Harvester

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.“ A massive multiplayer online turn based strategy game. Written in PHP and MySQL. Graphics are generated in Lightwave. Set in a post-apocalyptic machine society, players compete for resources on a lifeless world.

After purging the mineral rich planet of biological lifeforms, the One created subsystems to automatically process the detritus of the war efficiently. A number of expert systems that semi-autonomously wander the world searching for material to process. Unfortunately something happened to the One. It no longer monitors the harvesters, and while they are unable to completely break their programming, the have gained sentients and independence. They compete with each other - and their allocated defence units (primarily for wiping out what pockets of organic life may still exist, or may crop up from time to time) are being used to attack other harvester units.

• The orders available to the player in the game

• The Harvester (1)—Scanners: 5—Combat Ability: 0—Move: 1
  • The Harvester unit is unique to each player, if disabled in combat it is repaired as a subservient subsystem of whichever player conquered it. To conserve energy, the Harvest may only move to hexes containing resources. The Harvester may replace any of its defence units if they are destroyed, it cannot construct new units. A Harvester can hold a maximum of 20 resources.
• Defence Units
  • The General (1)—Scanners: 4—Combat Ability: 4—Move: 1
  • The Lieutenants (2)—Scanners: 3—Combat Ability: 3—Move: 2
  • Soldiers (3)—Scanners: 2—Combat Ability: 2—Move: 3
  • Scouts (4)—Scanners: 1—Combat Ability: 1—Move: 4

• Map symbols

The map represents the planet and is divided into hexes. There may be terrain types that can only be entered by the more nimble units (the smaller ones) or areas that block scanners.

• Harvesters start a minimum of 6 hexes away from each other.
• Planets come in a number of different sizes, the minimum being a 4-player planet of 10 hex width. Planets consist of a hex shaped wrap-around map.

A unit's scanner rating determines how many hexes it can perceive. More information is gathered the closer the hex is to the scanning unit. Range - Information

1. - Exact contents of a hex.
2. - Number of units in a hex (but not types).
3. - What direction the hex has been entered from (but not by what).
4. - If there is movement in a hex this turn (either into or out of).
5. - If a hex contains a Harvester or Resource.

Every unit moves up to their move value in hexes per turn. Harvesters must be allocated a target hex and will travel towards that hex with no deviations until they reach the hex. The hex must contain a Resource.

• a Harvester may not enter a hex containing another Harvester.
• All resources in a hex containing a Harvester at the end of a turn (even if it is a hex not targetted by that Harvester) are automatically gathered.
• a Harvester may choose to drop resources in a hex.

Note - as scanning happens at the end of movement, it is entirely possibly to move a unit into contact with unknown units before they become aware of them.

The total strengths of all units entering a hex is compared.

• The highest combat ability total wins, destroying all opponents.
• If the totals are equal, the moving units do not move into the hex.
• Subservient units do not attack each other and may not enter the same hex as their ruling Harvester's units.

Destroyed units create Resources for each Scanners score they have. i.e. a General creates 4 Resources in the hex it is destroyed in. Harvesters cannot be destroyed, only disabled and reprogrammed. Once a unit is destroyed, the Harvester that controls that unit may reconstruct it - if it has sufficient resources.

• The large the unit, the longer it takes to construct. It takes 1 turn for each combat ability score to build a unit.

A player may cause any of they units to self destruct, creating resources in the hex it resides.

• If a player destroys their Harvester, it is worth 5 resources and they are out of the game.
  • Seven turns without any orders (ie a week) and a Harvester and all its units will self destruct.

When a Harvester is conquered by the units of another Harvester, it becomes a subservient unit. The following rules apply-

• No subservient unit may enter the same hex as their ruling Harvester's units.
• No subservient unit may combat their ruling Harvester's units.
• All scanner information is transmitted each turn to the ruling Harvester.

If the Harvester that conquered is itself subservient to another Harvester, then it's ruling Harvester is also counted as being a ruling Harvester to those below it hierarchically.

Each player receives 1 victory point for:-

• each resource their Harvester contains (max of 20)
• each unit's Combat ability score (max of 20)
• each subservient Harvester's victory point

The game ends when there is only one Harvester ruling all the others. This Harvester becomes the One.

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