Also known as Warpath Classic, released in 1994. In this game you play against up to 3 other human or computer-controlled opponents. You expand your empire by taking over planets and fight the enemy ships and planets.
The game can be downloaded from the
developer's website.
Apparently it not only runs on Windows 95/98 but also on Windows 3.1.
There are two ways to win, either you destroy all of the enemy ships until the opponents have none left (each player starts out with 5).
Or you make it so the opponents control no planets anymore.
This game is not really interesting for TASing but I wanted to document some bugs I found that I have not shared yet.
Recover from death
You can control your ship not only by clicking on the screen but also by pressing directional buttons, which is supposedly a feature the developer added later in the game's development, as implied by the game's help file. The thing is, this lets you recover from killing blows and you can keep moving after your ship gets destroyed. You can even move through red barriers in hard mode.
Radio bug
The radio is the game's chat, basicly. When you are in orbit of a planet and trade with or invest with that planet, you normally can't do any other action or move until closing that window. However, if you trade or invest and the window shows up, and then you click on the radio window, you can press directional buttons to move. This allows for some subsequent bugs:
- When trading after you have moved away from the planet, you can buy items from afar. Interestingly, if you try to buy something after the planet gets wiped out, there will be a window saying "Error" and something along the lines of "Unable to trade with planet". This message cannot be triggered by other means I think.
- When investing from afar, the percentage numbers will become blank and there will be a sound effect indicating it's not working. You can't invest in a planet unless you really are in orbit.
- Now the most useful part. If you have cargo and orbit a planet, you will be offered to sell the cargo for money. And by moving into a planet again, you will get the offer again (another window opens). You can open a bunch of windows like this and click sell each time to get the money multiple times. Free money! Be careful, if you open too many windows there will be a stack overflow error and the game closes. Interesting fun fact: if the planet gets wiped out while you still have the sell offer windows open, the windows will change to say that the uninhabitated planet is doing the sell offer!
