Launch Program
From the software page click the 'Pocket Empires" link. JWS will load and begin to download the program. If you have run it already and have the program on disk it will just check to see if there has been an update. If you have run it before and are now disconnected from the network, you can launch Java Web Start separately, select the program, and launch it from there.
It may also prompt you to create a desktop icon for the program.
Screen Layout
The screen is comprised of three parts. The left most is the action panel. The middle is the starfield. The right is the information panel.
The action panel contains the current phase you are doing. When you have completed the current action click the "OK" button at the bottom of the action panel to move on to the next phase.
The information panel contains information on a ship, a world, a game or a side. Frequently whatever object you are working with will appear in the information panel. Almost every part of the information panel is active, and clicking (or double clicking) will bring up that object into the information panel. For example, if you are looking at a ship, and you click on the button which describes its location, that location will now appear in the information panel.
The starfield shows the game arena. You can scroll around the place with it, and select worlds. Often when you are required to assign ships to worlds you can drag and drop them onto the starfield.
Select Game
The first screen displayed lets you select which scenario you wish to play. You can also load a custom scenario into the game from here as well. For now just select "Second Santry and Cordova War" and click "OK". There will be a slight pause while it loads in the data.
Select Side
The next screen allows you to select which side you wish to play. As you select each side information on it will appear on your info panel. You can further explore the sides to see the worlds they are comprised of and the ships they start off with.
Looking at the ships displayed for each side you can see that Santry has all battle ships (every ship has its own jump drive) and Cordova has all battle riders (fighting ships have no jump drive, and tenders that can carry them have no fighting capability). The ship display is a tree view. A + appears next to a ship that is carrying riders. Clicking this will display the ships contained.
For now select Cordova and click "OK".
Ship Setup Phase
The very first move in the game is to initially deploy your ships. At this time you can move all of your ships to any world you start off owning. (In some scenarios where you only own one world, this step will be done automatically and will not appear.)
Initially the computer will arrange all your riders and carriers in what it considers the best deployment. In this example you will note the Mateo carrier is carrying two riders: Sophia and Dorotea. You are free to change this arrangement. By selecting a rider and clicking the Undock icon, you will undeploy those ships. Select Sophia and Dorotea now and click it. They will move to the mail level of the tree view. They are no longer contained in Mateo.
You can put them back using the Dock icon. Select Mateo, Sophia and Dorotea and click the dock icon. They now appear back under Mateo.
You can deploy ships in one of two ways. Try selecting David and Diego. (Ctrl-click on a second ship will let you select two items at once from the ship view.) Now click on "Cordova" on the star map. Click "Set" in the action panel. If you note, the "todo" arrow on those ships has been filled in. Additionally you can now see the ships appear in the info panel when Cordova is selected. Lastly, you will note on the star display, that there is a little line next to the planet counter. This grows depening on how many ships and whose ships are in a system. This allows a view, at a glance, of what's going on.
The second way to deploy ships is using drag and drop. Select José and Filip. Click on the selection and then move the cursor over to Anlumir. (This may take a little bit of practice.) Those ships have now been placed on that planet.
Continue using your preferred method and set up Guillermo and Tomás on Iraddii and Sebastián and Mateo on Rili Aash. We've now set up our line of defense.
Some scenarios allow you to reconfigure your fleet at setup stage. Ships can be "cashed in" by selecting them and clicking the recycle button. This scraps them and adds their value to your resources total. New ships can be designed and bought by clicking "buy". If you select an existing ship before clicking buy then it will template the new ship off of that ship.
Since we're done, click the Done button.
Ship Movement Phase
The first phase in each term is for Ship Movement. This is very similar to the Ship Setup Phase except that you are restricted to only moving ships within range of their jump engines. You are free to move your ships to enemy or neutral worlds.
Click on David. In the action panel you now have several destinations you can send David to. Some of these are empty hexes. Be careful about sending ships to empty hexes. In some scenarios ships have extra fuel tanks. They can jump into empty hexes and have enough fuel to jump out again. In this scenario they don't. Jumping into an empty hex is a one-way trip!
Send David to Santry by clicking either the hex on the star map, the entry under Destinations, or dragging and dropping onto the star map. Note that the little bar at Cordova has shrunk and a new bar has started on Santry. Also calling up Santry and Cordova onto the Info Panel shows the new deployment. The ship has not actually moved yet though! When you have finished setting up all your ships, click the Done icon to finish your movement phase. For now, do so: just move David.
Combat Phase
Combat is signaled when the action panel presents a "Combat Started" screen. You can click the icons to check the info panel and see what is going on. Click "OK" when you are done to move to the combat.
The first thing to happen in a combat turn is to decide which ships are to flee into the outer system. Note that in this view the computer has automatically deployed your rider ships apart from your carriers. We don't want our carrier to take part in the battle. It is undefended and if blown to bits would leave us stranded. Select David, and click "Flee". This sets its todo arrow. An alternative shortcut is to click "Flee Carriers". This sets any ship with a zero attack factor to flee. When we are done selecting ships to flee and can click "Done".
Next we shift to actual combat. Our ships are displayed under "Attacking Ship". Their ships are displayed under "Target Ships". We can click on anything to bring it up under the info panel and see what we can see.
To specify whom we want to attack we select one or more of our ships, then select one of their ships, and click "Target". When we do this it will display the odds we get for that attack.
In this case, select Inés, select Crimson Boar, and click Target. We get "1:1" odds. Not very good! We could, at this point, decide that discretion is the better part of valour and flee. However, since we have already engaged, they would get a chance for a parting shot.
When we're done assigning ships to attack, we click "Done". The computer then reports in the action panel what the result of our attacks and their attacks. Combat continues until all but one side have fled or been destroyed.
You can choose to continue the attack, or else flee the system. After the first round, if you don't want to change your targets, you can just click done. Your targets from the previous round are remembered.
Sometimes combat will start, you will set your ships up, and then combat will end without any fighting. This happens when all of the computer's ship have chosen to flee.
If you are lucky (or unlucky) one or more systems will change sides depending on the result of combat. The Action panel will tell you this information when it happens. Just click "OK" to move on.
Repair Phase
If you have a damaged ship at a system that has not moved or fired that round you may have the option to repair it. Class A starports can repair two ships per turn. Class B's can repair one. Class C's can repair two ships per game. Although no more than one per turn. Class D's can repair one ship per game.
The action panel will ask you if you want to repair and let you select which ships to repair. Click the ships, click "Set", and click "Done" when finished.
And so on
Play proceedes back to the Movement Phase and so on until all the turns of the game are done.
Have fun!