Feel free to comment and discuss this game here. Also, if you have any useful tips or tricks don't hesitate to share them with the others! Thanks!

Review and Download (if available):

Does anyone have a manual for this game?

Large patrols between two or three planets help with six or more ships

I loved this game!! Knew it as Space Federation tho. We took ages to figure out which button did what, but it was fun hehe... my tip yould be, try and get alot of planets right from the start, and build lots of mines! Can't wait to play this again :D

ummm... havin some difficulty figurin this game out.. how do you dock with and take control of the other planets? i get the g is dock but i dont think it works with that first ship and cant seem to build others.. hhmmmm.

i'm sure it's easy when you know how. :bleh:

i loved this game, check keyboard setup... for key control...very high fun raiting in 2 player mode

OMGOMGOMGOMGOGMOGMOGMGO



WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR FINDING THIS GAME WHICH I HAVE LOOKED FOR THE PAST DECADE????? I was like 8 so I didn't remember the name of it but I remember the gameplay of it only!

I have to thank this guy personally because this game, as I've found, isn't sold in any electronics (it's all about PSP andd the newer consoles now).

This is one of the best real time strategy!

Time to relive my childhood with this game. Bye!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Acoustic Sectoid @ Nov 19 2006, 04:37 PM) [snapback]267618[/snapback]</div>To take over planets, you must send a troop transport to it. If it is controlled by enemies, it will require lots of troop transports and planetary bombing! Hope I helped you...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Furious Texan @ Nov 19 2006, 04:37 PM) [snapback]267618[/snapback]</div>I provided it, I'm glad I could give you your childhood back!

I've just started playing the game and it looks good. I'm on mission 1 and it's really boring to wait for minerals to gather, is there anyway to make time go faster?

Unfortunately there is no way to speed up time. Once you get used to this you won't mind it as much...

Brilliant game, I liked it very much but found it hard as hell.

hard? ha, ha, ha...
all you need to do is identifiy the planet's source of energy and then use "carriers" to move the good in between. offocurse some protection from the fighters combined with 2 healing ships is also good (patrol).

move food to mineral rich planets and minerals to planets with population. build factory on population planets, but save the money for that on mineral planets.

to protect a planet use min 2 healing ships, 4 or 5 fighters, defensive satelites. once you have the defense it's time for offense. build space docks. store in 4 fighters, 3 marauders (yeah they are worth every penny) and 1 troop ship. build another docks and fill it with fighters, destroyers... whatever can protect the troop fleet. now send them in in such a way that they more or less all come there at the same time. but the protection fleet should be there first. well then all you need to do is wait. if you have enough resources i strongly suggest building more marauder ships.

Whaaat???? there are plenty of different musics how can they get repetitive? oh to change music hit "esc" and select change music. i actually like them. they are quite good made for game that old. you have it all electronic, rock, techno...

also i like the sound effects! the talking from various races and how thier voice varries.... who can forget that "Planet Tengton - hydroponics plants estalished!". "Planet Earth - Factory produced!"

sweet! 5/5 from me for this baby.

also 2 players can play at same time on one computer. works suprisingly good.

I'm looking for a way to convert midi/mp3 files to Star Federations's .MOD audio format. Until I find out how, I enjoy getting annhihilated by the comp, LOL :)

You could rename the game to "Star Federation", because
1) The zip is named Star Reach, but the folder that extracts is named "starfed"?
and 2) The splash screen when the game loads also says "Star Federation"

I want somebody to build a remake of this great game (game should stay as it is, graphics and music updated)
By the way there is a similarly old-school game remake called "Galactic Dream" which is fantastic. Search google for "evolution vault" to get a fully playable demo.

Hi, while I've been a fan of abandonia for a while this is my first post.

Anyway, I have the orginal boxed copy of this game (on 3.5 floppy's), do you want a box cover and manual scan?

These are always welcome.

I'd definitely like a manual for this game...and tips for improving the "economy" section of the planets, in order to gather cahs faster, would be appreciated as well.

i think exporting helps with the economy.

Unfortunately I don't have the manual, but I would have to agree with velik m, exporting will help your economy. Keeping large supply lines from every planet to every planet is the best strategy. It's also fun to attack another player's large supply lines and cripple their economy!

Seems fun, but I cannot for the life of me make any money.

I'm exporting goods and stuff, but I always end in debt.

I need a detailed method for doin' this

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Sol @ Dec 27 2006, 11:17 PM) [snapback]272638[/snapback]</div>Just try to focus on what really necessery. In mission 0 and 1 you don't need defense. Sell it and You have nice mineral and slightly better income. If You see planet with 3 hydrophonics and pop 300 still with food 0 (population is dying) so it's worthless to pay hydrophonics when they got no effect. Sell them, or let 1 stay and move food from BLUE planets where hydrophonics are much more effective. Don't build mines when planet without them produce some 2 mineral/round, there are much better planets for mining. And allways send stuff where is needed, do not try to produce it in planet for all costs, just make some trade routes and You'll see.

BTW awesome game split screen. Might be better via network where other player don't see what You're producing and whats in Your storage :D

Must find someone to play with ;)

Hey Guys,

I just stumbled across this forum and thought I'd share a little bit of Star Reach/ Space Federation history:

Star Reach as one of the first real time strategy games on the PC market. If I remember correctly the only other RTS games were Dune II, and Herzog Zwei. I hadn't played Dune II, but definitely put some hours into Heroz Zwei.

When I was first pitching the concept and showing the demo the executives at most the game companies I talked with ie.. Broderbund, EA, etc.. had to be convinced as to why it made sense to to allow Real Time in a strategy game.

Also since Star Reach was published by Interplay, Blizzard who was also published by Interplay at the time was looking at pre-release versions of Star Reach while developing Warcraft I.

At the time that we designed Star Reach, CD Rom's were not in popular use so we were constrained to a 3 disk limit ( 3 3.5 inch floppies at 1.44 mb per piece!). Also virtually no one was making LAN based games at this time. Both of these trends changed dramatically 6 months into production, so other RTS games such as Warcraft released with increased content AND LAN support. We wanted to add both of these but would have had to delay the release of the title beyond possible release dates.

We also faced major technical challenges at the time. Since Star Reach was a RTS, we needed to load everything into ram (since pulling data off a 3.5 inch floppy is really slow). So we had to use custom extended memory drivers in order to map everything to ram.

I also overdid it a little bit on sound and music. Early in production we received a prototype of the super cool Gravis Ultrasound card. This card was capable of playing 16 channels of 16-bit sound at the same time with 256K onboard memory. compared to 1 sound channel from the Sound Blaster and no memory. So.. we wrote our own music player and sound driver so that we could utilize all 16 channels, including stereo effects, panning and fading. Its cool that you can play this title on DosBox, but its not quite the same as hearing it on an actual Gravis Ultrasound. Sometime before release I also received a prototype of the Sounblaster 16, which allowed 2 channels of 16-bit sound. So I ended up writing custom drivers for that too. So Star Reach allowed for native mode support of SoundBlaster pro, SB 16, SB, and Gravis. Virtually no game at the time did this, and engineers from both Gravis and Creative labs were referring other developers to us to answer questions.

We also created a sound track using the Amiga Mod format using sampled digital samples.. most games at the time used MIDI synth sounds for music (sounds like a cheap casio keyboard). Its easy to take this stuff for granted now in the days of massive memory and mp3 sound tracks. But it was no joke to try to fit several real sounding songs on 4.2 megs of disk space that loaded up to 2-4 megs of ram maximum along with all of the other graphics etc..

I then added a twist to the Amiga MOD code to allow for sound tracks that changed depending on the level of action in the game.. This didn't become popular in other games for at least 5-6 years.

Creating the arcade input for both joystick and keyboard was also ridiculously difficult. I had to write custom assembly keyboard drivers to be able to detect key press and release. Also many of the keyboard models for PC's had lockout issues.. if you pressed two keys at the same time, one of them wouldn't be detected. This is why they keyboard selection screen includes the ability to press multiple keys at once and see which ones highlight, so that users could choose other keys when they encountered lockout. Joystick support also required direct assembly drivers. Even worse I couldn't find any information about how joysticks worked until i happened to find a Kraft joystick at an electronics store that came with an electrical schematic! this schematic explained which port the joystick talked to.. So I had to write code to keep throwing data at this port and listing to responses while moving the joystick to figure out how it worked. And the responses only made sense because I happened to know how capacitors work.

At least 60% of the code was written in assembly language to enable the targeted FPS Rate of at lest 15, which was a major challenge for this game on the 386 PC's.

Features I wish that we had been able to add in - Campaign mode, Mouse capability, and Network play. Along with much more content. All of these things were primarily limitations of a 3 floppy disk limit, lack of decent network drivers, and numerous technical hurdles to get a game of this scope to play within a 2 megs of RAM on a PC, while inventing the technology to run it and fitting in content and game play in a 12 month production cycle.

It's really great to see some of the feedback on this site. And my regards to the this site for finding and hosting these games.

-David Foote

I remember playing this when I was about 16 or so (about 10 years ago). In fact, I even remember exactly where I got it: from a bargain bin at CompUSA. I thought the box looked cool so I grabbed it. I absolutely loved the music, especially the clip with the heavy guitar sounds. ^_^ That song has stuck in my mind as one of the most awesome DOS soundtracks I can ever remember.

I remember the manual wasn't very helpful aside from learning the controls, so I had to figure out the strategy on my own. However, with some practice, I got pretty good. It's been a while, but I remember some things:

Ship vs. Phantom interface. The ship interface is a lot of fun, admittedly, and adds a decent method of defense early on. But once you're able to produce some ships, its combat effectiveness diminishes, especially since you'll be spending more time running around to all the planets than fighting. Aside from that, your ship can get destroyed and takes a while to be rebuilt. The Phantom mode, however, lets you move between planets quickly and give orders effectively.

Protect your trade ships! Send a few patrols between planets that have traders going between them. Otherwise, your precious cargo will be lost. On the flipside, make sure you stage raids against enemy trade lines to distrupt their economy :)

Defensive sattelites are extremely useful, but it's a good idea to also have some patrols or your planets might be in trouble :sos:

It can be a bit frustrating on the first missions to wait for the economy and minerals to pick up, but believe me, in later maps, you will want all the time you can get! So take the time to learn the quirks of the game in the first maps.

This game seems simple at first, but even back when I first played it, I could tell that they wanted to add more features. It was among the first real-time strategy games, so keep that in mind while playing! I hope my little tips helped ^_^

hey i remember playing this game when i was like 10... i cant seem to figure out how dosbox works.. can anyone help me with this? i would really like to play this game again but without dos i cant :(

Start reading this:
http://www.abandonia.com/forum/index...howtopic=14913

how to download?
 

I cannot figure out where to download this game. Can someone post the link or explain how?
thanks

My dad picked this game up for us kids when we were pretty young. It was one of the first computer games I remember playing, and maybe the best. We were young enough that it took us forever to figure out how to do things in the game, especially since this genre was not something we saw in console games.

I still play Star Reach every now and again, and think of it as one of my favorite video games, if not my favorite. Long hours spent in front of the old computer, sharing the keyboard with a friend during a 2 player game :OK:

Screen looking became a problem :doh:

Some aspects of the game seem unfinished, but from reading the above post by David Foote, one of the designers, it makes sense with the amount of constraints they had. It's cool to see a developer post on here, especially about a game I didn't think anyone else knew about. Reading about the development of Star Reach made my day. The music turned out great :rocks:

Remember to build your hydroponics and biospheres!

one of the best odler RTS games evah ;D, i was about 8 or 9 whene first playing this game, spent 10 years loking for it and found it on hotu, it is must try for any1 who lowes RTS

Star Reach was indeed a great game that died because of underexposure... One day i hope to re-make it with improved graphics, online multiplayer support, better gameplay in terms of controlling your ships etc... It'll be so epic.

You know what really sucks? The fact that the head developer basically said 'good on you' for making old, near-forgotten games available... and some other guys who are barely or not even related to its creation (*cough*Titus*cough*) are probably the ones who gave the 'NO GO' demand...

Ah well... Can't blame Abandonia for following the law, regardless. I have access to the disks regardless.

I don't suppose anyone out here knows how to create scenarios (or edit existing ones)?
I still play often, from original Star Reach diskettes :) but the same scenarios can get repetitive. So many of the more advanced maps are symetrical, and I'd like to try more oblong galaxies, or galaxies for four players with a planetary remainder of 3. Like interstellar musical chairs.

Also, for all the strategies I've seen here, no one has mentioned how a couple fleets of pirates over a home planet can cripple an opponent (or protect yours).