IMPORTANT NOTE: if you use this version of the game, you will not be able to post high scores to the Solar Wars web site, because Dave didn't give me the score-verifier code. Tough break. I don't know whether he plans to incorporate any of these changes into the official version, and unless/until he does that's just the way things are. You have been warned.

Click here to download the .prc file.

While Solar Wars is a great little game, both my wife and I found a few ways in which the interface could be improved, and also thought of a few game features that would improve the play. Most of these features are selectable on a new options screen when starting a game. The options are as follows:

Tax policy.

You can stick with the old tax policy, which takes 30% of anything if you happen to be on Earth, if you like. With the new policy you could get taxed on any planet, but only at 20% and only on cash - never on cargo, and only on savings if you're on Earth. There's also built-in protection against being taxed more than once per five days. Lastly, you can turn taxes off altogether.

To be quite honest, the new tax policy is a little bit more lenient than the old, and turning taxes off altogether is practically a cheat, but that's why it's an option.

Grace period.

Ever start a game and get whacked by taxes or pirates right off the bat? Annoying, isn't it? The grace period is a number of moves at the start of the game before random events start occurring, so you don't have to restart quite as often. Of course, you give up the possibility of getting a dilithium bonus on the first move too.

Pirates.

I just don't think they add much to the game. Now you can turn them off, and if you don't have pirates you don't need blasters either.

Stay Put

This option allows you to stay on the same planet for a turn, using zero fuel, instead of having to bounce between planets looking for a good market. Certain random events - e.g. pirates, breakdowns/wormholes, abandoned/derelict ships - also won't happen if you don't leave the planet.

Other changes and bug fixes:

• The name of the current planet is shown in the title bar on the warp screen.
• When calculating net worth - e.g. for loans - the game uses a minimum "scrap" value for all cargo, even if there's no market for it on the current planet. This avoids the problem of coming to Earth early in the game with a full hold of dilithium, and not being able to borrow very much because your supposed net worth is based only on your cash.
• Your current fuel cost is shown on the main screen.
• Your current credit line is shown on the borrow-money screen so you don't have to figure it out in your head or switch to the calculator. There's also a "max" button to in the borrow/repay dialogs to make life even easier.
• Credit lines are now handled much better. You can borrow and repay money as many times as you like during a turn, so long as you don't try to borrow more than your credit limit. The way this is handled in the code also avoids a bug in the original, whereby you could borrow money multiple times in a turn just by switching to another application and back.

There are still some things I'd like to do, if I ever find time:

• Add a "max" button to the bank deposit/withdraw dialogs. Now that all the other amount dialogs have one, it feels weird not to have one here. Another idea I've considered is a "million" button so you don't have to write so many zeroes.
• Add a "Sell for Scrap" (or maybe just "Jettison") option for those cases where you want to dump cargo - e.g. to make room for ultra-low-price dilithium - but there's no market for what you're carrying.
• Add a "Warehouse" feature so you could buy stuff and put it in a warehouse for later if the price is particularly good. To make this fair, the warehouse on each planet would charge fees per turn, so you could screw yourself by not coming back for it soon. I think this feature would add a new dimension of strategy, but it would certainly make the game - and especially the interface - much more complex. I'd be interested in hearing people's opinions on this one, including suggestions on what the warehouse interface might look like.
• Remove the 999-bay restriction on cargo size.
• Add engine upgrades to increase maximum cargo size (see previous item) or reduce fuel cost. One idea that I have pretty much rejected in this area would be to have different engines allow different speeds, and go from a turn-based to a continuous-time model so that engine X might take three days to get from Earth to Saturn while engine Ymight take only two. If I really wanted to go hog-wild I could even account for varying distances between planets, calculate orbits, etc. In the end, though, I think I'd just rather keep it simple.