Planets is a multiplayer, strategic, intergalactic, play by E-mail, war- and conquestgame. It has great gameplay, but, unfortunately, no graphics. Actually it has some pictures, but most of them look like shit. So I gathered some nice looking pics from the net (and scanned a couple of pics myself) and did some editing on a few of them. You can download the result, replacements for 197 winplan 3.x BMP's (wich are at least a little better than the originals). For more info on VGAP check out Tim Wisseman's (the author) VGA Planets Page.

• Each race file contains the ships, fighter, logo and picture of the leader of the race.
• In the freighter file you'll find the 5 freighters and the alchemy ships.
• I also replaced the 46 worst looking planets.
• The misc file contains stuff like the natives and messages.
• Leftovers : the stuff I haven't used, but didn't want to put in the recyclebin.

Just unzip it and copy it over the old pics in your BMP directory. (you could make a backup of your previous bmp's if you don't trust me...)

Federation	Lizard	Birdmen
Fascist	Privateer	Cyborg
Crystaline	Empire	Robotic
Rebel	Colonial	Freighters
Planets	Misc.	Leftovers

Also for download is The Firm a usefull VGA-planets reference, written by a friend of mine.

In my third game of planets, I played the Cyborg. The privateerplayer was annoying all other players by constantly sending messages to say how great and powerfull the privateers are. They seemed to want some Annihilation and/or Biocide battleships (actually they threatend and begged me), I got really sick of it and gave them a cube. Not a real planets borgcube of course, I made a 1:2.500.000 scalemodel. Click here to see the building plans for this actual reality cubeship (no minerals needed!). I found several uses for these scalemodels:

Having trouble with Galactic Greenpeace cause you're assimilating endangered species ? Enhance your popularity by giving away signed cubes with borgisms written on them !

The Cyborg version of "Somewhere there is a bullet with your name on it"; write someones name on it, give him the cube and destroy his homeworld in the next turn.

Make two cubes and you can simulate a Biocide and a Annihilation battling eachother !

Even better : build a Crystal Thunder or a Gorbie as cannonfodder for your cubes!

Not much here. Just over 400 dinosaurnames to name your ships after. I used these in my fourth game.

This will be a rather unusual game, if you got a little bored with ordinary games of planets, try a game like this. It is a 'risk-style' teamplay game and the universe is flowershaped; 5 clusters (continents) grouped around a bigger central cluster (Atlantis). I'm playing the colonies and my teammate plays the fascists. Every team has been given a risk mision, randomly chosen out of these misions :

• 5x destroy all armies of a certain color
• 3x conquer 2 continents (Atlantis counts as 2 continents)
• 1x conquer Atlantis

The first one to fulfill his mision is the winner of the game. A continent is conquered when a team controls 90% of the planets of that continent. A team has lost the game if its number of starbases is reduced to zero (remaining colonies and ships will be removed with Killrace). The length of the game will be about 90 turns.

Well.. it's now june the 28th '98 and the game is over. It lasted 89 turns and nobody won, although things weren't looking to good for me; halve my kingdom was covered with webmines and the empire had taken over lot's of planets. I did slaughter a Virgo though (one that the crystals had stolen from me .... ) and I learned that it really makes a difference wether you have beams or not in a carier vs. carier battle. I had forgotten to put beams on my stolen Virgo (stupid me), but that turned out to be a 'smart' move after all...