Once upon a time - all good stories begin this way…

But like I said, once upon a time in a distant galaxy an epic battle was about to take place.

From the darkest parts of the universe an huge fleet emerged. This happened a long long time ago so some of the facts are no longer clear, but some of the older man say they knew someone that was there.

This fleet had nothing more than 40.000 units. All crusaders.

For years and years it grew and spread fear across the universe. Planet after planet, nothing survived.

One day they faced their challenge. A small, but very skilled, fleet arose from a small moon in a forgotten planet. These brave men fought with honor. Many of them died.

But wave after wave of crusaders they hold strong. In the end only a few brave souls survived.

Now, some may say this is just a tale. A bed time story to make kids scary. Some say it is true and even say they know someone who was there.

I’m going to believe in it. Back in the old days strange things happened.

Legend or not this is the tale of 40.000 crusaders.

Based in an original story by Anfernius, in the game’s old forum. See the original here (portuguese version only).

Are you paying attention to the bounties? Are you seeing the prizes on some player’s heads? Having thousands of orions for a bounty reward is a serious reason to start hunting! Here’s the list of the universe most wanted players:

1. ulisses - 1500 Orions - Ordered by tsousa
2. Punisher - 1000 Orions - Ordered by Ash528
3. Mawhrin-Skel - 500 Orions - Ordered by AIR Diogo
4. Syriin - 250 Orions - Ordered by whitdemon
5. Ashis - 250 Orions - Ordered by whitdemon
6. Killiri_Kreg - 250 Orions - Ordered by Mawhrin-Skel

There’re +3750 Orions available for the take! Let the hunting begin!

I had a typical firing squad battle. My opponent attacked me on the universe with about 80 Dark Crusader and used the firing squad tactic. As always, it’s very difficult to leave the battle with few casualties, but it’s very easy to win. I tried to keep most of them, but even so I lost a lot of units.

When I knew that I had won, I started preparing my Stinger to replicate on the opponent’s Dark Crusader. Unfortunately, my opponent gave up before I could replicate.

This reminded me that we shouldn’t travel on the universe with fleets having a lot of unit types, because we’ll almost never need them and we can loose them against firing squads.

Being a bounty hunter can make you gain lots of orions and points.  The following steps tell you how…

1. Go to the bounty page.
2. Choose a player you want to hunt and accept the mission.
3. Go to an academy and find the player planets and/or fleet.
4. Engage him into battle and destroy his fleets.

Almost since the beginning of the game that players have began forming alliances.

But in the old days it was all much different than it is now. In the first rounds there was no alliance interface like now. It all came down to a group off players that said that they were from the same alliance. They changed their name so they included an alliance tag, but that was all.

Like Tiago already said earlier it all began with the ACSK alliance (an alliance dedicated to overthrown Shadow Knight from the top of the ranking). In response to that the CUS alliance was created. CUS stands for Shadow United Club, and as you can guess their objective was to protect Shadow Knight and help him.

But that was not all. Some players decided that this war was not for them. So a third alliance appeared: Independent Universe Conquers or IUC for short.

The powerful System Lord also appeared around this time. This alliance formed by the game programmers was most known by their diplomatic abilities and their capacity to make the several alliance go into war.

In the third round the AIR alliance was created. AIR stands for Independent Ruler Alliance and was created by me and Miguel18. It all started in the office where I worked back then but rapidly other players joined. Around this time some of the IUC players started joining other alliances, as the IUC leaders stopped playing.

With the end of the ACSK and CUS alliances two other were formed: GOAL (Game Over Alliance) and ORE (Orions Renegades).

GOAL was maybe one of the biggest alliances that ever existed, with more than 40 members. They became so powerful that now the alliances have a member quantity limit. They won that round individually and by alliances.

Still in the first version of the game the Cosa Nostra alliance was created. With only 2 members their superiority was amazing. It was one of the most successful alliances ever although some times the two member attacked witch other. But it was all in a good spirit and those episodes were very funny to watch in the game forum as the discussions toked place.

Although many other alliances were created just one more got some notoriety: the ST’s (the Star Trek alliance). A small group of friends but all very god players. It must have been one of the most hated alliances ever in the game, but that didn’t stopped then from some success.

Nowadays the alliances work in a very different way that back in the first version. There is a cool alliance interface and even game messages. Some of the players from back then don’t play the game anymore, others changed team and new people got into the game.

And if those times were very nice and fun the future seems even brighter. The game is growing and the players are becoming better and better.

After I got first place in the ladder, I was happy but I also knew that now I need to maintain my game and try to get even better. So when Nunos challenged me I thought of it as my first step towards that.

Looking at the units that we got, the kamikazes and the samurai we’re really “abused” in the start of the match. When I saw that his fenix were in front of my cruzaders and I was first, I thought they would be goners sooner or later, cause of their high cost move rate. So I kind of forgot them and focused in destroying his samurais and kamikazes. Well I think the game really started going my way when he exposed his hive protectors and I went for it. He then positioned his eagles behind them but the fact was that my deploy was really strong in the middle. I had the krill there, more eagles ready to help and my hives also, so defending wasn’t an issue. Having a unit with rebound around like the fenix also helps a lot controlling the middle and his heavy units we’re now on the sides of the action. He was running out of lights and eventually made a mistake with the eagles and I destroyed them. I also still had rains left to destroy his heavy. It was a great match, the start was full of tactical strikes and some mistakes from both sides. Eventually I managed to get the upper hand. Now I can only hope he challenges me back for another great battle in the near future and that goes to you also mawhrin =)

Cheers

You may add battles to posts to analyze them (example). To do so you need to choose a finished battle. Each battle has an URL like this one:

http://s1.orionsbelt.eu/Battle/Battle.aspx?Id=3877087

If you change the page name to Embedded, you’ll get a simplified view of the page:

http://s1.orionsbelt.eu/Battle/Embedded.aspx?Id=3877087

Now you just need to incorporate that simplified view on a post. To do that, go to the HTML view of the write post window and write something like:

<iframe src="http://s1.orionsbelt.eu/Battle/Embedded.aspx?Id=3877087" 
  scrolling='no' frameborder='0' marginheight='0' marginwidth='0' width='480' height='505'
</iframe>

This will show the battle on the post. Another way is just to copy the source of the embedded page and paste it to a new HTML file. The HTML source has all the moves information inside. Then you could upload that file to the blog using the Add Media option. This has several advantages: the battle is now static, doesn’t depend on the server being up and won’t consume server’s resources. On my example I did just that:

<iframe src="http://gazette.orionsbelt.eu/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/mawhrinvsrebornedaspx.htm" 
   scrolling='no' frameborder='0' marginheight='0' marginwidth='0' width='480' height='505'
  </iframe>

But if you’re not comfortable with this option go ahead with the direct reference.

EDIT: It seams that you many not insert iframe’s due to security issues. A workaround is using the following tag:

[ iframe url width height ]

For example, the next code:

[ iframe http://gazette.orionsbelt.eu/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/mawhrinvsrebornedaspx.htm 500 535 ]

Will result in the following:

Note: you’ll have to remove the extra spaces near [ and ]

I was behaving pretty well on the ladder. I’d won against nunos, tsousa(several times :)) and others to keep it. The other day reborned challenged me and although I didn’t underestimate him, I didn’t think that he was already a great player on the board.

Here is the battle:

Normally it’s a hard choice weather we should split the best units or not. I usually choose not to, because they’ll be stronger that way. On this battle reborned chose to split them and mad a heck of a deploy. He put 2 groups of Vector and Eagle on each side of the board, and the the Doomer near the middle. That meant that he had catapults everywhere! And they all protected each other.

Now, I made a big mistake by loosing my Eagle, but even so the game was already very balanced at the time, it was asking for an error. Great game by reborned! I learnt a thing or two on this match.

Battle Viewer and Break down

Before we start looking at battles and analyzing them I think it is a good idea to talking about all the information that can been seen in the battles. Here is a break down of the HUD and how to fight and view battles in Orion’s Belt.

Battles are played out on the battle page of Orion’s Belt, in what is called a HUD. The HUD or Heads Up Display includes the battle field, information about the unit you have selected, a battle calculator, a battle log, and other option to effect the battle. The HUD will play a crucial part in gaining the edge over your opponent.

*Note* The layout, and the display will not change but the information in the display will, most of the information will be unique to each unit. Simply rolling over a unit will change the display and the information it provides.

Left Side We are now going to dissect the HUD, talking about each piece on its own, starting with the left side from top to bottom you will see: Unit Properties, Strong Against, Weaker Against, How to Attack, and How to Move.
	Unit Properties will provide information about the unit you’re mouse is over. By line the information will be: Abilities; These are listed as small black and ornage icons and will show what (if any) the units abilities are. Here is a list of Icons and Abilities Quantity; How many units are in this square Attack; How much damage one of the selected unit will do (the unit group will deal this number multiplied by the quantity to the target) Defense; How much life this unit starts with. Hit Points; How much life the unit has right now. Movement Cost; How many Movement points it takes to move this unit. Range; How far this units can be from it target
	Bonuses; When a unit receives a bonus its’ life or damage will be inceased. In this box will be all the units in witch the selected unit will receive a bonus when attacking.
	This Box will show all of the units that will receive a bonus when attacking the selected unit.
	This will show how the selected unit will attack, there are three different ways a unit can attack: Close; The unit can only fire the square above it. You will see the crosshairs at the bottom of the grid. Far; The unit can attack a target more than one square I.e. 2-6. You Will see the crosshairs at the top of the grid.(As shown) Catapult;The unit can fire more than one square and can fire over other ships. You will see the picture to the left. (a unit at the bottom and the crosshairs at the top)
	This will show how the selected can move, if there is nothing in its way. There are four different ways to move. All; Can move in any direction. Normal; The unit can move up, down, left and right. Diagonal; The unit can move forwards or backwards in a diagonal square.(as shown) Front; Can only move to the front. Each Square the unit can move to, will have a green arrow in it.

Center In the center column, we will look at only three items but the most important of the HUD display; the battle field, Battle Calculator, and battle log. Your window to the Battle field Movement This is where you will move your units and where you will tell who and when to attack. This will be done by selecting the unit. To do this just click on any unit you want and a green box will appear. Then move the unit by selecting another square they can move to, a green arrow will appear, click and the unit will move. You can move a unit as many times in one turn as you have move points for. Attacking While your unit is move your mouse over an enemy unit, if that unit can be attacked it you will see a red crosshair appear on that unit, simply click and your unit will attack that unit at the end of your turn. Each unit can only attack once per turn, and can not move after it has attacked. *But another unit can move in front of it, to make it harder to hit!* You can undo any action in a turn by pressing the “Undo” or “Reset” button BEFORE the “End Turn” button is pressed.

Whenever you place your mouse over a unit this will automatically show how many unit it can kill. You can change the distance of the attack (as the farther away the target is less damage it will deal) or the number of units attacking to meet your needs.

This is where you can see exactly what has taken place up until now in the battle, your turns or your opponents. You can see only what has happened the last turn (unless there was very little that happened), if you need to see more press Get All at the bottom of the log to view the entire battle. The Icon on the left tells you what type of action took place, and the number on the far right of the log shows what turn it took place on.

Right
	Each turn both players receive 6 “Move Points”. Move Points control the battle, each time you move or turn a ship and every attack uses move points. The amount of this cost depends on the ship that is moving, and each attack cost one move point.
	With a unit selected enter the number of units you wish to move away from the selected one. You will see a min and max number of units you can split. After the desired number of units is entered, then click on the square where you want to move the units.
	Whenever you order a unit to attack an opponents unit this will box will show how many of the opponent units will be destroyed.
	By selecting a unit then clicking on the N,S,E,W the unit will turn in that direction. It cost one move point to turn the unit. If a unit is not facing its target it can not fire on it.
Options In the upper right hand corner of the battle viewer you will see the Option box. The contents of this box will change three times depending on the state of the battle.
	This is the options you will see when it is your turn. Undo; This will undo the last command you gave barring in mind that it is still your turn. Reset; This will reset all of the moves you made for this turn. Give Up; When there is no other option and must quite. You will lose all of your units if you quite. End Turn; This will finalize all moves you have made for this turn. Once you click on this you will not be able to undo or reset.
	The only option you have when it is not your turn is to quite, and again you will lose all of you units.
	This is the controls when you are replaying a battle, it will show you every move that was made during that battle, to see what went wrong or how you dominated.

As you may see, the authors have an associated avatar. This avatar is showed using the Gravatar’s service. To personalize your avatar you should register at that site, configure your image, and then use that same mail on the your gazette’s profile.

Also, don’t forget to add your bio, this way at the end of your posts you’ll have something about yourself. Here’s an example.