C-evo HOWTO

How to play C-evo

Overview

This document is a guide on playing the excellent tiny free game C-Evo for someone who has never played any of the games in the famous Civilization series. The purpose of this document is to allow someone who has never played any Civilization game before to become familiar enough to be able to build a spaceship and win the game at the easiest level of play in C-Evo 1.1.1 (Beginner).

This document will not cover situations when there are other nations on the map, such as alliances and war.

Introduction

The Civilization series of games are a series of games which combine city building, society expansion and creation with traditional war gaming aspects. In the Civilization games, strategy consists of several facets:

• Improving your cities and the area around them
• Performing scientific and military research
• Making alliances with your neighbor civilizations
• Going to war if the alliances break down (or your neighbors don’t want to enter a treaty with you)
• Developing technology starting with spear men and advancing to space-age jet fighters, battleships and tanks.

User interface overview

An overview of the user interface is in the sub-article C-evo HOWTO: UI. Click on this link to get more information.

City management

An overview of city management, including keeping a city alive, improving a city, and building new cities is in the sub-article C-evo HOWTO: City Management

Technology

An overview of technology, including strategies for increasing the pace of research advancement is in the sub-article C-evo HOWTO: Technology

Building and using ships

The first naval unit that becomes available in C-Evo is a longboat. This is a slow-moving boat that can not attack and can transport two units. The "map making" technology makes this boat available.

Longboats can only be built in cities next to a body of water. To build a longboat:

• Research the map-making technology (see research above; the tech tree is simply the introductory technology "alphabet" followed by "map making").
• Once you have map-making, C-evo will inform you that a new unit, the longboat, is available.
• Go to the management screen for a city next to the sea (left-click on the city)
• Click on the box that selects which unit to build (it has an image in it and is directly below the button that looks like a money-bag)
• Select to build a longboat. You may need to click on the button that looks like a man holding a spear to see the longboat option.

It will take a couple of turns to build a longboat. Once the longboat is built, it can be used to:

• Explore other islands and continents that your initial city can not access over land.
• Transport up to two units over water to other lands.

Note that longboats are civil units that can not attack other boats.

To use a longboat as a transport:

• Put the longboat on any square adjacent to land (to move a unit, first left click on the unit to select it; this will make the unit flash. Then right-click the square you wish to move the unit to)
• Move a land-based unit, such as a settler, next to the longboat.
• Now, move the settler on to the longboat. Note that boarding a ship is time consuming and takes all of a unit's turn.

To unload a unit from a ship:

• Make sure the transport is one unit away from land to put the unit on.
• Click on the map square containing the ship with the unit you wish to disembark.
• You will see, at the bottom of the screen, an icon of the ship along with all of the units on that ship.
• Select the unit you wish to disembark that is visible on the toolbar on the bottom of the screen.
• This unit will now be visible and flashing on the map.
• Right-click on the square where you wish the unit to land.

Note that a longboat can only hold two units; if you try to load more units on the the ship, you will get a "The transport is fully loaded" message and be unable to load the unit.

Also note that longboats can not sail over deep water; only shallow coastland.

Building better ships

It is desirable to have ships that can sail the seas faster than longboats, that can sail over the deep ocean, that can hold more than two units, and that can attack. All of these features require "military research" to develop; some of these features (transporting more units, sailing over the high seas) need certain technologies more advanced than map making.

To create new types of ships, your nation needs to invest research and development in to a new ship design. To do this:

• Wait until the last technology you are researching is researched, and the "What Do We Research Now" window comes up
• Select "Military Research"
• Click on the picture of a ship with a blue background in the "Military Research" panel that pops up
• Some technologies affect which capabilities a ship can have. If all we have is map-making, we can make a ship that moves 3.5 squares (instead of the longboat’s 2.5 square move), has no attack, a defense of 1, and can transport two units.
• Click on OK once you have a ship design you are happy with.

Military research can be used to design new ships, land-based, and air-based units, depending on the technologies available. While the majority of this is geared towards making units that can fight wars, this can also be used to make transports more capable than longboats.

Unlike other games in the Civilization franchise, new units have to be designed and researched; you set the balance between cost, strength, and speed for a given unit.

Winning the Game

To win a game of C-evo, you need to build a spaceship that can go to Alpha Centauri. Doing this requires a combination of developing a large number of technologies, building cities near certain rare resources that are only visible late in the game, and building certain buildings and spaceship structures. The manual briefly describes what needs to be done in the section entitled "Winning the Game". To see this section:

• Open up the manual by clicking on the C-Evo logo in the upper left hand corner of the screen and selecting "Manual", or by hitting the "F1" key.
• Selecting "Concepts"
• Selecting "Winning the Game"

A lot of other information about C-Evo is available in the manual.

Final Comments

This HOWTO is not designed to describe all of the things that can be done in C-Evo. It is designed to provide basic information about playing C-Evo geared for someone who has never played this kind of game before. I hope this manual has given you enough information to feel comfortable enough playing C-Evo and use its manual, even if you have never played a Civilization game before.

If you have any questions about anything or feel this manual doesn't cover something in enough detail (or clearly enough), please bring up your concern at the C-Evo forum:

http://c-evo.org/forum/

Appendix

While the following information is not needed to win the game with no other nations, this information is useful for finding and using features in the game that may otherwise be difficult to find.

Diplomacy

The window that allows you to make or break treaties with other players is accessed thusly:

• Click on the picture of a building above the "next turn" button in the lower right corner of the screen and select "nations", or hit "F9" to open up the nations screen.
• Click on the button that looks like three horizontal lines.
• Select the nation you wish to negotiate with.
• When information about the nation in question comes up, click on the picture of a building in the upper right hand corner of the "nations" window, just below the button marked "X".

Conscripts

Conscripts are a special type of unit. Their main advantage is that they cost less than normal military units. Their main disadvantage is that, unlike normal units, they use food resources.

Some basic points:

• The "conscription" technology is needed to make conscripts.
• Any type of military unit can be conscripted.
• To make a the conscripted version of a military unit visible, go to the city management screen to select a unit to build, and shift-click on the unit in question.
• There is a button that looks like a helmet with a spiderweb behind it.
• Click on the spider-web to make it disappear.
• Now, leave the city’s unit selection screen and re-enter it.
• The conscripted version of the unit will now be visible.

Science and resources

Certain special resources are only visible once the "Science" technology becomes available:

Prairie with bauxite:        1 food          3 shields              1 trade
Forest with bubble (mineral) 1 food          2 shields              4 trade
Jungle with black ebony      1 food          2 shields              4 trade
Hills with coal              1 food          2 shields              0 trade
Mountains with diamonds      0 food          1 shield               7 trade
Swamp with peat              1 food          4 shields              1 trade
Tundra with gas              1 food          4 shields              1 trade
Desert with oil              0 food          3 shields              1 trade
Coast with manganese         1 food          5 shields              3 trade