Galaxy #223

The ongoing Saga of Galaxy #223 in Galac-Tac

Heading Towards Turn #6

The Issue of Time

My turn orders for Turn #6, I am not quite finished with, just yet. Six turns isn't a long way into the game after starting from scratch with Turn #1, but it is far enough into the process that the amount of time that it takes to issue a full set of orders with a lot of thought put into them begins to become more and more noticeable.



This stems, in part, from simply having built a lot of new starships, since this game of Galac-Tac began. It also stems from the fact that Galac-Tac is a game that requires an investment of time on the player's part in order to maximize your chances of doing well, compared to your fellow players in the game.



Heading into Turn #6, there's a lot more at stake than heading into the first few turns of the game. The gravity of importance in the orders that you issue begins to weigh upon you all the more.



Various considerations begin to take on a heightened sense of criticality. If for any reason, at all, you can't get resources harvested from other star systems transported to your homeworld system in a timely manner, then your empire is going to struggle - both economically and militarily.



To fund your empire's war machine, you've got to have an economy that is humming. To transport lots of resources (PV) from lots of other star systems to your homeworld requires substantial transport capacity in the form of freighters. And just one or two freighters simply aren't enough to get the job done.



As long as your homeworld system is intact and under your control, you'll always enjoy a bare minimum of PI (cash) to spend to build new starships and/or platforms with. But that will only get you and your empire just so far.



Galac-Tac is definitely a "thinking man's" (or "thinking woman's") game. There's a lot about it to like. There's a lot about it that I like.



Which makes me wonder all the more, why does it have so few players, at present, and why did it suffer from player retention problems, both historically and in recent years?



Galac-Tac is a game that should be booming with players. Yet, the reality is that it isn't. What a pity, eh?



Of course, it's much too early, yet, for me to ascertain whether the game will continue to hold the bulk of its appeal to me, as I go forward, turn after turn after turn. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. I'll just have to continuing playing it for a while longer, and see for myself, firsthand, how the different dynamics of the game interact with one another and with the players.



Does Galac-Tac have untapped potential? Absolutely! I have no doubt, whatsoever, about that. But even if that untapped potential were tapped, that's no guarantee that players will then begin flooding in to give the game a try. That goes to the very core of why there's no one, single thing that can be changed, to dramatically turn Galac-Tac's player base's fortunes around.



But that doesn't mean that it would necessarily require an arm and a leg of effort, nor a huge amount of time-investment, to bolster Galac-Tac's chances of competing more effectively for both new players and for player retention.



Ultimately, I ask myself this question: Will the current Galac-Tac status quo prove sufficient, in and of itself, to spark an influx of new players and then retain them over the long run?



Right now, headed into Turn #6, my answer to that question would be, "No."



But who is to say what my answer to that question would be after, say, twenty turns?



A lot of PBM games have underwent changes down through the years and decades. Galac-Tac has, also, and more than once. I don't view any PBM games to be sacred cows. Times change. People change. Tastes in gaming change. A PBM game that won't change can easily end up an endangered dinosaur.



Space warfare type games always seem to have a following. Gamers, many of them though not all of them, are interested in outer space and science fiction. It's very imaginative stuff. Those are big pluses to have in Galac-Tac's corner.



PBM games that have been around a long while remind me of old houses. If you go and look at old houses, your eyes will tend to quickly latch onto a variety of different things that you either dislike or that you think could stand with a bit of improvement. Something as simple as a fresh coat of paint can address some shortcomings in old houses. Some might need a little more work of consequence, such as a leaking roof, or a rotted floor, or maybe some outdated carpet or other floor product. But none of those, standing alone, mean that an old house has lost it's architectural beauty or overall visual appeal. Some can see past an old houses' shortcomings, whereas others cannot.



The core of Galac-Tac is sound. It's got what I would term a "sound foundation." For instance, I really love the way that constructing new starships at a production center's shipyard works. You can construct a variety of different ship types in just one turn. Yet, some starships require multiple turns to complete construction, depending upon their size. This makes sense.



As long as you have enough PI on hand at your homeworld's production system, you can build as many starships as you want to build, provided that you can afford them. On Turn #5, for example, my empire built ten starships and one platform. Galac-Tac's ship building system provides players with lots of flexibility, and if you want to, you can quickly begin amassing many, many ships.



But then once they're built, if you want them to do something in-game, you then have to invest the time necessary to issue orders to all of them. This can end up feeling like a lot of fun or a lot of work, depending upon how one chooses to look at it, and depending upon how many starships that you've taken it upon yourself to order the construction of.



Nonetheless, it's a system that enables you to conduct a lot of experimentation on your own.



The mechanics of the game that is Galac-Tac, and how things interact with one another, requires the passing of time and the processing of turns, in order to develop a greater appreciation for them. I can imagine all kinds of different things, but how they actually play out when turn orders get processed is where the beauty of Galac-Tac really begins to shine.



One thing well worth pointing out, highlighting, and underscoring for readers of PBM Chaos is that lots of turn orders for Galac-Tac can actually be issued in a relatively quick and easy fashion (especially if you're issuing your turn orders via the GTac player assistant program for Galac-Tac). But better turn results will likely result, if you put more time into thinking your turn orders through, than if you just rush through things, just in order to get done quickly.



Heading into Turn #6, which will get processed this upcoming Saturday, November 22nd, 2025, I find myself thinking more and more about the concept of balance in the composition of my overall assortment of starships that my empire has constructed over the course of the previous five turns. Do I have too much of this? Do I have too little of that? Back and forth through my mind, over and over, again and again. There's something to be said for a PBM game that one thinks about, even when they aren't playing it.



I find myself thinking about Galac-Tac Galaxy #223 a lot. With two weeks between each turn, this processing schedule affords me lots of time and opportunities to think about what turn orders that I want to issue. Two weeks between turns also provides my mind with plenty of downtime between turns - a bit too much downtime, if you ask me.



Downtime between turns also forms opportunities to get distracted from the game. What constitute the "right processing time" will vary from person to person to person. While five turns under my belt in this game of Galac-Tac, thus far, isn't one whole heck of a lot, as for how I feel, right now, I probably would not be inclined to start another game of Galac-Tac where turns only get processed once every two weeks. Your personal mileage may vary from mine on this.



Of course, assuming that my empire continues to grow, there may come a point in time where my thinking and my personal preference on the turn processing schedule for games of Galac-Tac may begin to shift. If so, then I will elaborate on that in a future Galaxy #223 article.



Currently, I have more colony systems and charted-but-undeveloped star systems from which I can harvest/gather resources (PV) for transport back to my homeworld system for conversion into PI for building new starships and platforms than I have freighters enough to transport them all. Even still, as part of trying to look ahead and think ahead and plan ahead, my mind always wanders the fertile imaginative ground of bringing even more new production systems online.



That will take time and the allocation of 30 PI per colony system that I want to upgrade to a production system. And right now, trying to maintain some kind of military edge over my empire's adversaries tends to result in hogging the lion's share of my empire's available PI for spending on construction projects. It keeps going back to that concept of balance that I spoke about earlier.



The "right balance" is not an unchanging constant. Indeed, the "right balance" could easily change from turn to turn. It's not hard for me to see that. With each new turn comes the prospect of changing priorities, and you can't really ever hope to strike the "right balance," if you don't take your empire's current priorities into consideration, whatever turn in the game it might be.

Player Blurb - Ajwan

Player Blurb - Brendan

No player blurb received.

Player Blurb - Djinny

Player Blurb - Hammer

I have been stuck on 4 GTac orders for more than 4 days!



Hammer, Minister of War

Player Blurb - Richard

Player Blurb - GrimFinger

Even suffering the loss of only a very few starships in a turn creates gaps in capability. Thus, as this game of Galac-Tac, Galaxy #223, heads into Turn #6, I find myself unable to persuade myself that construction on new starships should be paused for my empire.

Right now, I'm weighing what I feel will be the right balance of offensive and defensive military operations in my next set of turn orders. Those unintended attacks on several Saydonia starships complicate matters more than usual, yet simultaneously, I have other empires to concern myself with, in the form of the Wyvern Supremacy and/or the Kroji Konfederation.

They're still out there, after all, and both of their empires are still very much intact.

So far, I've submitted turn orders for Turn #6 a number of different times, only to make changes, and submit them anew. With Turn #6 due to be processed a mere five days from now, I'm still not done running an array of different scenarios through my mind. As always, decisions,  decisions, decisions. . .

I will be ordering an increase in the number of CHART missions to be carried out on my empire's behalf in Turn #6. We'll see if it shall be sufficient to boost my empire back into the 100th percentile on the old Empire Valuation score. Plus, as always, charting unexplored star systems that remain out there (there's still a LOT of star systems still unexplored, yet) will provide me even more options when it comes time for me to decide where to construct new colonies for my Yonds of Droon.

By the time that I get around to issuing orders to all of my empire's warships on my turn orders for Turn #6, I may have to roll back some of my decisions to issue even more CLASSIFY orders, which is what basically creates blueprints for my shipyard to go by, when trying to construct starships and platforms.

Talisman Games GM, Davin Church, was able to clear up for me an issue that I was encountering, when I would try to spend as much of my empire's available PI as I had on hand. As it turned out, there wasn't a real problem to solve. Most excellent! I thought that I was perhaps trying to spend more PI than I had, by way of overlooking something that I ordered, but which I was not accounting for in my manual adding up of the numbers. Here is Davin's explanation for your (and my empires' spies') reading pleasure.

Aha! That is indeed a bug in error-checking. You have loaded 1014 with PI and then used it to Colonize. This is not a problem, but players rarely do that. The Colonize command will load its own PI and most players just let it do that rather than pre-loading in advance. Consequently, nobody has ever noticed that pre-loading it doesn't mark the ship as already loaded, so it tries to spend the same PI again.

You may ignore that error, or if you remove the LOAD 1014 then it won't complain in the first place. Either way, you're OK!



Thanks for the report!

Davin

What it boils down to for me is whether I end up building an additional starship in Turn #6 or not. Yeah, you guessed it - another warship!

With Player Ajwan having survived an invasion of her empire's homeworld in a different game of Galac-Tac, recently, her survival of such a massive attack against her in that game will likely serve to embolden her in this game. In my heart of interstellar hearts, I can just sense that Ajwan wants to blast my empire. That trigger finger of hers is definitely of the itchy variety, I do believe.

If only I enjoyed the luxury of just ignoring the evil Wyvern Supremacy and the dastardly Kroji Konfederation. But war is afoot! Such enemies no doubt sit and stir their pots of revenge against my beloved Yonds of Droon. If everyone in Galac-Tac stayed friendly and peaceful with one another, though, then where would that leave us? Indeed, where would that leave you, dear readers of PBM Chaos?

I am still developing my theories of war for playing Galac-Tac. How to play offense, how to play defense, and how to play both offense and defense, simultaneously - these are all core concerns of mine. Heading into Turn #6 still leaves my empire in the early phase of the game, but no longer in the starting phase of the game. That's my take on it, anyway, as I sit here pondering things at the moment.

I'm pondering both the big picture and several different little pictures of the current state of this particular game and the various different empires that populate the star map for it. My mind wanders as it wonders about all sorts of different things. I like thinking about things like this. A silent serenade of thought, as the different possibilities reach out to make themselves known to me, each vying in turn for my attention. Which of them shall become my empire's actual priorities, and which of them shall get shunned and be forced to wait for a new day to make their case to me, anew, for my attention and a proper share of the imperial budget?

It all comes back to resources. It all comes right back to competing priorities. So much to do, yet so restrained by such a modest production of resources. Turn #6 is still way too early, it seems, for me to escape the chains of sharp resource limitations that loom large over all considerations. There's just no escaping that reality at this juncture in time, regardless of what all is happening in the stars all around me.

Messages sent by my empire to some of the other empires in the game via Galac-Tac's built-in message system several turns ago remain unresponded to by more than one of them. So, maybe there's no real point in me even making use of that communication system. Missed opportunities for these other empires that have opted for silence via that mechanism.

The economic realities that restrain my own empire's hand also restrain my enemies' hands, as well. How much PI do they have just sitting around unused, that they can allocate to their respective war efforts against my empire? How strong, currently, are their own economic engines and transport capabilities? War is expensive, even if it's all still relatively small scale at this point in time. Huge fleets of very powerful starships remain relegated to the realm of pure fantasy headed into Turn #6. Even now, for all of my efforts thus far, my empire still has less than 200 PI to spend in any given turn. Talk about enough to make a man cuss!

Once the results for Turn #6 process on this upcoming Saturday morning, I should have a lot more to say. Receiving one's turn results in this particular game of Galac-Tac is like taking freshly-baked bread out of the oven. I can't help but to wonder whether Player Djinni is enjoying the fireworks that have been visited upon her empire, thus far in this game. She was the one to initially inject that word into this game's galactic lexicon, after all.

If I were to just suddenly ceases and desist with my attacks upon Kroji shipping, Player Djinni and her entire empire might suddenly die of loneliness. Out of respect for her, I'll have to keep the pressure on. Take the foot off the throat of an experienced player, and that can quickly come back to haunt you. After all, if anyone can dig themselves out from a hole that their empire finds itself in, it's definitely an experienced player.

I have some hard choices, some really hard choices, to make for my turn orders for this next turn. I must resist the temptation to just list them all, here and now, for to do so would be a real boon to my enemies' ability to prepare and to prioritize. For all that I know about this game, at present, there's still so very much that I don't know.

Information deficiencies complicate the ability of my empire to wage information warfare effectively. So many stars, so many information source points. My empire simply lacks the necessary number of starships to render the decision-making process on my end simple and straightforward. Thus do risks and risk-taking continue to dominate the viewscape, from my empire's perspective.

When my empire's enemies begin to rally and to bring the war to my empire's doorstep, this will bring with it new challenges and new risks, but new opportunities, also. When they crawl out of their respective holes and fling their empires' warships across the stars in their bids for retaliation, they will also open the door for me to take advantage of the shifting of their military assets. I don't know, yet, what the exact challenges and risks will be, but what I do know beyond any shadow of a doubt is that very localized balances of power will shift. It is imperative that my empire's war machine be prepared to exploit openings that this shift in dynamics presents.

Much like my own empire, their military assets can't be everywhere all at once, simultaneously, and certainly not on Turn #6. They have to pick and choose very carefully where they will move their starships to, and as experience taught me well oh so very long ago, the timing of when they do whatever it is that they ultimately choose to do can be everything.

The artistic inspiration of Basil Wolverton.

* All Galac-Tac content and images copyright © Talisman Games.

Another stray dog of an issue - a day late and more than a dollar short, but it could be a lot worse (not to belittle the fact that is was late out of the publication door, mind you). But no real point in beating this dead horse. It won't change what already is.

I'll make a major push to get Issue #55 published on time. It's just a gut feeling, but I think next issue will be a better issue, overall, than this issue. It not due to something that I know that any of you don't know, but rather, it's just a feeling that I have in my gut, as I sit here, tonight, trying to finish this issue up once and for all.

The player blurbs for this issue barely materialized, at all, with most Galac-Tac players in Galaxy #223 not sending one in for this issue. I sometimes wonder if anyone is reading the stuff that gets written about Galaxy #223, even though a part of me knows full well that someone always read pretty much anything that PBM Chaos publishes, even if not everyone reads every last

item.



Over on the Talisman Games website, the Galaxies Filling box is still stuck at just one galaxy currently filling, Galaxy #228. It's shifted from one to a few. PBMer Hammer should be happy that someone else has signed up for this game. It's slow going, for sure. This particular game of Galac-Tac will be processing turns once a week, when and if it starts.



Every time I wonder why more people aren't signing up for or playing games of Galac-Tac, my mind drifts back to when I used to read those PBM ads for Hyborian War, back in the 1980s. It was months of me looking at, reading, and pondering those ads, before I ever took the next step of sending off for more information about that PBM game. How many articles about Galaxy #223 and how many player blurbs must be written, before others' curiosity begins to get the best of them, and they then actually give the game a try?



I suspect that the Thanksgiving Day holiday won't disrupt PBM Chaos' publication schedule. It's still way too far out ahead of Christmas for me to make a determination on that holiday. Christmas Day falls on a Thursday, this year, but I've no expectation, whatsoever, that any real work on PBM Chaos will get done for at least two or three days, that week. We'll just have to play it by ear. Christmas Day 2025 falls about halfway between the scheduled publication dates for Issues #59 and #60. Just trying to give one and all a heads up, well ahead of time.



For Return to the PBM Maze, this issue, I didn't know what was going to happen to Maze Runner #2. My gut told me ahead of time that the spider was probably gonna either kill him or continue sucking the life out of him. When his fate was finally resolved, I got tickled, because I thought that it was funny that he transformed into some kind of spider creature. I really hadn't envisioned this, when I started running Return to the PBM Maze. It will be interesting to see if any of the other maze runners end up as spider food in the coming turns.



The PBM Maze is a big place. It may take this spider creature a while to track down its potential victims. And just because it can see much further than the other maze runners, that doesn't mean that it knows which maze passageways to travel through, necessarily.



Since we are in the middle of a drought of PBM material sent in by either PBMers or PBM GMs, I don't tend to run as many PBM ads as I used to. That's why I currently only run some PBM ads intermittently, now, if at all. A lack of participation begets a lack of advertising. The weather forecast for PBM activity from now to next issue is more of the same bone dry season. Who knows? Maybe one day, PBM Chaos will dry up and blow away. Fortunately, it's not 100% participation dependent.



As the first two issues of PBM Zombies has recently demonstrated, people aren't even wiling to write two or three sentences a month about something of PBM interest to them. That's perhaps just the current reality of the PBM scene. Some of them post in their favorite PBM game's forum or Discord, which isn't a bad thing, and technically speaking, PBM Chaos tends to cater to and appeal to - well, what do we cater to and appeal to? A more general PBM segment of the overall PBM population? A small cross-section of the PBM nostalgic? Something else?



That Colonel Sanders Halloween costume of MaddMattParker's that he posted over in the general channel of the SuperNova Discord chat server looked great. You really should check it out.



It's 7:21 PM, here. on a Tuesday night. I guess that I should wrap this up, and try to do a little bit of proofreading.



As always, happy PBM gaming and happy PBM reading!



Charles Mosteller

Editor of PBM Chao

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