Orion's Belt (game)

Orion's Belt is a free browser game, originally a Bachelor's degree project of two Portuguese students. In this game the player has to manage several planets and grow his empire battling other players.

History
The game was released in a very beta state in October 2003 for a few Portuguese players, mainly from a Portuguese gamedev web community. The game was launched as an open source project, supported by SourceForge.net, and was is influenced by Master of Orion and Heroes of Might and Magic.

Despite technical limitations and hosting difficulties, the game started to grow in popularity, and was reviewed in June 2005 by the Portuguese TV channel RTP2 in the Quiosque magazine. Several Portuguese game related magazine and sites published interviews with the Orion's Belt developers, increasing the game's popularity.

On January 2008, a new beta version of the game was launched.

Gameplay
Orion's Belt provides two distinct competitions: the round and tournaments.

The Round


In an Orion's Belt round the player starts from his Home Planet and has to expand. The game has two very different aspects: the combat mode and the planet management mode. There are several buildings, research, and combat units: the objective is to make the planet's production as high as possible, to be able to manufacture many combat units.

There are no automatic battle resolutions. Every battle is performed in a rather complex board game style, with units on a square grid. The rounds usually last for 6 months. When a round ends, the game is restarted.

The Tournaments
In the tournaments players are given a fleet with a predefined set of units and have to battle through the available competitions. The tournament battles count for the Orion's Belt Elo rating system. There are several tournament types with different victory conditions:
 * Total Annihilation - the objective is to eliminate all enemy units
 * Regicide - the objective is to eliminate a special flag unit (similar to the checkmate mechanic of Chess).
 * Domination - the objective is to control board places to earn points; after a set number of turns, the player with the most points wins

The tournaments are divided in two phases:
 * Groups - all the players are divided in groups, with the maximum of 10 players
 * Playoffs - the 3 best players from each group are then matched in playoffs