Phoenix is a game of great depth where good play and well thought out actions are rewarded. When first started in 1992 it was set a few centuries into the future when mankind ruled the Stellar Empire. At the frontier, several distant 'Peripheries' had been discovered. These huge areas of space, accessible by specially designed Starships were explored and colonised.

Since then however the history of the game has developed and many plotlines have been explored including the fall of the Stellar Empire culminating in a return to the old Empire in order to pick over the stagnant and isolated populations and rebuild.

Humanity also found that it was not alone and alien races encountered, sometimes peaceful though not always. As a player you have the option of playing in one of many factions, whether human or alien, aiding their cause.

Phoenix is a turn-based game in which players control positions in a persistent and open-ended universe moderated by a human Games Master.

• Positions – ships, bases, agents etc.
  
• Turn-based - positions are processed in a single* batch on a daily basis, i.e. each position performs a number of actions within a single day and this is referred to as a turn.
  
• Persistent – positions in the game are always considered active. They can be attacked at any time. There is no logging-off.
  
• Open-ended – there is one game that has been continually running since 1992. Some positions that existed then still exist today.
  
• Moderated – the game employs professional referees to add plot lines, modify game data, answer questions and generally expand the game and the game universe.
  

There are several different types of positions in BSE: Starships, Starbases, Outposts, Platforms, Ground Parties, Agents, Operatives, Cargo Dumps, and Political Positions. You start in command of a Starship. Starships are all-purpose spacecraft capable of exploration, cargo haulage, and combat. Starbases and outposts are small ports founded on worlds throughout the Peripheries. Platforms provide stationary naval defences and are generally built in orbit. Ground Parties are composed of people and equipment (usually) and are commonly used to explore or conduct military operations on the surface of a planet. Cargo dumps are as the name suggests. Agents and Operatives are effective spies in rival Starbases and Outposts and Political Positions are a position type reserved for advanced players and represent the people who actually run the Affiliations.

From starting the game with a courier you can build up the number of assets you control. Positions can normally be transferred between players except in a few special cases, including but not limited to Starting Positions, Politicals, Agents and Operatives.

Certain positions have a fee levied against them. These may be per week or per update. See fees.

While there are no limits to the quantity you can control, positions also have maintenance costs. This is often the effective limit to the amount of positions you can control in the game. Only your starting positions and political are created without the use of in-game resources.

Every position in the game will be flagged with an affiliation signature. This is a three letter code that is normally an acronym of their affiliation or the most significant letters:

• AFT - Association of Free Traders
  
• IND - INDependent
  
• PIR - PIRate
  

Factions in the game are known as affiliations. Some may belong to the same race while in some cases an entire race may be counted as an affiliation.

Players can normally only belong to one affiliation. Assets controlled by the player are flagged as belonging to the affiliation with the exception of their positions they have flagged as Pirates.

Assets you control may be flagged as Player Owned or Affiliation Owned. Player Owned positions can be transferred to anyone. Affiliation Owned can only be transferred to other members of the Affiliation.
You can purchase Affiliation Owned assets in order to make them Player Owned.

Player Owned Positions can be flagged as Pirates. Their main advantage is that they allow affiliations to conduct covert actions without implicating their affiliation.

Player Owned Pirate ships can be re-registered. This costs stellars but will remove the pirate flag, making the position a normal Player Owned ship bearing their Affiliation signature.

Phoenix is not the kind of game that you 'win' in the common sense of the word. Only you can decide how well you are doing. There are always new challenges to face and new goals to be attained. Very little can be achieved easily or quickly in Phoenix.

Turns are run during standard working days (Monday to Friday) and hours (Greenwich Mean Time).

The game is not processed on Bank Holidays. Instead a double day is run on the following working day. In the case of two Bank Holidays back to back (e.g. Christmas), double runs will be on the day before and the day following the Bank Holidays. Normally the second run starts mid-afternoon.

Each game week has 5 Days. There are 260 game days in a year (52 weeks).

As the game is run on week days the standard date format is year.week.day.
2008 AD = 208 Game Year (208 years after the foundation of the Human Empire).
Example
30th October 2008 = 208.48.2 (2nd day of the 48th week in 208).

All actions performed by a ship, ground party, agent, operative or platform require time. The amount of time required is measured in Time Units (TU's). These positions can have a maximum of 300 TU's at any one time. The current amount will increase by 60 TU's per day. When orders are sent in, they will perform actions until it has no more TU's remaining. Any actions still outstanding will be listed as pending orders.
More information on this can be found under Movement.

Within the galaxy are millions of stars. A star is a huge ball of burning gas. It is generally the case that a star has a number of celestial bodies orbiting around it. These celestial bodies could be planets like our own or swirling spheres of cold gas like Jupiter. There could be asteroids or in some circumstances even another star present. Together these are known as a star system, or more commonly just system.

A primary star always exists at the centre of the system. Around this, the system is broken down into 4 quadrants and 15 rings known as orbitals. This map is not a map representing true location, but closer to a map used in the real world by underground tube trains. It represents relative location not physical distance. In Phoenix, relative location is based on iso-gravitational regions. These are effectively relative travel times for ships moving from one location to another.

Each star system is separated from other systems by phenomenal distances - so huge that it takes light produced by one star many years to reach another. Under normal circumstances travelling from one star to another would be impossible. Scientists however discovered something called Inverse Spatial Resonance (ISR). This showed how one region of space could be uniquely connected to another through the dimensions known colloquially as subspace. The application of this at a macro level meant that with the correct navigational knowledge a space ship could create a sphere around itself and be effectively catapulted instantaneously from one region of space to another.

There are two uses for ISR fields. The first use is to move from orbit around one star to orbiting around another star. This is known as 'jumping' from one system to another. Drives designed specifically for this use as known as Jump Drives.

The second use of ISR fields is to move through space within a system. This interplanetary travel requires faster formation of ISR fields and many micro-jumps. The speed at which the field surrounding the ship forms is related to the relative volume of the ship compared to its integrity. As such ships that are relatively small compared to their mass such as those constructed out of heavy hulls are able to utilise smaller fields. This means that they can use drives that are able to create fields faster, thus allowing them to travel through interplanetary space much faster than ships that are built from xlight hulls.

It is therefore more sensible to create maps of systems based on the use of ISR fields rather than actual distances. This allows the star system to be neatly cut up into regions of relative iso-gravitation known as orbitals. As all worlds have a direct impact on iso-gravitational regions within a system, in some systems it may be the case that some worlds in a low orbital are icy while other worlds in the same system at a higher orbital are in fact warmer. These though are quite unusual and it is generally the case that increasing orbital means decreasing world temperature.

Originally the Phoenix universe was split into two main parts, the Stellar Empire (more commonly known as the Inner Empire) and regions of stars beyond called the Peripheries. The game was limited to the Peripheries.

Since the collapse of the Inner Empire a few years ago this region of space is now part of the game. It is also referred to as a Periphery as the term Periphery has become synonymous with a region of star systems in close proximity to each other rather than somewhere on the edge of somewhere else.

There are few redundant or archaic terms in Phoenix that have arisen on account of its long and dynamic history. Don’t worry; they will become clear in time.

Most worlds are in fact not spherical. Small asteroids may well be oblong, while rocky planets may be slightly oblate, that is squashed. In Phoenix the size of a world is represented by its X and Y values. Like the system map, these are relative to the time required to cross them. In the case of a planet, each sector is roughly 1,000km across. Earth roughly corresponds to a 36x36 planet. Smaller worlds such as asteroids tend to be made out of localised mineral deposits of an inhomogeneous and generally very rocky nature. As such a sector may well represent only a 100km. Gas giants on the other hand are little more than gaseous spheres. The surface of these worlds is considered to be the depth where the atmospheric pressure is suitable for life (roughly equal to Earth’s). As such the gravity at this level is also roughly equal to Earth’s. As the surface at this depth is still insubstantial a sector could easily be 5,000km in diameter.

Each sector has a terrain type. In the case of gas giants these will all be gas, but for planets, moons and asteroids, there are many other classes such as craters, mountains, ice, forest, sea etc.

The Solar System has thousands (millions?) of rocks, asteroids, kuiper objects, comets and other chunks of dusty ice left over from the accretion period. Why are there so few in a typical Phoenix system?
Actually there are just as many in Phoenix, we make the assumption however that players do not want to scan thousands or even hundreds of planetesimals scattered throughout the system. We therefore have presumed that sensors ignore anything below a certain size and anything that does not reflect any possibility of mineral deposits of a size large enough to be exploited.
So ring 15 of a system may well have a thousand (or more) kuiper objects, though most well be less than a few kilometres in diameter and consist of nothing more than ices, dust and be devoid of minerals. They will be fairly easy to spot, just not interesting enough to explore.
So in theory ships could hide in their shadow (something presumed by the scan routines), land on one of these (as a special action) or even set up a base – though the sensor profile of the asteroid+base will make it fairly easy to spot due to the sudden anomalies. It will also have no minerals, so all in all, it is better to find an asteroid through scanning as it will have a lower sensor profile and have minerals.