When it released in 1994, K240 was both criticized and commended for its complex gameplay. While the concept of a real-time strategy or 4X game is well-known to players today, it was a relatively new idea back then.
K240 helped players make meaningful choices by providing both on-screen information windows and a heavy game manual in English, French, and German, for which the English-language section alone counted over 28,000 words.
However, a significant amount of the game’s mechanics were left unexplained, and even veteran players have difficulty objectively determining the best strategy. The purpose of this project is to dig deep into the game files and find answers to the mystery of these undocumented game mechanics. A brief overview is given below.
Ships and missiles
We are told how many points of armour each ship has and what each weapon costs to buy. However, we aren’t given any numbers for how much damage each ship weapon or missile warhead deals.
Colonies and buildings
Buildings can be damaged by missiles and ship weapons, but we are not given any details. Discovered features include hit point values for all buildings, the effect of Repair Facility and Building Armour, and a surprising hit point boost for Protected buildings.
The exact behaviour of some buildings is also ambiguous, such as Turret damage and Anti-Missile Pod hit chance. These have now been discovered, along with other mechanics such as the order of precedence under in which buildings fail under power outage, the rate of colonist death due to red PAFW resource deficiency, the number of workers required for each building, and some unexpected or counter-intuitive building effects.
The exact causes and effects of social unrest have been identified.
Aliens
Alien ships and buildings are even more mysterious. The game leaves us wondering if aliens follow the same rules as the human player; e.g. requiring ore or currency to build, susceptibility to radiation, what their building and ship stats are, and so on.
Several general alien mechanics have been discovered. Additionally, detailed species-specific rules are known for the Kll-Kp-Qua, Lak’Maj’Traal, Ax’Zilanths, Tylarans Rigellians, and Swixarans, including species-unique missiles and ship hardpoints.
The exact AI routines of the aliens are reasonably complex, and only partially known.
Bugs
Some game mechanics are undocumented because they are unintended; i.e. bugs.
Other
Various unexpected events, such as Magnetic Storm, Solar Flare, the appearance of a comet, or a bribe to increase ore shipments, are in fact completely random events.
The rules governing ore price fluctuation, and certain undocumented income streams have been identified.
Various miscellaneous features have been discovered. Additionally, twelve cheat codes have been detailed, although these have generally been known since the 1990s.
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