WaveCatcher Tips

WaveCatcher Overview WaveCatcher Tips

There is information on this page for all WaveCatcher players, I do not guarantee that all this information is accurate so if you believe something is incorrect, Contact Us and we'll look into it.

Contents:
Advice for Brand New Players
The Three Cell Policy
The Power of the Pause Button
Outlanders
Other players, spying, sabotage, and diplomacy
Research
A highly-efficient nation
The Global Market
Shared Connection Information

Advice for Brand New Players:
So you've just finished installing this interesting game, have registered your player and are ready to head into the world of WaveCatcher.
Before you do that I would suggest a few things. The first of these is to read the next couple of sections - they will help you keep problems with the three resources (food, resource points and scrap) to a minimum as you learn to play.
The second of these suggestions is to check out the Edash Game Help page, especially the tutorial and FAQ's. The manual is also interesting but some of the information in it seems to have been outdated in the latest version.

Lastly experiment and don't be afraid to ask people questions, either ingame or in the WaveCatcher Forums - there are people there that have been playing for years and will happily give you advice on how to progress with your nation.

You can also check out some of the other WaveCatcher sites run by players, they also have tutorials, information and some technology research guidance that will help you along. Restarting your nation if you are having problems is also a good idea, at the start there is a lot to absorb and you will quickly develop your own playing style - a fresh start will let you refine it much faster than keeping your existing nation running.

The Three Cell Policy:
This policy will help you the most when you are just starting out, it gives a solid foundation for early growth however you will quickly realise it's shortcommings (inefficiency) and learn more efficient cell allocations for longer term growth.

When you start the game you'll usually be on a thorn root, thorn forest or fibrous growth cell - anything else and it might be a good idea to immediately restart your nation.
The first thing to do is scout out your immediate surroundings - put your starting cell in the center of the screen and scout out a ring of about 3 to 4 cells in all directions. Don't worry about resource points, you have 100,000 of them when you start and exploring costs only a very small amount.
Now, find 3 cells, one MUST be fibrous growth, one MUST be thorn forest and the last can be either fibrous growth (preferred) or thorn root. It's best if you don't have any empty claimed cells so try to pick the three cells so they are in a line or little cluster.

The idea of the three cells is to maximise growth (fibrous growth) while still mining on the best terrain for it (thorn forest). You should put your farming population on fibrous growth, miners on thorn forest and the producers in the 3rd cell.
You'll find that your farmers and (if on fibrous growth) producers will grow in number very very quickly while your miners grow very very slowly. What you need to do is shuffle people around - take them off fibrous growth and move them onto thorn forest or thorn root. It's preferable to take from the farmers first since you don't need very many to feed your little nation.
If you get any messages about running out of scrap or your resource points start dropping then shuffle people as needed to correct the problem - early on if the three cells are balanced you will always have a surplus of scrap, resource points and food.

Once the three cells are up and running you can clone them to increase production of all resources - this is a good way to start expanding however you want to take note of the points below to improve your nations efficiency (as you clone the three cells more times the efficiency drops off).

The points to watch out for are:
- A single cell of farmers can feed a number of other cells, so as you clone the three cells more times you will have a massive surplus of food. The excess farmers can be better used as research cells or it's possible to leave them out and just make new production and mining cells.

- Always have a spare cell of farmers around, it's a nice constant supply of people for new mining and production cells without hurting your economy or food production.

- The ratio of miners:producers is not 1:1, it varies but 2:3 is a good ratio to aim for. Any tools and technologies you get will shift the ratio around so while you learn it is best to try and adapt, big scrap surplus per cycle means you should have more producers and vice versa.

The Power of the Pause Button:
While paused you can still explore, scout, give orders to start caravans, check the encyclopedia, your nations statistics and other information screens, chat to other players, and a large number of other activities without your nation doing anything.
Note that anything you change will not take effect until after you unpause!
One of the big benefits is that you can pause when you are reading through all the information screens or your nation is in a crises without worrying about anything happening to your nation.
However it's not a total solution to every problem - humans can still attack, outlanders that are already settled nearby might (though its unlikely) attack, and you can still be spied on and sabotaged by other online players.

Outlanders:
These computer controlled players enjoy wrecking havoc on the weak areas of your nation, they can settle anywhere that you can and can settle anywhere on the map at any point in time.
They can even repeat-settle an area very quickly (very annoying), and they tend to attack relentlessly once your nation is large or certain technologies have been enabled.

What they do is find what they think is a 'weak' cell on the border of your nation. It could be an empty cell in the middle of your nation next to an unclaimed cell you missed or one of your soldier cells with the lowest protection rating.
Once a suitable cell is found every unclaimed cell that they are allowed to settle on is claimed by them and a number of soldiers and healers (sometimes with items of comparable tech to yours) appear ready to attack. You do get a warning about someone claiming a cell near you so provided you don't miss the warning the actual attack won't take you by complete supprise.

After being settled for a certain length of time (it varies, but is usually short) they will simultaneously attack the cell they have targeted and attempt to take it over. If they succeed, they will then claim it, and soon afterwards the next 'weak' cell near their new settlement will be attacked. The process continues until they are driven back or run out of nearby cells to take.
The outlanders usually won't attack while your nation is paused, so you can pause, go and check out the cells that were claimed and see if it's them and then prepare your defences.

In general you will find the outlanders are just very annoying, they can be foiled if you can find choke points leading to your nation and claim all the cells in them up to the choke - creating a border of sorts - and then defending the very edge heavily. If you implement techs that let you settle on more terrain types then obviously there could be problems, usually just a much wider choke point.

Other players, spying, sabotage, and diplomacy:
By far the best aspect of the game is that it is multiplayer, which means at some time or another you will find other players online, or find their nations on the map.
The game lets you interact with them in a variety of ways. Spying is the most common, you can spy on individual cells and it will give you information similar to what you see in your own cells, or you can spy on entire nations if they are online. This can yield much more information except that if you fail they are much more likely to notice!

Sabotage can be a very fun tool to use, allowing you to steal resource points and food or start riots and just generally harass your opponent. All of these activities are based around your diplomacy points. These points accumulate constantly as you play however you'll accumulate many more if you participate in the global economy - every time you buy or sell something on the global market you get a percentage (around 10%) of the resource points that were exchanged in the purchase.
When actually conducting any spying or sabotage attempts your diplomacy points are compared to your targets diplomacy points and a significant random factor is thrown in - you can never have 100% success or 100% protection.

Research:
A lot of information about what areas to research can be gathered just by looking at the encyclopedia in the game, it will list all the things that researching that tech will give you although not in any specific order. Sometimes items will require certain levels of advancement in multiple techs so when researching such items try to maintain equal levels of both - usually the values required in the techs are pretty close to each other (there are exceptions of course).

A few levels in the original set of technologies, especially argiculture, should get you some basic tools that are cheap and provide a significant boost to your early production/mining abilities.
When to start research is debatable, it's often a good idea to get your nation running well and then setting up some research cells. More advanced players can have research going very quickly as they can get their nation going much quicker.

There are different research methods, one extreeme is to use the 'even' button in the research screen and advance each available tech at the same rate. The other extreeme is to put every single scientist on one tech and raise it to a level you are happy with before moving on.
Each has their merits, spreading scientists out over all techs is a good idea while you are learning what comes from where while focussed research is a great way to get specific items and implementable technologies quickly.

For research limits the top tech level in any tech is 255. As you approach this value research progress slows down, requiring more time for each advance.
A word of warning about the medicine tech - as the tech level increases so does the max population capacity of your cell. They are directly related and it is reasonably easy to cause overcrowding problems you can't control by not keeping an eye on how much research is done.
If you do get overcrowding it will hurt morale and the only way to offset it is to implement morale boosting technologies.

A highly-efficient nation:
This is a explanaion of a strategy that has been used to good effect and can make your nation very efficient if you can afford the time micromanaging it.
First you need a very high tech level in all tech areas, enough to give you most (if not all) of the morale boosting technologies and healer boosting items (production, mining and farming items are also highly beneficial).

Having them (and having them active) is only the first part, the second is the ratio of workers to healers in each cell.
For civilian Cells (those without soldiers):
The number of healers you need in each cell is around 30. If your cells hold more than around 220 people you might need to raise the number of healers slightly or you can be the ultimate tweaker and find the exact number before morale starts dropping off.
Any other profession you just 'let go' and usually with tech level 80 or 90 in medicine, it ends up at about 180-190.
Now you want to equip your people properly, get the best healer boosting item and make sure all of your healers is using one (most important!) - a little surplus is also handy. Equip the other profession with your best tools related to them, again a little surplus is good.

For soldier cells:
You need more healers, at least double the number of civilian cells - the more you have the fewer casualties you'll take in battle! Don't overdo it though, 200 healers will not keep 1 soldier alive very long. You'll also need to equip your soldiers, it can be quite expensive to build the higher tech combat items and even more expensive since they are likely to be destroyed pretty quick (when soldiers manning an item die, the item goes with them) unlike other expensive items for mining or production.

There is one other special cell, your capital. How you treat it is up to you, if it's just another production cell then it requires no special attention, however if you are security concious then make it soldier cell and put your best weaponry there.

How this strategy works:
The goal of the strategy is to minimise the number of healers needed per cell while keeping morale high enough to get every cell in festival mode more or less continously. For that each cell needs around 95% which is pretty easy to reach with most of the technologies implemented. It's so easy that you can generate extra revenue through taxes (tax hurts morale) and STILL keep 95%!
With everything implemented you can even have overcrowding and taxes and still have those festivals going, however it becomes much more of a challenge to stop everything collapsing at this point :)

With the minimal number of healers you have a higher % of your nation being productive since healers don't actually produce anything aside from boosting morale and they get paid rather high wages.
Unfortunately the game won't happily keep the number of healers at the number you set... with the birth/death cycle and a very large difference in allocation % you will find that the other profession will get any births the majority of the time and as a result the number of healers will drop slowly over time. To offset this you need to go over each cell regularly and re-adjust the numbers. This is the micromanagement part of the strategy and if you have a large nation it can be very time-intensive, not to mention boring.

Still the benefits easily make up for the time invested and you can maintain a strong standing army to defend your borders and scout for new resorce deposits. The micromanagement can be reduced by using more healers than needed at the expense of some efficiency, you'll find the right balance for you through experimentation.

Now you'll probably implement this strategy (or one of your own) as you progress through the game since it is rather hard going from using nothing to having all this in place without your nation running into many problems before all the tech is available. Just keep in mind the eventual goals, study any new items you get and see if they can replace your current items. Implement new technologies when you believe they are needed or will give the most benefit - if you already have 95% morale then there isn't much point putting in a new morale boosting tech unless you are going to use the 'surplus' morale for taxes.

The Global Market:
A wonderful part of the game is being able to buy goods off anyone in the game, and sell your own goods, all without needing to be around 24hrs a day.
Unfortunately it is something that can be a little confusing to use at first.
When buying you need to enter two values, an offer price and maximum price. The game takes these values, compares them to the sellers entries and sees if they match up well enough for the sale to take place. The listed price in the marketplace is NOT the lowest price the seller will take, you have to try and guess this unless you have plenty of resource points and don't want to much around.
If you want a guarenteed purchase then put your offer price just below what they are asking and the max price just above. Provided the seller hasn't done something silly this should work :)

If you are selling make sure you enter the right prices in the right fields! If you get the fields swapped around then your lowest price can be higher (in some cases much higher) than your requested price (what is shown on the market) and if that happens you are not likely to sell anything while annoying any player trying to purchase your items.

The last benefit the global market gives is diplomacy points - around 10% of what you spend or the person buying your item spends you get back in diplomacy points.

Shared Connection Information:
Shared Connections (via proxy server or Network Address Translation (NAT) software) typicially don't like accepting unrequested inbound connections. Unfortunately the WaveCatcher will want to make one to you whenever you try using TCP mode.
To let the connection in so you can play reliably you'll need to know how to map ports on your software and also know how to use the games "Game Server Settings" program, which you can find in the same place you run WaveCatcher from.
You also need to know what happens when the client and server chat to each other, it follows this process:
The client connects out on the set port via UDP (always) and the server will then establish a return connection on port 1966 for UDP (always) and TCP (only if set in game settings).
It is this return connection that is the problem - in UDP only mode everything works fine (which is odd, but still it works) but when in TCP only mode or TCP & UDP only mode everything grinds to a halt!

So how do you get around this problem? Well you could play in UDP only mode (not recommended) or you could setup a couple of rules for your proxy/NAT software and it'll run quite happily.
What you need to set for proxy are:
Map outbound connections on TCP and UDP from internal machines on your chosen port (default is 1965) to the server (you don't have to keep the same port for the external connection) and then map inbound connections on port 1966 for TCP and UDP and tell it to forward them to the client.

For NAT software, mostly for people using Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), then you may have some problems.
Under Windows 2000 and Windows XP you can access the ICS port mappings directly, but under Windows 98SE and Windows ME you can't. What you need to do is obtain an ICS configuration program - I recommend ICS Configuration by Harley Acheson.

What you need to do is make a new entry for WaveCatcher then in it make a rule for UDP, port 1966 and TCP port 1966, normal connection, and tell it to forward to the machine you want to play off.
Once thats done and you reboot the game should let you in under TCP only!

This might also apply to a hardware router, check your router manuals for instructions on how to add the mappings if needed.

NOTE: If you change the outgoing port to something other than 1965 and are having problems connecting (even just finding the server) then try setting the port back to 1965 and seeing if it works. I couldn't even find the server in UDP only mode when I changed the port, but it worked fine set at 1965.

'Portions of text and/or graphics on this page are Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, Edash'


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