PlanetsCentral

What is FLAK?

Fleet Action Kombat, or FLAK for short, is a multi-ship combat engine. You can find documentation and software here.

The main problem with standard one-on-one combat is that small ships cannot team up against a big ship. In FLAK, they can. For each fight, your ships will form fleets; each fleet will attack an enemy. This way, a group of medium-sized ships does have a chance against a top battleship, even if that top battleship would normally just defeat each of them one by one.

FLAK is intended to be "plug-compatible" with existing ship lists. In 1:1 combat, it attempts to mimic PVCR as close as possible. It was designed to be easy to use, for players and hosts.

Why now?

FLAK was designed several years ago, in a joint venture of the PHost, Planetsserver, Blutmagie and Vagabond people. You may remember the last three as high-quality hosts of the past.

Unfortunately, it mostly laid dormant until now. I think some hosts tried hosting one or another game with it, but nothing big. I finally found the time to revive it, which was much less work than I had feared for, and more fun than I thought. In particular, the PCC2 Web Battle Simulator now has an awesome FLAK mode: set the mode to FLAK, add some ships, sit back and watch.

What's in this game?

This is the second game I'll be hosting with FLAK (the first one was, well, long ago). I hope to find the remaining bugs (and I hope that they're not too plenty), and maybe tweak one or another bit of the engine. If everything goes well, FLAK could be a new standard game series on this site.

For now, the game uses PList 2.4 because FLAK doesn't yet support 100% of PList 3.2. Cleaning that up would be a task for the near future. For example, FLAK doesn't yet support FullWeaponry - all ships have it, always. So, let's discuss whether that makes sense for multi-ship combat.

I'd like to play as well if you don't protest too heavily, but you get first picks of the race.

--Stefan