PHost has some features that might be dangerous when you don't know about them.
- When you enable an alliance to someone else, you should be fully aware of the implications of that alliance. One pitfall is the ship-level alliance: by default, all your ships are remote-controllable. When you offer ship level to someone, he will be able to take control over all your ships. The best counter-action for this is to forbid remote control for your ships at the beginning of the game; send a message to yourself containing the following:
remote forbid default remote forbid 1 remote forbid 12
The first line disables remote control for all ships you will build in the future, the other two disable remote control for your first ships (change the Id numbers as appropriate). Shameless plug: when you have to do that for many more ships, PCC can generate the "remote forbid" commands automatically for all ships. - Likewise, a planet-level alliance will allow the ally to freely beam up stuff from your planets. He can even clone his ships on your bases - you pay and he gets the ship. Beware.
- When you use alternate combat, simulation results from HOST simulators will be worthless. In particular, do not use VPA's or Winplan's built-in simulator for alternate combat. For non-alternate combat, results will come close but not be exact either.
- BSim 2.1 supports PHost 2. It will yield accurate results most of the time, but doesn't support all PHost 3 peculiarities.
- CCBSim supports PHost 3; since version 1.1.4 it also supports PHost 4. However, it has problems handling very long fights.
- PlayVCR since December 2006 contains a simulator with full PHost support.
- When you're taking over for someone, and receive sub-space messages in a strange language you don't understand, you can usually change the language back to English (or whatever you prefer) by sending a command message
language english
