Anyone remember K240?

[Jonathan Drain]

I'm a big fan of K240, Gremlin's 1994 space colony management sim. Anyone else have fond memories of this game?

It was one of my favourite games back then. A few years ago I played it again, and discovered a few hidden secrets, which I talk about on my K240 website.

For example, you actually get income for having colonists. In the CU Amiga coverdisk demo you don't, and the manual doesn't mention it. But in the full version you get 100 credits per turn for each colony and 2 credits for each colonist. They must have added it at the last minute to keep you from going bankrupt when you've mined every asteroid.

The Protected Environment Control, Protected Resiblock and Protected Solar Matrix have more than just a laser turret - they actually have more hit points than the non-protected forms. The Protected Storage Tower doesn't.

Nuclear missiles are especially lethal against the large four-square buildings, because they hit every square once. Your CPU is toast! I wish I had access to the source code of this game so I could find out more things like this.

A while ago someone started a Facebook group for K240. Two of the developers even showed up (Graeme Ing and Pete Daniels).

Anyone else remember this game?

[Neil79]

Yes, it was kinda the sequel to Utopia one of my all time favourite games...

However I could not understand how to play K240 at all as I did not have the original + manual

[dex]

I do! I once asked in a thread here somewhere about how to get its music to work during actual gameplay on the Amiga. There are some mods on the disk you never actually hear if I remember correctly. Now that I am thinking about it... I wonder if the original developers know a way to get ingame music in that game? Maybe it's hidden, like the music in Populous II

[Reynolds]

I liked it. It was quite buggy but great fun.

[ptyerman]

Yeah. There was also a PC remake called Fragile Allegiance released by Gremlin Interactive on CD, it ran on Dos and Windows 95. I have it here but not run it for years, will give it a try under Dosbox one of these days.

[danwood]

Yes a good game. I preferred Utopia though!

[gimbal]

Never did get to play this one. I played its predecessor Utopia for years though.

[Lord Aga]

K240 is one of my favorite games of all times Prone to sudden crashy crashy for no apparent reason, but that did not stop me. Didn't even slow me down I would just restart and play again.
Can't remember how far I got though...

[Hillsy_]

Great game! Wayyyyyyy better than Utopia, but the music was good for Utopia.

[Jonathan Drain]

The best tactic was to build asteroid engines and ram your asteroids into the enemy asteroids. 45,000 credits for the blueprints and 190,000 to build, but that's still cheaper than Mega missile (500,000 credits) and can't miss. As long as you have more asteroids than the enemy, you can win this way

Some of the aliens actually had ways to counter asteroid engines. The Ax-Zilanths can teleport their asteroids to get out of the way. And the Tylarans have asteroid engines that go faster than yours, up to speed 8.

Nuclear missiles were especially good too. Another secret feature: Asteros ore actually has a half-life. If you don't mine it, it decays on its own.

[roberthazelby]

One of my all-time favourite strategy games on the Amiga. I must have spent hours playing this.

I've given your site a plug (see yesterday's post) on the blog. Here's hoping it brings you a few more visitors:

http://amigagamer.blogspot.co.uk/

Keep up the great work. This thread and your site has brought back some happy memories.

[Predseda]

I remember playing this a lot back in 1994 from a cracked floppies. It was buggy and the game crashed after I invented ore teleporter (which is vital for the game). I gave up then. Two years ago I tried to play it again from original floppies and via WHD then, but I didn't get into again. So I used a cheat, attacked enemy with a rain of missiles, won and forgot this game forever.

[Jonathan Drain]

Thanks for the link!

One of the cracked versions crashed more often, if I remember correctly. I think this is because it was an earlier version of the game executable. If you press 'V' in-game it shows the version string. The cracked version I found online gives this version string:

K240 - VERSION 1.886, 20-5-94 13:25

But on the disks from my original UK retail copy of the game, it gives this version:

K240 - VERSION 2.000, 7-6-94 11:15

That version seems to crash less often. When I play, I use my retail copy and look up the manual protection codes on my own website

I'm wondering what the difference was. Was version 1.886 a review copy sent to magazines? There was a rumour that one of the Amiga magazines had a guy who would leak review copies to pirate groups.

[Mrs Beanbag]

I remember it. Hours of fun.

Especially since I worked out part of the format of the saved game files and wrote an AMOS program to give you as much money as you wanted (it was just stored as a longword value at a specific offset, if I remember).

[Jonathan Drain]

I noticed some interesting things about K240 while looking over the terran buildings list extracted from the game code.

Items appearing later in the list, or having a higher text string ID number for their name and description, were probably added later in development. This gives us interesting insights into how the game design changed during its development.

1. Buildings 06, 12 and 13 appear to have been deleted at one point and their slots re-used when the devs ran out of space for new buildings. 06 was Scaffold (description: "building under construction") and 12 was Engineering Section. 13's name string was re-used for the description of Living Quarters, so perhaps 13 was deleted early on.

2. The 2x2 buildings like CPU and Command Centre all appear together in the list, suggesting they were added at the same time.

3. The ship buildings Command Centre, Construction Yard and Landing Pad appear together in the list, suggesting they were added at the same time. This suggests ships were added later in development than missiles. Anti-Missile Pod actually appears very early in the building list, as does Ore Teleporter.

4. After the ship buildings comes Laser Turret (a ship defence building). Next are all of the tower versions of smaller buildings (e.g. Resiblock, Storage tower), followed by the protected versions of those buildings with a laser turret on top. These would have been easy to add since the tower buildings are mainly built out of smaller building sprites.

5. Playtesting at this point would reveal a flaw: once all asteroids are mined, your income dries up and the game is a stalemate. K240 has an undocumented feature that you gain 100CR/turn per colony and 2CR/turn per colonist. This explains the next set of buildings dealing with colonist welfare: Decontamination Filter, Medical Center, Hydroponics, Hydration Plant, and Security Center. The cost of these buildings makes it more expensive to build a large colony as an income source, something which became increasingly viable when the devs added the tower buildings allowing very dense colonies.

6. I think this also explains why Hydroponics and Hydration look alike and supply 400 units, whereas Life Support looks different and supplies 500. Life Support was added to the game before the other two, and may have originally supplied all food/air/water. The description of Living Quarters says that building provides everything necessary for life, a description which seems to have been written prior the addition of Life Support and so on.

8. Deep Bore Mine actually appears a few buildings after Mine, suggesting they weren't added at the same time, but rather the idea to have two classes of mine came later.

It seems a lot of game design was done as they went along instead of planned in advance. I guess that's how a lot of games were designed in 1994!

[gimbal]

It seems a lot of game design was done as they went along instead of planned in advance. I guess that's how a lot of games were designed in 1994!

And also still today in the case of indie games. Nowadays you even see a new trend of the "early access" - you already get to play the game long before it is finished and not only see it grow, but also be able to get suggestions you make in there too. I really like that concept, it is also more honest than the old release quick, patch later deal.

[Jonathan Drain]

Yeah, I'm excited for Planetary Annihilation. It even has asteroid engines!

[d4rk3lf]

Since my youth, and my first starting of this game, where I didn't know anything about how to play it (I had cracked copy with no manual), I was very intrigued by a vast number of options and looks (graphics are simplified, but it have that sort of old school sci fi design, that have it's own charm).

Slowly but surely, and with lot's of trials and errors, I figured out what many options meant, and how to play it, and was very excited.

Recently, I revisited this game, and was expecting to maybe become somewhat disappointed, after all this years... BUT NO! The game is still awesome to play, and with a few little changes, I think it could pass like a very playable game even by todays standards.
I think I know now 99% of the game mechanics (back then I knew much less (but still enjoyed it very much).

Right now, I am very struggling with Tylaran Empire (second medium), and had something like 6-7 unsuccessful attempts (even using, sort of cheat-ish buying asteroid engines and hurling my asteroids into them, didn't help). They are freaking strong, and once they start attacking your asteroids they don't stop until you're doomed. They defeated some of my strongest fleets that had Terminator ships, with pretty expensive equipment).
So any advice is welcome.

Personally, I think this game is heavily underrated, and it deserves fame of Civilization, Dune, Settlers... etc.

What do you guys think?
And if someone wants to give it a try, I am willing to help understand the concept of it.

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Personally, I think this game is heavily underrated

Yes, it can be because it's one of Amiga exclusive games. There is PC remake, but it's different game.

[Foxman]

What do you guys think?

I also think its one of the greatest Amiga strategy games.
I‘ve played it also hundreds of hours in the past. I loved all the things you could do in this game.

But if i want to play it today, i think i must learn many things again.
But its worth it.