Player's Guide

Planet M.U.L.E. presents you the classic multiplayer economic strategy game for 4 players.

In M.U.L.E. you are colonizing an alien planet called Irata and gathering its resources to make money and be prosperous. Players build factories to produce goods which later can be sold to make a profit. The player which has the largest profit at the end of the game is the winner.
A. Before you start

There are some things you need to do before you play your first game of M.U.L.E.:
Download the latest client.
Register a new Player Account here.
Login to your account and select a species in your profile.
After you successfully done all the steps above, you can start the client, login and set up a new match.
I. Controls

The game is by default played with the Arrow Keys and Spacebar.

The Arrow Keys moves your avatar while Spacebar performs actions.

When the games says "Press Button" it referes to Spacebar.

You can use the Enter key to chat with the other players.
II. Gameplay

There are two game modes: Tournament and Training.

Training mode has more options and allow more computer players. Also it doesn't affect your tournament score.

Each tournament game has 12 rounds and lasts about 60-90 minutes.

Each round has 5 phases:
Land Grant
Development
Production
Auction
Summary
III. Phases

1. Land Grant

At the start of each round players are granted a plot of land. A marker moves from left to right over the map and when the land you want is selected you should press your button.

If someone else pressed their button faster on the same land you must wait and choose another plot.

The difference between plots is explained under section 3. Production.



Land Auction


Each turn the store might put up one or more lands for auction.

All players are buyers in these auctions and get to place a bid for the plot. Just move your character up until you reach the price you're willing to pay. The player with the highest bid gets the plot. If no player bids over the starting price then nobody gets the plot.

Plots put on sale by players the previous round will also appear here.
2. Development

After the land grant all players take turns to develop their plots. The player with the lowest score goes first and the leading player is last.

There's a chance that a random event occurs before the development. These events can either be good, and give you resources, food or even a plot of land, or bad, and waste your money and resources. If you're in the lead you can expect bad events while you get good events if you're last.

All players start development in the city. The first thing to do is to buy a robot M.U.L.E. for installation on the plot you claimed.

To install a new M.U.L.E. you walk to the corral in the bottom right corner of the city. Simply step into the corral and a M.U.L.E. will follow you on the way out. You must then decide which production packages you want to outfit the M.U.L.E. with. The available goods to produce are:

Food
Energy
Smithore
Crystite

To do this walk into a package shop with your M.U.L.E. and it gets outfitted with the corresponding package. For beginners it's recommended to start with a Food package.

With your equipped M.U.L.E. you exit the city and walk to one of your plots. Then press your button to install the M.U.L.E. on the plot.

You can at any time walk to a plot and pick up one of your existing M.U.L.E.s and move it to another plot or even sell it back to the corral for it's market value.

Personal Timer

Your development timer is located on the right of your screen.

How much time each player has during development depends on the Food units he has available at the start of the round. At least 3 Food units will guarantee a decent amount of time, while less Food results in being short of time to do much. Your turn ends immediately if the time runs out.

During the first few rounds it is of much importance to ensure to have enough Food available to maximize potential colonization efforts later in the game.

Assay Store

Walk into the bottom left store to buy an assay robot. This gives you the ability to analyze the amount of Crystite in one plot. You simply walk to any plot on the map and press your button. Then, at the right corner of the plot, a sign shows you the amount of Crystite found.

If the signs shows an X, no Crystite can be found there, otherwise the number of diamonds tell you the base production of that plot.

If a Meteorite Strike occurs the affected plot will immediately gain a 4 Crystite base production.

Land Store

Walk into the store to enable the selling mode. Then walk out to any of your own plots and press your button to sell it. It may be wise to move your M.U.L.E. to another plot or refunding it at the corral after selling the plot.

Sold plots show up in the land auction later where players can bid for them.

Pub

When you're done with your actions and have time left you should go to the pub in the city and gamble. In an ironic twist, everyone who visits the pub for some gambling always wins. The amount that you win is proportional the amount of time you have remaining.
3. Production

During this phase the M.U.L.E.s on the plots begin to produce goods. How much each plot produces is based on four factors.

Terrain Type

The base production from a certain factory depends primary on the plot it's installed on. There are six types of plots which give the basic output from the table below.

Food
Energy
Smithore
Crystite
Plain 2 3 1 Variable
River
4 2 1
Variable
Desert
0
4
1
Variable
1 Mountain 1 1 2 Variable
2 Mountains 1 1 3 Variable
3 Mountains
1 1 4 Variable

The Crystite amount varies with underground contours. There are always 3 plots which each has a base production of 3 units. These centers are surrounded by plots with a base production of 2 and 1.

Energy Available

Each factory other than the solar collectors need 1 Energy unit to function. If you don't have enough Energy the under-powered factories will produce nothing at all.

Bonus Factors

Economics of scale. If two factories of the same kind are adjacent they both produce one more unit.

Learning curve theory. For each three factories of the same kind all your factories of that kind produce one more unit.

These bonuses don't apply to Crystite factories.

Random Variation

Each factory's output varies naturally between -3 and +3. This means that factories with low base production sometimes produce no units.

Colony Events

A global colony event happens before or after each production. These can be either good or bad. If they're bad, they will always strike the leading player hardest.
4. Auction

After the production, players get to sell or buy goods in the auctions.

There are four auctions, one for each type of good.

At the beginning of each auction the goods from the production are collected and added to your sum. Food and Energy spoil if you keep too much between rounds. Food more so than Energy.

An auction is automatically skipped if there are no goods available for trade by neither players, nor the store.

Before an auction starts, each player decides if he or she wants to be buying or selling goods. Note that you only have a limited time to choose.

When the auction starts you move your character up or down to increase or decrease the buy or sell bid.

If two players meet at the same price, the seller begins to transfer items for that price to the buyer until either the seller has run dry, the buyer runs out of money or anyone retreats from the line.

Notice that during movement or trading, the timer is slowed. When the timer bar is empty the auction is over.

Below your player is a monitor which shows your surplus or shortage. If it's negative you have less units than needed of that resource. If it's positive you can sell units and still have enough for your usage next round. Typically a player would sell or buy until the value becomes zero.

Prices

The price of goods varies from round to round with supply and demand. If the supply is larger than the demand the price goes up, or the other way around, if the supply is smaller the price goes down.

The supply of Food is the number of units possessed by all players and the store. The demand is the number of units that will be eaten by all players in the following round. In the table below you can see the Food needed in every round.

Round Food
1 3
2 3
3 3
4 3
5 4
6 4
7 4
8 4
9 5
10 5
11 5
12 5

For example if all four players and the store has a total of 16 Food at round 8, the price will rise, since the next round requires a total of 20 Food.

The supply of Energy is the number of units possessed by all players and the store. The demand is the number of units that will be used by all factories in the next round, plus the number of players, because we expect all players to build at least one more factory the next round.

The price of Smithore is tied to the number of M.U.L.E.s. Smithore is used by the store at the end of each round to build M.U.L.E.s. The supply is thus the number of M.U.L.E.s available in the store. The demand is the number of unexploited player plots. Those which need a mule to start production. Here we also add the number of players since we expect all players to get at least one other plot and M.U.L.E. the next round.

Since the store needs Smithore to build M.U.L.E.s, the corral will only be replenished if players sell Smithore to the store.

Crystite is sold to off-world prices. This means that there is no way to affect the price. All we know is that it's valuable but varies randomly.
5. Summary

This phase shows the actual ranking, which is calculated by the total value of your assets and money. The score of your assets is the current market value of all the goods you possess together with the value of all your factories.

The Colony Total shown at the bottom is the sum of all player's scores. This is the basis for the overall colony ranking at the end of the game. The game ends and presents a winner in the summary of the last round.

The player rank is updated only after the summary where the player with the most points takes the lead. It can be a good strategy to avoid being first at the beginning of the game. It decreases the risk of suffering bad events.

IV. Final Word

This is all you need to know to play Planet M.U.L.E. If you have any questions please make a post in our forum.

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