TripleA/Getting Started

What is TripleA

TripleA is a turn-based strategy game engine. TripleA games involve various scenarios between world powers depicted on maps of varying size and complexity. Many maps for individual games are historical, being primarily based on relative strength and position of world powers leading up to the Second World War. Some maps are more fantasy oriented or based on non historical scenarios.

TripleA comes with multiple maps and over 100 more maps can be downloaded from the user community. TripleA supports single player vs AI, hot-seat, Play by Email, and a hosted online lobby. TripleA is Free Software, and is released under the GPL.

How to Install TripleA

GitHub is the host location for the TripleA project and TripleA can be downloaded here.

Version 1.3 and later comes with the following maps:

Big World:1942 (includes 2 scenarios which are mostly the same scenario but use v2 and v3 rules respectively)
Great War
Capture the Flag
Minimap
New World Order
Pact of Steel
Napoleonic Empires
Middle Earth

The Interface

The main menu for Triple A is the first window seen when the program is initiated. In the top left hand corner, TripleA displays the details of the currently loaded game. These include: Game Name; Game Version; Game Round; and File Name of the current game.

Choose Game

This button allows the player to change the existing game (displayed next to Game Name) to another game. This button launches a second window displaying the games available in the left column, along with a brief description of each. Select the desired game by clicking with the left mouse key and hitting OK. Click Cancel to close the window without making any changes to the current game.

Load Saved Game

Hit the Load Saved Game button to return to a previously saved game. Loading a saved game returns a game's territories, forces, turn round, and technologies to the in game saved position. NOTE: Loading a previously saved game does not retain who previously controlled each world power. Selections on who controls each world power must again be made once a game in initiated. This is true both as to human opponents and as to AI opponents.

Saved games typically have the filename extension ".tsvg". Player designated saves can be made using any name that includes the .tsvg filename extension.

TripleA has an automatic autosave and additionally separately saves for each even and odd numbered turn. Respectively, these are named: autosave.tsvg; autosave_round_even.tsvg; autosave_round_odd.tsvg.

Battle Calculator

The Battle Calculator is used to calculate probability of winning a battle, along with the average result. There are three ways of starting the Battle Calculator:

Pressing Ctrl-B while hovering over a territory
Clicking the button in the territory tab
Opening the calculator from the menu bar

Stats

On the right of the screen, click on word "Stats". Below you will find a table with current states of all countries: PUs, Production, Number of units, Total Unit Value, Victory Conditions( that is an automatic way of finding the winning side: it counts the territories marked by stars (that are considered strategically important) ocupied by that country)

History Battle casualty

At any time you can enter into history mode by going to the top manu "Game"-> "Show history". Game history will be shown on the left. You can click on the "+" on the left of the "Combat" phase; double-click on a particular combat below, than on the "Battle casualty summary" below. On the left side of the screen select "History" if it's not already selected. On the left of the screen you should see the value of the battle casualty. That is the sum of the PU values of defending units minus the sum of the PU values of attacking units.

Edit mode

Edit mode is used to make live changes to the current game, such as changing the owner of a territory or adding/removing units from the map. To get to edit mode, from the top menu select Game -> Enable Edit Mode. Than use the menu on the right of the screen to make the edits("edit" submenu on the right has to be selected).

Playing against the Artificial Intelligence (AI)

When starting a game, (see Starting your first game chapter) before clicking Play you can change the player of any country. On the right of any country, the player is written. "Human" by default. Click on it, and you can select from three levels of AIs.

E.Z. Fodder (AI) is the weakest AI.
Moore N. Able (AI) is the best AI.
Dynamix (AI) is a Land-Only AI that is still in Beta development (it will not move any ships). It can also be customized to "cheat".

Customizing the Dynamix AI

Start a game with a Dynamix AI. After starting the game, from the top menu click on Game->Change Dynamix AI Settings. On the top of the new window you can see "AI Cheating". Just select the way you want to allow Dynamix AI to cheat. However, Dynamix AI will not cheat at every turn.