Communication
The comm window is an important part of Shores of Hazeron and is accesed by pressing F3 at any time while playing. The comm window is split up into several tabs that represent different chat channels within the game. As well as having the necessary buttons to facilitate a wide range of actions from buying items to ordering fleet movements.
Main Comm channels
Trade - this channel is used to query players, cities, and space stations on items they might have for sale. You are only able to query for items from cities when you are standing on a Cantina, a Grocery, Retail Store, a Broker. Only the broker in a city is able to sell you all of a cities items. The others are a bit more specific in what they sell.
Voice - this channel displays chat from players nearby using the voice channel as well as the starting npc.
Hail - this channel is the main means of chatting between players in game.
Intercom - when on a ship or spacestation the intercom can be used to issue orders quickly and efficiently
Friend - This channel displays informtion about attacks on your empire and it's allies/friends
Log - the log channel displays data relating to attacks made by and against the player.
Fleet - the fleet channel is used to issue orders to all ships under your control.
Comm buttons
Range - This is a set of 5 options used to determine how far you want to broadcast any message you send out. It can be set to close range, hail range, system range, sector range or galaxy range. The majority of actions will only require you to be in the system / sector range. However, talking to other players is usually done galaxy wide. Unless you are only wanting to talk to players in your area.
Hail - causes all cities / spacecraft within the area of effect to open up a new tab in your comm window.
Spacecraft Mission Order - allows you to give commands to ships that access your current channel. This should mainly be used on the fleet / intercom channel and for the channels of individual ships unless you want all the ships in the area to do the same thing. You are only able to add multiple orders if there is an officer on board. If not then commands should be issued as a new order to ensure that they are done.
Request Transporter Beam - requests a transport beam from players / ships in the current channel. Again mainly used on the fleet channel and individual ship channels to request a teleport from an npc
The following commands are only usable in the trade channel. Although you will broadcast the commands on other channels if you're not careful, they will not have any effect.
Inventory of City - Causes all cities in range to open a new tab displaying their inventory. Unless they already have a tab open in which case it will be displayed there.
Request Repairs - similar to trading but you will be trading for repair of your ship. Subsidised ships do not have to pay for this privilege
Load Crew, Passengers or Troops - allows you to fill up empty berths on your ship from the planet you are landed on, requires a landing square
Unload Crew, passengers or Troops - the reverse of the above.
Note: The further away a sender is, the intensity of the messages they send gets dimmer.
Note 2: Using the / key when the cursor is controlling the view of the character results in the brightness of the text at the top left of the screen being changed. This cycles between 4 modes, invisible, dim, low brightness, and bright.
Forming a Fleet within a Fleet
Once you've acquired sufficient officers, you may wish to start communicating with specific groups of ships. Allowing them to act with more group cohesion while avoiding messing up your trade ships orders. This involves forcing ships to share channels so that orders broadcasted will be accepted by all the ships listening.
The simplest way to go about this is to simply right click on any message received from a ship then open a new channel (named whatever you like) The ship will now be listening to that channel. You can repeat this process to add as many ships as you have command over. Making sure to specify the same channel name for each ship that you add. The downside of this method is that the ships will eventually stop listening to the custom channel. Requiring you to go through this setup every time you log on or whenever the custom channel is silent for extended periods.
A more longterm method is to give ships the same name. Ships with the same name will respond in and listen to the same channel that's opened from a fleet hail. This can lead to some confusion when your trying to communicate with individual ships within a channel. However, you can again right click any individual reply to open a direct line of communication to the entities of your choosing.