The Day of Sagittarius III
From SOS団 Wiki
The Day of Sagittarius III is a computer game that appears in The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi.
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[edit] Role
The Day of Sagittarius III makes its appearance in "The Day of Sagittarius." The Computer Research Society president, in an effort to recover the computer system that Haruhi took from him, challenges the SOS Brigade to a round of the game.
Because the computer research society programmed the game, they were able to manipulate a feature to their advantage during the match. This was foiled by Yuki, however, and the SOS Brigade ends up winning.
[edit] Game
After the game's appearance on the series, programmers have attempted to recreate it in reality.
The Day of Sagittarius III - Visual Basic version
The Day of Sagittarius III - Flash version
The Day of Sagittarius III - Official website and game
[edit] Gameplay
[edit] Summary
The Day of Sagittarius III is a multiplayer real-time strategy game involving warring fleets of spaceships. Each player controls a single fleet of 15,000 ships in a region of space, and the objective is for your team to destroy all of the enemy fleets, or just the enemy commander's fleet - the fleet belonging to the enemy team's leader.
[edit] Players
The total number of player possibilities in the game is not specified, but it is known that up to ten players can play in a 5v5 match, and that a team of 5 players can play against a team of an unknown number of AI-controlled fleets. During their five days of practice, the SOS-Dan only succeeded in beating the AI once, due to the efforts of Yuki Nagato.
[edit] Victory Conditions
A team wins if the fleet belonging to the commander of the opposing team is destroyed. Presumably a team also wins if the opposing team surrenders.
[edit] Game Space
The game takes place in a two-dimensional playing field of space. In the Anime, the space is empty apart from the warring fleets. In the novel, there are stellar bodies such as suns, planets, and asteroids that fleets must navigate around and can hide behind. Fleets are displayed in the map as an isosceles triangle shape with smaller triangles at the corners containing the player's name. The number of ships within the fleet is written just below the shape. The team leader's fleet also has a crown symbol at the top point. A micromanagement fleet triangle is smaller, without the smaller triangles at the corners and containing a number from 1 to 20 to indicate the fleet number.
[edit] Fog of War
As is typical for many RTS games, Day of Sagittarius uses a 'Fog of War' - players can only see the space around their own fleets. To expand their fields of vision, players can send scouting units out around their fleets. The field of vision is shown as a light coloured circle on the darker background.
The visible area around a player's fleet can be seen by all of the players on the team.
[edit] Fleet Attributes
Seen only in the novel, at the start of the match each player has 100 points they can use to increase the speed, attack power, and defence power of their fleet. Players can divide the points up between these three attributes as they see fit. A fleet with higher speed is suited to hit-and-run tactics, for instance.
[edit] Combat
A fleet can fire at an enemy fleet if it is within range and within the player's field of vision. Exchanges of fire are displayed in the game as lines of moving arrows connecting the fleets - arrows moving from fleet A to fleet B indicate that fleet A is firing at fleet B. During exchanges of fire, the number of ships in the fleet decreases as the fleet takes fire. Presumably as a fleet takes losses, its firepower decreases and the damage done to the enemy is lower.
According to the game interface as seen in the Anime, fleets are armed with lasers and torpedoes. While fleets were seen firing in one direction while heading in another, some scenes indicate that fleets need to be facing their target to fire (as seen when the Kyon fleet needed to rotate 90 degrees to starboard to fire on an attacking fleet), and that a ship's heaviest weapons are fixed forward (as seen when Nagato used her ship's main gun to annihilate the Computer Research Society president's last ship).
[edit] Supply Fleets
In the Novel, it is mentioned that each fleet is accompanied by a small number of supply ships, though it is never specified in what way fleets need resupplying (ammunition, fuel, etc.). In the SOS-Dan's game against the Computer Research Society, all of the supply ships were given to Asahina.
While the notion of resupply ships is never mentioned in the Anime, some scenes at the beginning of the episode show small ships bearing the colour scheme of Asahina's fleet supplying what looks like large torpedos to the Kyon fleet's battleships.
[edit] Micromanagement
An often-unused feature, the game allows the player to split their fleet of 15,000 ships into 20 separately-controllable fleets of 750. Controlling so many fleets at once is considered impossible. However, Nagato used this to great effect by using her 20 fleets to scout large portions of the map - a technique known as 'Micro-Scouting'. This afforded the SOS-Dan team the advantage necessary to turn the tide after she deactivated the Computer Research Society's Fog of War cheat (see Known Hacks/Cheats).
Using multiple fleets also allows a single player to surround an enemy player fleet using their multiple fleets, and also allows a player to attack a single fleet from multiple directions. Nagato used this to surround and corner the Computer Research Society president's fleet near the end of the game.
[edit] Known Hacks/Cheats
The Computer Research Society expoited two cheats during their game against the SOS-Dan. In both the Anime and the Novel, the Computer Research Society played with the Fog of War turned off - whereas the SOS-Dan could only see the area immediately around their fleets, the Computer Research Society could see the whole map. This cheat was manually disabled by Nagato while the game was running in order to level the playing field.
While working on cracking the above cheat, Nagato was able to open a second map window showing the oppsing team's view of the map.
In the Novel, the Computer Research Society were also able to teleport their fleets around the map at will. This was not seen in the Anime.
