What is it? The Stars! AutoHost Client is an application to make interacting with the AutoHost website and Stars! a little easier. Easier? Than AutoHost? Yup. See the feature list below. AHClient 2.0's More Delicious Features: new and improved display - shows everyone's status Easier to setup - you still have to use / instead of \ for directory separators, but the rest is much easier Thanks to Ron's generousity, the polling is faster and much more complete The feedback when you upload, download, and screw up is much better Last, and definitely best, fleet analyzing! The client now has built in analysis tools to get fantastic amounts of information out of those pesky .F files. Included are: Lists of all cloaked fleets, total visible ship counts by type and owner, a listing of the top 20 or so war fleets, a listing of the top 20 or so bomber fleets. (Since these analyses are based on the f-files, the results shown are only for those fleets you can actually see. This is a double-edged sword. If you have public player scores, you can tell how much is hiding. If you don't have public player scores, while you can judge the local strength of an enemy (or ally), you won't konw their full strength and may assume an enemy has less than he does. WARNING If you used more than one f-file to generate these reports, some fleets may be double counted. This occurs when a fleet is known by two different names in the two or more f-files. For instance, if you've named your fleet \Killer 1\, an ally's f-file will not reflect this naming and there is no way to reliably make the connection between the two f-files. In these cases, I have taken the easy way out by including the fleet count twice and warning you.) As Good As Ever Features: one click turn downloads one click turn uploads (mulitple x-files per game!) launches Stars! turns with one mouse click checks game status every 10 minutes creates .FXX and .PXX files for all files downloaded creates backups of every m-file downloaded Instructions: Install Java 1.4 JRE (or the SDK, but that's a lot bigger) (you can get this from Sun here). Put the jar file in the same directory as your stars.exe file. On Windows double click on the jar file. Make sure your path to stars.exe is correct. Fill in the game parameters You should be ready. If you are behind a proxy there is no automatic installation step for that. Just follow the instructions above then go to the options pane and add your proxy host and port. To do: Check status of x-file more often Check to see if x-file is just a save or a save and submit. Currently AHC assumes all x-files are submits. Variable time to check AH Thanks to Michael Auwers, Jeff McBride, and especially Ron Miller. Without their help, this would not have been possible.