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Cities vary greatly in their defences a few cities are almost undefended (just minefields), a few cities are very very intensely defended (e.g. Any mobile defences (Hunters, droids, etc.) are renewed when the player leaves a city so cities are never fully cleared. buildings) which are destroyed are permanently destroyed. They can be repaired at any supply centre.ДЄny static defences (e.g. The skimmer also has a shield although its power is limited and if the shield is badly depleted or exhausted, the skimmer will take damage and some of its systems will fail. To defend itself against these, the skimmer is armed with lasers, missiles, and AMMs (to destroy missiles fired by robot Hunters). These consist of laser towers, Fortresses (which are essentially better-armoured Towers), Hunter ships (of which there are three types: Mark I, Mark II and Mark III), and slowly moving mines.

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The cities of Tau Ceti III are extremely hostile places as they are full of robot defences. These days are much shorter than Earth's consisting of one spin of the planet per hour with sixteen 'spins' to a Centaurian day. As well as displaying these 3D graphics, Cooke's game engine renders them with simple shadows in order to simulate the day and night cycle of Tau Ceti III. The gameworld is displayed in a 3D view from the skimmer. This also allowed the player to jump to non-existent cities off the map. This can be used as an advantageous way of returning quickly to the center of the map, without traveling back through every city. When taking the long trip between cities, a bug in the Amstrad CPC version meant players stayed in the same city when next using a jump pad. The cities themselves can be travelled to by means of a 'jump pad' which makes the long trips between them much quicker. The player's skimmer can dock with some of these buildings and find parts needed to help shut down the central reactor as well as refuel and find vital information. The planet Tau Ceti III consists of several cities which themselves consist of clusters of buildings with their defensive laser towers and patrolling robot Hunter ships.

The only chance, it was decided, of successfully stopping the defence systems without destroying the cities already there is to send a single pilot in an armoured Gal-Corp skimmer to the planet's surface with the task of shutting down the central reactor in Tau Ceti III's capital, Centralis. Experts decided that the planet's robots were running amok as a result of the meteorite impact. A mission sent to Tau Ceti III in 2164 landed on the planet but broadcast a mayday message followed by silence. While several of these colonies have been successfully re-inhabited, the colony on the planet Tau Ceti III (orbiting the star Tau Ceti) has been uncontactable since a meteor smashed into the planet.

Humanity has spread out and colonised nearby star systems but a plague in 2150 led to the colonies being abandoned and left to their automated robotic maintenance systems. Д¬ooke was also inspired when writing Tau Ceti by the works of the science-fiction writer Larry Niven and the space-simulator Elite. I know a bit about astronomy, so I looked around for a likely location - because the way the routine works meant it couldn't be in space you couldn't have the sun above because the line-draw routine wouldn't work, it would have to be on the surface of a planet.ДЄnd I thought 'Right, it can't be Earth because it looks a bit barren for Earth, it's got to be another planet.' So I looked round for nearby stars that might be inhabited and Tau Ceti had a nice-sounding name. Having created the basics of a game engine, Cooke had to decide on a scenario for his new game:

I just went away and played with that for quite a long while and got it so that I had the sun in the sky and the shadow in the right place. I finally twigged that they must have used a table of line widths, and I thought about it a bit, then realised I could split it three quarters and a quarter, and then it would look like a shadow. It obviously couldn't be a sprite because they didn't have enough memory to have that many sprites. for a long while it had puzzled me how on earth they did the spheres.

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The origins of Tau Ceti and its game engine came from Cooke attempting to work out how the spheres in the game Gyron, released by Firebird Software for the ZX Spectrum in 1985, had been created: