Genetic Wars Manual

Introduction

Genetic Wars is a game in which you breed soldiers to fight your enemy. Artificial life and genetic programming provide a new kind of game experience.

Users can play against the computer, against another user across a network, or two players can play on the same machine.

In the course of playing Genetic Wars, you will create genetically unique soldiers, which you can use both to fight and to breed yet more powerful and intelligent soldiers.

Playing the Game

Begin the game by pressing the "play" arrow in the control box in the upper left of the screen. Your soldiers fight on tiles which are connected into tilescapes. When you press play, you will see the tile with your team's base. Add soldiers to the tilescape by dragging them onto the team's base. Doing so creates a soldier from that design; you can add as many soldiers of that design as you have energy for. Once a soldier is in the tilescape, it is entirely under their own control (as determined by its genes)--you can't tell it what to do.

The object of the game is to capture all of the goals spread through the tilescape. To capture all of them, you'll need soldiers to go out and get them, and also soldiers to attack the enemy to prevent them from doing the same. During the course of a battle, you'll need soldiers to get food, attack the enemy, and capture goals. Use the different soldier designs to do each of these tasks.

Adding a soldier costs 1000 energy points. The base starts with enough energy for a few soldiers, but more energy must be harvested from the tilescape to create more. Some soldiers will perform this function by searching for food and returning it to the base. It's a good idea to start the game by putting food-seekers into the game. You can see how much energy a soldier has by looking at the display at the bottom of the soldier's picture. When a soldier runs out of energy, it dies.

All soldier designed are stored in genebanks. You can save these genebanks in a file and retrieve them for later games. There's no need to start from scratch each time you play Genetic Wars. You begin with a few basic soldier designs. Use these designs to fight your early battles, until you are familiar with how combat works and you know what makes a good soldier.

Combat

Soldiers attack each other with punches, shells, and suicide attacks. Punches do a lot of damage to an enemy up close. Shells do less damage but affect a larger area. Kamikaze attacks do a lot of damage over a large area, but at the cost of the soldier's life. Unlike punching and shelling, suicide attacks can damage or even kill the soldier's comrades.

Soldiers that are attacked lose energy. When they lose all their energy, they dies. Doing the attacking also subtracts some energy.

Tilescapes

Soldiers move between tiles by following links, and you can too. Click on a link to move to its destination tile. (If you can't determine where the links are on a tile, click on the "eye" button on the bottom of the tile window.) To see more than one tile at once, use the "New Tile" command in the Window menu. That way you can track the action going on in several places on the tilescape.

More on Soldier Designs

You can have many soldiers of the same design in the tilescape at any one time. All soldiers of the same design will behave the same way, but other than that they have independent existence.

All soldiers have the same inherent abilities. Soldiers that do not fire shells are still able to do so, but they choose not to.

Soldiers of a given design will behave the same way each time they are put into a world. They do not learn from experience or get better at what they do. To get better soldiers, you need to breed them.

Breeding Soldiers

Breeding soldiers means that you shuffle the genes of two or more soldier designs to get new designs. The child will have a mixture of the parent's behaviors. A new soldier design doesn't necessarily need two parents; it could have only one, it could have several.

In the course of breeding, you can also mutate genes that will be in the new design. Mutation can be a dangerous thing; you can easily end up with a soldier that's completely useless. But mutation is the only way you can come up with new behaviors that don't come from parent designs. To use mutation, you have to designate yourself an Intermediate or Advanced player in the Preferences dialog box.

Create new soldier designs in the Laboratory window. Choose one or more parents, choose a picture for the new design, and give it a name. The new soldier design will appear in the current genebank.

Even without mutation, breeding doesn't always work out they way you expect. Let's say you are trying to design a food seeker that commits suicide when the enemy gets too close, going out with a blaze of glory. To do so you would select a design that seeks food and a design that commits suicide and breed them. Some of the resulting children will have one behavior and not the other, but if you breed enough children there will be one that has both. You'll probably want to test out new designs before taking them into combat. Use the Proving Grounds tilescape to do this.

Hint: To make testing new soldier designs easier, use Two Player Experimental mode by checking the options in the "Local Setup" dialog box.

Genebanks

Once you have a good design, be sure to save it in a genebank. A design doesn't have to stay in one genebank; you can move it to another one by dragging it there, or copy it by dragging it to a new genebank while holding down the Option key.

Genetic Wars Genetics

Soldier have genes for deciding what they want to do. They examine their surroundings and decide on courses of action. One soldier may have a gene that makes it attack when threatened, another my have a gene that makes it seek out food when it's hungry.

All soldiers in Genetic Wars are haploid, meaning they have only one copy of each gene. (People and most other animals have two copies of most of their genes.) When you cross designs, the offspring gets about the same number of genes from each of its parents. You won't know which genes it got from what parent until you try out the new soldiers that result.

Notebook

Use the notebook to see information about a soldier design. Each design has a set of statistics compiled about the battle performance of soldiers make from it. This information is very important for making breeding decisions. You can see how a lineage develops by examining a design's parents and children. Double-click on a parent or child design to view its page in the notebook. Put in your own comments about design for your or other's reference.

Shadowing

If you want to examine the behavior of one particular soldier, use the shadow option. In a tile window, command-click on a soldier. Shadow follows the soldier as it moves from tile to tile; you don't have to track it manually. To turn off shadowing, click on the silhouette on the bottom of the tile. You can shadow your own or enemy soldiers.

Two-player Games

Two people can play each other on the same computer. To do so, designate a two-player game in preferences, and open both players' genebanks. Each player drags soldiers to his own base.

An easier way to play a two player game is across a network. When you play across a network, one player hosts and the other joins. The host does more computing work, so the host should be the faster machine. To connect two machines, the host should first be waiting, then the joining machine can make the connection. Only the host can control the speed of the game. You can connect using either Appletalk or Internet protocols, but both players must use the same protocol.

Note: Playing network games requires the presence of Open Transport system software.

Shortcut Keys

Tile window
Option-click on link	Bring up destination tile in a new tile window.
Command-click on soldier	Shadow a soldier.
Shift-click on soldier	Open the Notebook with that soldier's design.

Bank window
Option-click when dragging	Move instead of copy a soldier design.

Status window
Option-click in a team information box	Go to that team's base.
Drag a soldier onto the team name	Same as dragging on the team's base.

Startup
Shift key	Open the Proving Grounds in two-player experimental mode.

Where to go from here

Advanced players will want to create their own tilescapes with the Tiler. Then you have total control over soldier and their surroundings.

As you play Genetic Wars, you will build up a set of capable soldier designs. You can match them up against other people's designs, or play the computer at higher difficulties. The better you breed your soldiers, the stronger your armies will be.

Contents copyright 1997 Ryan Koopmans. All Rights Reserved.

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