Liquid War (v5.6.4) - Rules




The Liquid War concept
======================


  Liquid War is a wargame. But it is different from common wargames.

  When playing Liquid War, one has to eat one's opponent. There can be from 2
  to 6 players. There are no weapons, the only thing you have to do is to move
  a cursor in a 2-D battlefield. This cursor is followed by your army, which is
  composed by a great many little fighters. Fighters are represented by small
  colored squares. All the fighters who have the same color belong to the same
  team. One very often controls several thousands fighters at the same time.
  And when fighters from different teams meet, they eat each other, it is as
  simple as that.



How do teams react?
===================


  Teams are composed of little fighters. These fighters all act independently,
  so it can happen that one single fighters does something different from what
  all the other do.

  The main goal of these fighters is to reach the cursor you control. And to do
  that, they are in a way quite clever, for they choose the shortest way to
  reach it. Check it if you want, but it is true, they *really* choose *the*
  shortest way to reach the cursor. That is the whole point with Liquid War.

  But these fighters are not perfect, so when they choose this shortest way,
  they do as if they were alone on the battlefield. That's to say that if there
  is a fighter blocking their way, they won't have the idea to choose another
  way, which is free from fighters but would have been longer otherwise. So
  fighters can be blocked.



Who eats whom?
==============


  When two fighters from different team meet each other, they first try to
  avoid fighting, and they dodge. But if there is no way for them to move, they
  get angry and attack the guy which is blocking them. Sometimes, they attack
  each other and both loose health. But it can happen that a fighter is
  attacked by another one, which is himself not attacked at all.

  Here is an example of this behaviour: A blue fighter and a red fighter both
  want to move to their right, for that would be the shortest way to reach
  their cursor if there was nobody on the battlefield. But they are blocked by
  other fighters. If, for instance, the red fighter is on the right and the
  blue fighter on the left, it is the red fighter which will be eaten.

  When a fighter is attacked, he first looses health, that is to say that he
  gets darker. When his health reaches 0, his color changes and he becomes a
  member of the team by which he has been attacked. Therefore the number of
  fighters on the battlefield always remains the same.

  When fighters of a same team get stuck together and block each other, then
  they regenerate, that is to say that they get brighter.

  However, I think the best way for you to understand the way it works is to
  try the game...



Basic strategy
==============


  When I play Liquid War, I always try to surround my opponents, and it usually
  works.

  By the way, the computer has no strategy at all, he is a poor player, and if
  you get beaten by him, it means you have to improve yourself a lot!

  But still, the computer doesn't do one thing which I've seen many beginners
  doing: he never keeps his cursor motionless right in the middle of his own
  fighters, for this is the best way to loose.



More strategy
=============


  Here are some more tips, kindly submitted by Jan Samohyl.

  * Try to cut your opponent off walls and surround him completely with your
    troops; when trying to penetrate his forces inside a tunnel, keep your
    troops at the wall (and force them ocassionaly to attack off the wall). I
    think this is a biggest weakness of the computer AI, that it doesn't know
    this.

  * When luring your troops to outflank an enemy, always move your cursor
    through the enemy, not the other way around.

  * To penetrate very narrow tunnels, stand back for a while and let some enemy
    troops come from the tunnel to you. Then surround them, destroy, repeat.

  * I have observed that with more than 2 players (6), the game difficulty
    depends on the map in the following way: If the playing field is completely
    empty, without any holes (topologically equivalent to full circle), the
    game is the easiest, because you can just go through the middle to outflank
    your opponent. If there is a single large obstacle (ie. playfield is
    topologically equivalent to ring (the area between two nested circles)),
    the game is the most difficult, because you have to choose one direction
    for the attack, and cannot simply defend the other direction. For other
    maps, it seems to really depend on their similarity to one of these two
    extreme situations (and army size, of course, because it changes the
    relative size of obstacles). Also, if you would later add another cursor,
    this property would probably disappear (maybe then games with n+1 obstacles
    would be the hardest ones with n cursors).

  * If you want a particularly challenging computer game (at least for some
    maps), use several players, max out attack, min out defense, max out base
    health (opposite would be harder, but game then changes to the large cloud
    of black troops, so you don't see anything) and give winner an advantage.



The winner is...
================


  The clever guy who has got the greatest number of fighters in his team at the
  end of the game. Or the one who exterminates all the other teams!

