New PBEM Game: A.I. Wars (The Insect Mind) From: John Reder <John.Reder@DaytonOH.ncr.com> Date: Tue, 08 Apr 1997 00:00:00 +0000 Are you worthy? Do you have the GUTS to pit your logic against others ?!? If so read on...! A.I. Wars (The Insect Mind) allows you to develop the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) of a insect like mechanized unit. Once you have developed your A.I. to the point that you think it can hold it's own in battle you can then plop it into a battle simulation and see if it can survive! It's your unit against up to 500 others! A battle simulation supports 5 or 10 units and a tournament supports 500! A.I. Wars uses an easy to learn but hard to master A.I. command language that allows you to script out every possible decision for your unit. The A.I. files that you create can be password protected and saved as encrypted ASCII text files. This makes it easy to trade your A.I. files with other players via E-Mail, WWW, FTP, BBS etc... This game forces your logic skills to the limit and it's a neat way to develop programming skills even for people who've never programmed before! A.I. Wars comes with several battle arena's and includes a map editor for limitless battle possibilities! I hope your unit is smart enough to navigate it's way around almost any possibility! The A.I. Units come fully loaded with scanners, shields, sensors, energy cells, friend or foe beacons, mines, fuel, ammo, missiles and even a self distruct mechanism for those really sticky situations! We encourage tournaments using A.I. Wars and have a special page setup to allow users to post their A.I. files. E-Mail your completed A.I. files to me at John.Reder@DaytonOH.ncr.com and I will post them on this page so other A.I. Warriors can test their skills against them. You are free to dedicate your own web pages to this program if you wish. If you do please lets us know the URL so we can add a link to your page from our Official A.I. Wars page. Please feel free to send any comments or concerns to this e-mail address also. Remember: "Smart bugs never die!" & "May your A.I. Bugs be without A.I. bugs!" Official A.I. Wars Home Page: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/John_Reder/ai.htm ------ THIS JUST IN: (A.I. Wars in the News) A.I. Wars at BattleGroup Boston collecting Cybugs for Havoc XIV New England Regional tournament! Subject: Re: A.I. Wars - NEW: Insect Central From: "Peter Mancini" <pmancini@lynx.neu.edu> Date: 1997/04/02 Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic [More Headers] I down loaded this yesterday as I was snowed in and I can't think of a better way to spend 5 hours. This game is really good. It reminded me of the old Origin game OMEGA or that Microprose robot game. I had my first program written within 15 minutes of printing the language docs, and defeated my first opponent within an hour. Very very cool game. I plan on putting up a site on my club's web page to support it with designs we come up with. About the game, as I've experienced it so far: Language is easy with a couple of quirks to watch out for. The combat options are to either shoot the main gun (range, 5 grid points), launch the missile (no range limitation, but slow and expensive in terms of resources), or zap your local vicinity. All robots are the same, so there aren't the hull/weapons/gadgets mods you could do in a game like OMEGA, which in my mind is fine because its a battle of wits when all other things are equal. You can also text-encode (even password protect) your designs and send them via email or post them on your web site. This alone I think will help make this game very popular. A lot of people aren't up to the challenge of writing code and then sitting back waiting to see how their robot fairs, so I have doubts this will become as widespread as say DOOM, but it has all of the elements to become the most popular Program-Your-Own-Robot game out there. More so than C-Robots and Bolo IMHO. --Pete BattleGroup Boston Miniatures Wargaming Club http://lynx.neu.edu/home/httpd/b/bgb/bgb1.htm ------- American Computing Magazine A.I. Wars Review! Graded "A+" Partial American Computing Magazine A.I. Wars Review "Smart Bugs Never Die" is the motto of one of the most exciting games this geek has seen since the Castle Smurfenstein hack of the the early 80's. When I say "exciting" I don't mean "Quake-type exciting", I mean "this-could-be-important exciting." The game, entitled "AI Wars: The Insect Mind" involves programming, play testing, and strategy. As a basic programming tool, or foray into artificial intelligence, this game has intellectual exercise written all over it. Your task is simple, yet compelling. Develop an insect using the included AI language such that your insect will survive. Sounds simple, eh? Only if you do it wrong. My first instinct was do develop a simple set of instructions with absolutely no intelligence but lots of strategy. When I pitted it one on one in an open field against other insects it did quite well. However, when placed in on of the many included terrains it faired worse. When pitted it against the included missions (multiple oppenents on increasingly challeging terrains), it got the crap blown out of it. Oh yes, this game has action in the form of mines, missiles, blasts, and energy discharges. A self-destruct mechanism is included as well for the Pyrric-minded among us. Soon I began to develop intelligent insects and the result, which I call Predator, will soon be ready for prime time. -J. Scott Bushey Editor, American Computing Magazine American Computing Magazine now has an A.I. Wars area named INSECT CENTRAL check it out! INSECT CENTRAL http://www.mindspring.com/~ozzyfudd/insect.htm John A. Reder President, SumWare Software http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/John_Reder Check out our latest game: A.I. Wars (the Insect Mind) "Smart bugs never die." Up