Before you write to me with suggestions for the next version of Bolo, please read these frequently asked questions files, and read the "Bolo.futureplans" file to see if your suggestion is already on the list.
This file deals with frequently asked questions about gameplay issues in Bolo.
• "Why is there so little penalty for dying, and why do you have unlimited lives?"
I don't want Bolo to be boring for beginners. Remember when you played "Monopoly"? The first player to get knocked out of the game spends an awfully long time sitting around, bored, waiting for the other players to finish the game. I don't want Bolo to be like that. Everyone should be able to have fun playing, good or bad. Whether or not you win is another question...
• "So why should I care about getting killed?"
You may be able to do a suicide attack on a pillbox and then pick it up with your next tank when you are playing on your own, but in a crowded game the pillbox will be gone by the time you get back to it.
• "Alliances don't work."
They do. RTFM. Here is how:
1. Select a person whose alliance you would like to join on the "Players" menu and select "Request Alliance" on the "Bolo" menu.
2. If agreeable, that person should then select your name on their "Players" menu and then select "Request Alliance" or "Invite New Allies".
If you are in an alliance, the menu choices are "Invite New Allies" and "Leave Alliance". If you are not, then the menu choices are "Request Alliance" and "Cancel Request".
Take care that you have the correct players selected on the "Players" menu when requesting/inviting.
If you are already in an alliance, you must select “Leave Alliance” first before you can join a new one.
• "Why don't pillboxes shoot each other?"
Can you imagine how dull that would be? Two hostile pillboxes would simply fire at each other at maximum rate and wipe each other out in under a second. All the skill, strategy and tactics would disappear from the game, and the sole decider of who won any confrontation would be whoever had the most pillboxes.
• "Why don't pillboxes shoot at enemy men?"
Pillboxes don't shoot men because they shoot far too well. If they shot at your man, he would be dead, every time.
• "So how am I supposed to stop enemy men putting down hostile pillboxes in the middle of my base?"
Little Green Men aren't very bright. They tend to run in straight lines. Design the entrance to your fortress so that a man can't find his way inside.
• "Why can't I steer the man with the keyboard, to guide him around obstacles?"
Because you would then be able to send the man into places which he couldn't reach before. That would invalidate the defense described above, which would mean that there would have to be some other way to prevent hostile men from getting inside a fortress. End result: I do loads of work, the Bolo program gets bigger, you have to learn lots of new keys to operate the new features in the game, and your man still cannot get inside a well defended fortress. What is the benefit?
• "Why did the hostile pillbox I just repaired attack me?"
Because it is hostile. Capture it by picking it up with your tank before you repair it. The only time you might want to repair a hostile pillbox is if it fighting one of your enemies, and you want to give it some help, but that won't make it loyal to you.
• "When ever I die and get a new tank, I get a 'random' amount of ammo. Why?"
It is not random. The ammo you get is determined by the game type selected by the person who started the game.
• "Why does my tank, when it blows up, sometimes make a huge explosion and sometimes just a tiny one?"
Come on, guess! What do you think influences the size of the explosion? The amount of explosive material you are carrying perhaps?
• "I found a bug. The screen faded out even though I hadn't been killed."
If you are viewing from a pillbox when it is destroyed, then you lose the picture like when your tank is destroyed. Switch to another pillbox, or return to tank view.
• "When I shoot and kill an enemy refuelling base, it doesn't change colour."
That is correct. You can wipe out its defenses by shooting it (and its status indicator on the right of the screen changes to a cross to indicate that it is dead) but it won't change ownership until you drive over it.
• "OK. I drove over the base to capture it, but the status indicator still says it's dead."
That is correct. The refuelling base status will not change from "dead" to "operative" until the base has regained enough strength to defend itself.
• "Who gets to see mines I lay?"
1. All allies see all mines you lay. (This means mines layed while allied, not mines you layed before the alliance was formed, or mines you lay after the alliance is over.)
2. Enemies never see your mines, with one exception: If you drop a mine out of the back of the tank, and there is an enemy close to you, then they see it. Why? For reasons of stability in the game. Before this exception was introduced it was impossible to chase anyone. Even if you have nearly killed them, and they have no shells and no armour, all they had to do was to flee along a road and tap the mine key three times -- bam, bam, bam, you're dead. They can still do this, but instead of instantly killing you it will simply slow down your chase a little while you swerve off the road to avoid the mines.
• "When I join an alliance with someone, why don't I see all the hidden mines that they've already layed?"
Bolo was designed to have moderate memory requirements and use very little network bandwidth. To make all of an allies mines instantly visible would consume a lot more memory and network traffic for a relatively small benefit, so I decided not to do it.
• "I hate mines. After a hard fight to capture a pillbox, I lose it seconds later by hitting one of the mines that people scatter randomly across the map."
If you are low on armour, and carrying something valuable, BE CAREFUL. Your tank can detect invisible mines up to one map square in front of it, so watch carefully, and drive slowly enough that when you see a mine you can stop before you hit it.
• "Why can't I plant trees?"
Ecology, my friend. If you totally defoliate an area, then it takes 50 years to replant and cultivate a forest again, by which time you probably won't still be playing Bolo (or at least not on your current Macintosh, anyway). If you want to maintain a forest, don't totally destroy it. Farm just a few squares, or farm narrow strips through the forest, leaving the trees on either side to help the farmed area to grow back.
• "Why don't you allow the tank turret to rotate relative to the tank body?"
Many people request this, so that "when driving by a pillbox, you could drive on road and blow it away by shooting to the side." This is precisely the point. To maintain the balance of the game I would then have to make pillboxes more powerful to compensate for your enhanced abilities. The difficulty of shooting a pillbox, or an enemy tank, would be exactly the same, except that you'd have to do more finger ballet on the keyboard to achieve the same results. This would just make the game even harder on novice players (as if it wasn't hard enough already).
• "Why can't the tank reverse?"
Same reason as above. It adds more buttons and adds complication to the game without making it any better. As it is now, if you cleverly catch someone carelessly hanging around on a narrow bridge or beside a lake, you can shoot them and knock them into the water, where they will be almost helpless for you to easily finish off. If they had reverse they could quickly reverse out of the water and escape. In this game, if you are stupid, you pay the penalty. There are no second chances, no smart bombs, and no hyperspace. Watch your back.
• "Why can't I shoot things on land when I am on a boat?"
Boats are for transport, not for fighting. You can however shoot bridges away, and repeated shelling will disintegrate river banks.
• "Why can't I drop floating 'sea mines' in the water?"
Boats are for transport, not for fighting. Travelling by boat makes you immune from minefields, but leaves you vulnerable to being sunk by a single shot. Boats are best used for 'peacetime' transportation. In the heat of battle, they are a liability.
• "Why don't you implement line-of-sight-only vision?"
Bolo is a multi-player game. What makes it interesting is the encounters with other players. As it is you can spend far too long searching for the other players in the game, especially when they are hiding in forest, so making it even harder to find other players would not be an improvement.
• "Why don't you assign a different colour to every team, instead of just red/green?"
My goal is to have games of a thousand players across the Internet. I'd probably need to have about two hundred different colours, and with alliances changing all the time, I don't see how I can make a thousand computers agree on what colour every player is at every moment in time.
