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1992-09-02
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Act Of War V1.4
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(c) Dave Smith, March 1993
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. System requirements
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Act Of War works under Workbench 1.2, 1.3, 2.0 and 3.0 in both NTSC and PAL,
and requires 1 meg of memory as a minimum. The game may need more than a
meg to run it from a hard drive.
If you have a meg and the game refuses to run, try disconnecting or turning
off any external drives or hard drives. This frees up more memory.
It should work fine on accelerated systems, and is fully A1200 compatible.
The A4000 should be no problem.
As Act Of War was written with AMOS, it multitasks - use Left-Amiga A to
switch between the game and Workbench.
2. Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Act of War, or AoW as I've just decided to call it as it involves less
typing, is a strategy game in the tradition of Laser Squad, Breach 2 (or so
I'm told) and, if anyone can remember that far back, Rebelstar.
If you've never played any of those games, think of a childish fascination
for big guns married to a fair amount of strategy and you won't be far
wrong.
So what makes AoW different?
The game is played over a series of missions, five of which are included
with the program. More missions are being worked on as you read this, by
myself and others. And if you don't like these missions, there's no reason
for you not to create your own!
On payment of a small shareware fee (more information later on) you'll get
the mission designer that I use, which makes mission creation very simple.
Everything from the map, to the weapons, to the sound effects can be
changed.
Noteable game features include:
* 1 or 2 players
* Sampled sound
* Completely extendable!
* 3 difficulty levels
* Optional line-of-sight feature
* Squad arming sequence
* Explosive scenery
* Keyboard and / or mouse controlled
* Halfway-decent user interface
* Revolutionary new ICASS AI system (see later)
New features:
* Fire (as in flames)
* Units can return fire even if it's not their turn, under
certain conditions
* Character/cursor movement can now be carried out using
the mouse
* Weapons now have a range
* Four new types of weapons:
Scatter
Shrapnel
Incendiary
Multihit
* Landmines (and scanners to find them)
* Reinforcements
The new features are described in detail later in this document. If
you've played an earlier version of AoW and don't want to plough through
this whole file again, the file "Update.doc" also contains the new
descriptions.
The five missions included in this release are as follows:
* Informant - An ex-director of your shady corporation is ready to
spill your industrial secrets to a rival company. There's only one
way to stop him - break into his sprawling mansion and take him
out! (Obviously, negotiation comes a long way down the list with
these people).
* Escape - Taken prisoner by a corrupt Planetary Security Force for your
part in the above escapade, you and two companions have been
jailed in an orbital maximum-security prison. Initially armed with
only a little smuggled-in plastic explosive, you must break out of
your cell, somehow obtain a weapon, free your comrades and escape
to a passing PSF shuttle to secure your freedom.
* Terminator! - Soon after you make it back to your base after escaping
captivity, a Terminator droid from a rival corporation stages
an assault! Backed up by a squad of combat droids, it will attempt
to kill you all...
-- Two new missions are included with this release:
* Confrontation - In an abandoned warehouse is stored a superweapon.
Two identically-equipped sides fight to get to it, then to get
out again.
* Firestorm - The ubiquitous PSF have created a deadly new chemical,
Mutranol, allegedly for research purposes. However, they are
converting humans into hideous mutants! Your mission is to
break into the stronghold and destroy the (conveniently highly
explosive) chem dump located in the centre of three defensive
rings.
3. Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AoW can be installed on a hard drive - just make sure that the files:
diskfont.library mathtrans.library
are in the libs: drawer, and that you've copied the "Spacey" font to the
fonts: drawer. The directory that you put the game in must have the name
"px:" assigned to it. In other words, if the game is in "dh1:Games/AoW",
you should put:
assign px: dh1:Games/AoW
in your startup-sequence.
The mission directories should be in the same dir as the game, ie. "px:".
The default missions also require that the "Pics" drawer and the "Snd"
drawer, and their contents, are present in "px:" also.
The game is much nicer installed on a hard drive (isn't everything?). As
it is so extendable, a fair amount of disk access is inevitable. However,
there is no disk access during a game so the actual gameplay speed is
identical on both floppy and hard drive systems.
To summarise then: the necessary files are as follows.
libs:diskfont.library
mathtrans.library
fonts:Spacey/7
Spacey.font
px:Pics/GameTiles
EscapeTiles
GameBack.iff
WeaponBack.iff
Weapons.1
Snd/Samples.1
Act_Of_War
Informant/Everything
Escape/Everything
Terminator!/Everything
4. Gameplay
~~~~~~~~~~~
I know, I know, you just want to know how to play!
The front end:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* The first thing you have to do is load a mission in. Select "Load
Mission" from the menu. The disk will grind a bit, and a list of
the available missions will come up. Choose the one you want,
again using the mouse.
* Select the difficulty level you want. Easy gives you a lot of cash for
the arming sequence (see below). Medium gives you less cash and
introduces the line-of-sight feature, where you can only see enemy
units that are in your line of sight. Hard keeps line-of-sight and
gives you the least cash.
* Choose a 1 or 2 player game. The AI is not brilliant, but I think it's
good enough to be called "not bad". It even has its own acronym, which
is obviously essential for any program these days. So, when you play
a 1-player game of AoW, you are experiencing ICASS - the Intellectually
Challenged Artificial Stupidity System (tm).
Now, don't you feel proud?
Arming:
~~~~~~~
* Next comes the arming sequence. A total amount of cash is shown,
and you can either accept the default weapons (use the "Next Unit"
icon, which looks like a tick, to see each unit's weapons) or choose
to buy your own. To keep the defaults, click the "Quit" icon; to buy
weapons, click either of the two "Buy" buttons.
* The squad's default weapons are usually round about what you could
buy at the Medium level of difficulty. The amount of cash you get at
each level is as follows:
Easy - 250 per unit
Medium - 200 per unit
Hard - 175 per unit
* If you do buy new weapons, the first button is "Buy Weapon", the next
is "Buy Ammo", the two arrow icons let you see the weapons and the
"Next Unit" button is used when you've finished arming that unit. You
can always go back to it, until you quit the arming.
* The cash shown is a total for your whole squad, try to divide weapons
fairly equally. It's always better to have, say, four men with Pulse
rifles rather than one man with a Plasma Cannon and tons of ammo.
* If you buy something, then decide you don't want it, you can sell it
back at no loss by clicking on the object's name in the inventory.
* Click on the