Call of Mars is an experimental LANThrax mini game that has been around for a couple of months now. It hasn't been advertized except for a dedicated forum thread. There isn't even a direct link towards it in the main navigation bar. The reason for this is because the game is far from finished, "and yet it moves".
Several members have had a hand at it and left, possibly because of lack of playability. At first there wasn't much to do (build units and move around) and the interface was even more unintuitive than it is now. Eventually new features were introduced to add a purpose to the game, like the ability to attack other players' bases, but by that time, the whole map was controlled by just two players which made it impossible for new players to expand.
To this effect, the game has now been restarted so that everyone has an equal footing and an equal chance of building an empire that spans the whole game time. The game will be tentatively set to last a month, at which point the best performing players will be made known and a new game cycle is restarted.
A quick tutorial
The aim of the game is to control as much area as possible on the surface of Mars and hence gather more resources. This requires the founding of new colonies and, eventually, the conquering of other players' bases.
Every player starts with a randomly positioned base that he/she can rename. Every spot on the map has a varying amount of resources that can be harvested for building stuff. Below is a list of resources that can be extracted:
- Water is used to produce food. More food means faster population growth. Greater population means more "Eurons" through taxes. Eurons are used to produce units, farms and to found new colonies. Note that the more colonies one has, the more expensive it will become to found new colonies.
- Iron is used to build tanks, which are good against infantry but weak against gunships.
- Titanium is used to build gunships which are good against tanks but weak against infantry.
- Palladium is used to build infantry, which are good against gunships but weak against tanks.
When you have enough resources you can build farms to increase the rate of food production. Then it would be a good idea to build units to start exploring the area and found new colonies. Note that there is a minimum distance between colonies, so you cannot just build anywhere.
After building a number of units, they will be shown in your colony garrison. You can order a portion (or all) of the units to form an army by pressing "spawn army" in the colony details page. Armies can also carry resources from one base to another. Your armies show in green while enemy armies show in red. Moving armies is as simple as clicking on the army, choosing "move army" and pointing to the target. Armies take time to move from one place to another and you can notice how much an army has moved by checking the game every now and then.
Armies belonging to different players automatically attack each other when they get close. A battle always ends with a vanquished army and a victor getting all the resources that the loser was carrying plus a portion of scrap materials from the wreckage of the destroyed units (from both sides). Attacking an enemy base will show the result in the player news. Such report will onlt be available to the players participating in the battle, but an undetailed battle report will still show for other players who could take advantage of the information.
Beta Phase
The game can currently be accessed by following
this link. Remember that this game is far from complete. Although there are a lot of things that I plan to improve, your feedback is greatly appreciated. If you notice any problems, or you have an idea about how to make the user interface more user friendly, please comment in
this thread. Likewise, if you have any questions about gameplay and tactics, please post your questions in the
thread mentioned above. Also any help with graphics and icons would also be greatly appreciated since the game is verly lacking that department.
Generale d'Armata+ Osprey
