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Overlord’s guide to happy swarming

Swarm can be a bit confusing to new players.  To keep people from getting lost on their first game, I’ve written a short guide to Swarm.

Waypoints

 Waypoints lay out a path for your swarm to follow.  They look like a flag with a circle around it.  The arrows connecting the waypoints show which way the swarm will go.  You can drag the waypoints with the left mouse button.

In order to create a waypoint, click the black flag button on the left.  If you want to delete a waypoint, right-click it.  You can connect waypoints to the hive by dragging from the hive to the waypoint.

An advanced way to make waypoints is to SHIFT-drag an exiting waypoint (or the hive).  This will make a new waypoint, connected to the one you dragged.

Hive

The hive has 30 health points in the beginning of the game.  When its health drops to zero, the owner of the hive loses.  Protect your hive with your swarm and watch out for enemy flanking attacks.

Upgrades

Upgrade orbs periodically appear on the field.  There are three types, each improving a different aspect of your swarm.  The level of your upgrades can be seen on the upgrade meters to the left.

Swarm UpgradesSPAWN RATE: This upgrade has an icon that looks like a bug.  It will increase the rate at which your hive produces the swarm.  Getting to level 10 will double your production rate from level 0.

SPEED: This upgrade looks like a lightning bolt.  This will increase the speed of your swarm and the speed at which upgrades are taken to your hive.

ARMOUR: This upgrade looks like a shield and will make your swarm tougher.  At level 10, your swarm will be twice as resilient as level 0.

In order to capture an upgrade, direct your swarm to it with a waypoint.  Some of the swarm will sacrifice themselves to capture the upgrade.  Once 20 swarmlings have attacked the upgrade it will start pulsing with your team color.  After a short while it will start to move to your hive.  Once it gets there, you will level up in that category.  Of course, if the enemy intercepts the upgrade, they can take it back to their base.

Other

The game has a difficulty switch that will give the computer or the player additional upgrades in the beginning.  Run Swarm.exe with the “-difficulty X” where X is a number from -30 to 30.  The default setting is 0, giving the computer no advantage.  Positive values will help the AI.

You can run Swarm in full screen mode by passing “-fullscreen” parameter to Swarm.exe.  You can also run the provided .bat file.
If you get tired of the awesome IndieBird splash screen, you can turn it off with “-nosplash”.  Just be sure to view it once in a while to keep the subliminal messages active.

Also, the game can be paused by pressing “P“.

 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Overlord’s guide to happy swarming”

  1. jlo Says:
    August 21st, 2008 at 7:34 am

    I love the concept! Thanks for the games! You are a true programmer after all!

  2. Matman Says:
    August 21st, 2008 at 4:26 pm

    I think there is alot of potential in the game. Hope to see an expansion pack (7 days dev of course) in a few months, maybe with some sort of AI scripting potential (so we can have Swarm AI wars?).

  3. microcontrolled Says:
    October 27th, 2008 at 12:40 am

    Great Job! I can’t seem to stop playing it :)

    I was just curious to see if anyone had come up with techniques they are proud of. I can’t seem to beat the AI if it starts with a +2 or greater advantage.

    In general, I find that once there is a small imbalance in terms of upgrades (for the player, or the AI), it’s almost impossible to turn the game around.

    The only good technique I’ve come up with so far is to try to get the AI to juggle it’s swarm. ie, if there are two upgrades in play, go get the one the AI isn’t after. Then, when the AI shifts it’s focus to the upgrade you reached for, it will commit all it’s troops to it. You can send a small amount of troops to snatch the AI’s upgrade away. This will cause the AI to switch it’s troops back, and hopefully, the transit time it has wasted will be enough to pull both upgrades far enough into your territory to secure them.

  4. Alex Vostrov Says:
    October 27th, 2008 at 8:17 pm

    Thanks for the comments. I think of Swarm as a sort of introduction to a different type of strategy game. There are many ways that the game can be developed from here. One of these days, I’ll explore some of them with Swarm 2.

  5. Swarm | Time Waster Says:
    November 1st, 2008 at 4:39 am

    [...] Swarm è un gioco gratuito di soli 5MB che si può scaricare direttamente qui. [...]

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