The easiest way to describe Cell War is that it's the game of Go played with the rules of Conway's Game of Life. Actually, the rules for when cells live, die, and reproduce had to be tweaked so that the two sides would fight each other – which, in itself, would have been an interesting simulation – and for the fact that both sides are actively adding live cells to the grid. If you're totally lost by this description, here is everything that you need to know. A small group of green and purple cells are placed randomly on the grid at the beginning of the game, and players take turns placing new ones on the board. At regular intervals, an algorithm checks the entire board and takes the following actions: any cell not touching another cell will die of loneliness; any cell touching four friendly cells will die of overcrowding; any cell touching three unfriendly cells horizontally or vertically will die from poisoning; a new cell will be created when the square is surrounded by two or three friendly cells horizontally or vertically. The strategy becomes much like Go: surround territory and limit your opponent's territory. Cells that are too far away from friendly cells will die of loneliness or get surrounded by unfriendly cells, while any sufficiently large group will become impossible to poison because invading cells can't survive in an "eye" inside a group of unfriendly cells. You can play against a human or the computer but, sadly, you can't watch two computers duke it out. Computer opponents can be assigned two different intelligence levels.
Added by DOSGuy
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Downloads
Cell War v1.0 (69,539 bytes) | 1992-12-24 | Win16 | Play online |
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