Intro: Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds is a Risk-like game based on taking territories combined with RTS combat to resolve conflict. Its setting is 1898, with a very retro-technology outfitted British attempting to hold off the heat ray equipped high tech Martian invasion. Send in the ironclads! It also features in-game music from the 1978 musical by Jeff Wayne, which still has a strong cult following and adds quite a lot to the atmosphere.
Excellent value at $20 (TRU 7/15/99). The manual is a bit terse with barely a wasted sentence -we'll try to help you here. Once you scale the learning curve necessary to get used to the different interface (about an hour of playing around) you'll find a very enjoyable game.
The game also lends itself to being easily tweaked through a windows utility tool, allowing a tougher fighting AI, and there is the tantalizing possibility that multiplayer support, while unadvertised, may get working if enough of us tinker with it.
Basics of the game:
How do I win: Destroy the other side's master base. This is Grampian Mountains in Scotland for the Martians and the Houses of Parliament in London for the British. This should be your single minded goal.
How do I move the units? I'm confused: The click and hold to drag menu options takes a while to get used to, especially for experienced RTS players (like Command and Conquer) since it uses both the left and right buttons of the mouse. The important thing to learn is that some pop up menus only appear while the right mouse button is held down. What is highlighted when you release the mouse button is your choice from that menu. It's faster once you get used to it, so bear with it.
Basically, you will move units (groups of vehicles) on the large Britain map by dragging them to other sectors as in Risk. When units from both sides meet, a RTS combat mode will ensue.
Large Map (War Map) movement: Click on a unit to select it; A box will appear on it. Moving the cursor over other territories will now produce a large arrow (but only if you can legally move to them). You'll get a nice sweeping arrow with the time of arrival at its head if headed into an enemy held territory. Pay particular attention to this as it determines if you'll be night fighting or not. If you don't like the arrival time (i.e. You're human and don't want to right at night), advance the clock a few hours before ordering them out.
Once selected, you can move units through multiple territories if you wish, but are unable to move more than one territory past a command post controlled territory. With battleships in particular, you'll find yourself unable to sweep up the coast but forced to issue several movement orders over time as your ships keep stopping in empty neutral sectors.
Initially you'll need six lorries for a fair fight against one martian unit. To group multiple units together, hold down the shift key while clicking on the units to send, or drag a box over them. If you include ironclads in the attack you'll initially see two arrows with two different dates (ironclads are slow), but after you finalize the attack they'll both arrive at the same time -the later date of the two. So pay attention to the later attack time -that's when you'll arrive.
Small Map (Battle Map) movement: Much easier and well described in the manual. Click on the unit or its thumbnail in the upper left of your screen. Click again on the landscape to send it where you want. Humans should be careful and not try to cross bridges while under fire. Use the CNTL key to target forced fire against the enemy. Multiple units can be grouped together by dragging a box over them. In general, doing this for Martian units and ironclads is a bad idea because the multiple units will often block eachothers line of fire.
How do I advance the time? You either move the slider over to advance the clock, or type a value between 1-9, 9 being fastest. The Martian "cycles" == Human "days".
How do I pause the game? Only possible on the big map. Backspace pauses the game clock, as does moving the slider to the left. You can issue as many commands as you want while time is stopped, then kick the clock back up again as above. (The clock ticking sound does not stop when the game is paused, which is confusing initially.)
How do I build buildings in my own territories? First, move a construction vehicle there. Without it you can't build anything. Look at the time -you may want to run the clock ahead a few hours if you don't want to be placing buildings in the pitch dark of night. Now click anywhere in the empty space of that territory with your right mouse button and hold it down. While holding down the right mouse button you should get two squares to pop up: An "X" for cancel and underneath that a few wavy lines that means "landscape". Drag down to the mountain icon to change maps, then release. You should get a briefing map during the load, then the actual map itself.
You've changed maps to the close up view? (i.e. the "Battle Map") Good. In the upper left edge of the screen are thumbnails of all your units in this sector. Select your construction vehicle with either a double left click or by selecting it and then pressing the Home key. Now that you've selected the construction vehicle, click and hold the right mouse button, doing a drag to the Construction Crane graphic before releasing. You'll get a pop-up filled with the different items you've researched so far available to be built in this sector. Left clicking on items will copy smaller pictures of them off to the right into the build queue. Clicking on the same picture multiple times will result in it being made multiple times -this is indicated by a tiny "footnote" number in the lower right of the each picture in the queue, and may be set to infinity if wanted.
Now of course the first thing you want to start in each sector is building -worst case a communication center if its entirely barren. When you click on this your pointer will become a rectangular outline of the foundation of the building to be built as it's moved over the landscape. You have to place this somewhere before it can be built, the basic strategy being place it far away from where enemies would come from and where you can build defenses to protect it After a while players have an idea of which structures they want to build and queue them all up placing their foundations one after another. This allows them to ignore backwater territories for a while and instead concentrate on the action at the front. Note: In construction you only have to use the battle maps for construction of buildings (you have to place their foundations somewhere in each map). You will save a lot of time switching maps if you choose to build your vehicles from the larger map of Britain (the War map) rather than zooming in to each sector. You can do this once the proper foundational buildings are laid -just choose a vehicle factory in the F2 view of the main map and you'll be able to load its construction queue pop up here also. Also note: You will need to build level two factories to be able to build level two vehicles after you've researched them, and additional support buildings are needed for the more advanced vehicles (like a Munitions Factory for self-propelled guns). Because of this it usually makes sense to cluster several factories into the same sector rather than spread them out between several sectors.
How do I build defenses? Use sapper vehicles instead of construction vehicles, and otherwise it's the same. Defense works go up rather quickly. To keep you from overbuilding a sector into unrealistic fortresses there is a limit to how many defensive gun emplacements of each type you can build per sector. When using multiple sappers in the same sector some work can only be done by the first sapper to prevent swarm construction cheats, and expect the resource use to redline while under construction. It is quite possible to hold a sector with defensive emplacements alone.
How damaged are my units? You'll notice in the upper left hand side a thumbnail of your units and a series of boxes underneath for each vehicle in that unit. Watch this to see which units are taking the most damage.
How do I repair vehicles? You can only do this on the large map, not while in the middle of battle. Move the damaged unit into a sector with a repair facility -a wrench will appear over it. Ships do not require a shipyard to be repaired, only a repair facility. Each repair facility can only repair one unit at a time, but you can build multiple repair facilities in a sector. Also keep in mind you cannot restore or combine less than full strength units back to 5 vehicles. Units that have been reduced to one vehicle left should be considered for suicide scouting missions rather than repaired, or destroyed outright. Badly damaged and missing vehicle units still consume resources from their sector when idle, as the pop-up window will show you; destroying wounded units will lift your construction efficiency back towards 100%.
How do I repair defensive guns and buildings damaged in combat? Mobile Repair Vehicles. For defensive structures like guns, fences, etc. that take less than 8 days to build it may be better to destroy badly damaged (ie. badly smoking) ones and build new ones in their place. You can't do this with Communication Centers, however. (Well you can, but it'd be very, very stupid.)
How do I infiltrate a base? Get a unit like a lorry, select the magnifying glass, then select the command base. It will close with the command base and have to sit a while before it reports "task accomplished". It's a bit hard to infiltrate Command bases before your own units destroy them, but doing so will let you know the contents of adjacent enemy held sectors, both in terms of defense units and vehicles (use F1 and F2 to view if successful) once back at the War Map.
Black dust? How do I launch it as a Martian? You have to do this by hand. Select the units you want to fire black dust, select the black dust, then select the units to fire at. Especially satisfying firing at ironclads.
Why are there all these rail lines on every map? The rail lines are possibly used by the humans to transport resources back and forth. To quote Gamecenter's preview:
For instance, during a battle in Newcastle, the only way to win the battle is to blow up a railroad bridge over a river. Blowing it up may allow you to destroy some of the Martian hardware, but losing that bridge may mean that shipments of steel don't get where they're supposed to be on the strategic map. It might actually be better to lose the units rather than lose that vital railway connection.
This was at an early beta stage and may not be true of the final version. Needs confirmation.
The music is really great! Can I play it on my normal CD player? Yes. The first CD track is the computer files, not much fun to listen to, so skip over it Tracks 2 and on have the game music in CD compatible form, and can be played on your home or car stereo the same as any other music CD.
How do I change the CD volume in the game? There's only an On/Off switch on the menu. The game music is played by a CD player while you play the game; You need to change this volume with the Volume Controls panel for CD players on the desktop, not while playing the game. You can go under the Control Panel to do this, but most people just bring this up by clicking on the speaker icon to the lower right of the desktop.
Game Strategy:
General: Vehicles are not allowed to "jump" sectors, but are only allowed to move into sectors adjacent to ones held by your command posts. (The martian landings at the beginning of the game are an exception to this rule). A strong front is the best defense for your rear, since they're unable to move past it. Optimizing resource production to keep close to 100% is more important than the RTS combat.
Also don't get too concerned about building up your second line. Command Posts have to be built before they can carry the battle to the next sector in, so this will offer you time to regroup.
Also feel free to play wars of attrition, destroying a sector, retreating and letting it become re-occupied, then destroying it again after a command post is built but before positional defenses can be set. The AI can also be fooled into attacking strongly defended sectors if you remove most vehicles from it.
Research: If you are exhausting the research tree before ending you're not playing aggressive enough. Unlike many strategy games (like Master of Orion 2 or X-Com), there is no way to increase your research rate over the other side by hiring more scientists. While you research some super-special technology, so is the AI, at exactly the same rate, so the technology balance stays the same between the two sides.
One of the beauties of the game is that there's multiple valid research paths that will allow you to win. You can play a game where you go heavy on defensive technology (fences and mines) and gleefully watch them fall into your traps. Or you can play a conventional ground war and research track layers and self-propelled guns. You can also play an indirect war with battleships and units to scout for them/lead them back into range. (A mortar bike-battleship battlegroup proves interesting, I think.) You can even try stealthy-spy kinds of missions by sending out armored sappers or drones to infiltrate and destroy enemy command posts rather than just front line conflicts over and over again, and the Martians have the ability to super glue vehicles into place and cast lunacy on the Earthlings. You'll see several people's (very opinionated) ways of playing later. None of them are the "only" way of playing, however.
Note: Some research paths, like AA guns and defenses against black dust, will only be open to Humans after they first encounter it in combat. This insures a window for the Martians when black dust and flying machines will be potent. Some Martians may want to hold back on using these big break through until you they have enough of these new high tech toys to take advantage of the research curve. In the tweaked nastier games I like to play, Level II fighting machines wait on using the black dust until I need it against ironclads. Then I've got about a three month window where it's very effective and I go hunting ironclads along the coast, even if I can't take the sector.
Resource management: Paying attention to resources is necessary for your home front development. You have to send construction vehicles to territories that can produce more of the resources you need. To find these enter resource mode on the War Map by choosing the rightmost button on the view selector. You will now see bars on each territory. Hovering on the resource bar for that district will show if any more can be gained by building another raw material factory there -for instance, building a steel mill or coal mine in London is idle -they'll add zero to your resources, as the resource view will show. But building a couple oil refineries in London is smart -the first oil refinery alone adds 40 tones a week to your oil reserves. F3 F4 and F5 allow viewing the map in gradations of purple to show a particular resource distribution.
"Need Help" had this to add: As a human there are the little buttons on the right side of the screen of the War Map. The one on the bottom row to the far right is the resource view. If you click it each sector has three bars with little white lines across each. The bars indicate (left to right) Steel, coal and oil. The horizontal white line indicates the amount of that resource the vehicles and buildings in the sector are using. If the white bar is above the resource bars then it turns red. This means you're using more than you make, this is why you get the messages about low resources. Resource bars can be raised by building new facilities. Be careful though. If you hold your cursor over one of the resource bars for a few seconds a little information in a box pops up. On the bottom it will say how many more tones of the resource can be made with the making of a new facility. On top there are numbers telling you how many tons of the resource you are using and how many you are making.
When a vehicle (such as the Construction vehicle or sappers lorry) is building something then how many tons of resources it uses is raised. This is true for Vehicle Factories, Ship Yards, etc. Units in the sector also use resources, a different amount for being Idle, Working, Moving, etc. (you can find out this information by clicking a unit in Unit View and hold the cursor over it for a few seconds. To find how many tons of resources vehicle factories, etc use click on the Construction view (middle button) and click the building and hold the cursor over it. All this is true for the martian game, too (but with different resources, blood,copper, heavy metals).
NOTE: On the Resource view there are buildings under each resource bar. This indicates how many of those factories, mines, refineries, etc. are in each sector.
Also note that the Northern territories are relatively barren compared to the South. The key to the game for either side is owning the South. Northumberland is annoying to battle for, but let the Martians own it for a year if you want the AI to have even a fighting chance at giving you a challenging game.
Strategy notes from different players: Here in this section you will find strategy notes from different players, most of which directly conflict with each other. There is more than one way to win the game, but central to any victory is proper resource management. Any strategy or research limitation can always be compensated for with adequate numbers, and the only way to "waste" research is to research items you don't use later on. Have fun, try different research paths, experiment. In particular, there's far greater bragging rights for the WotW player who's won a game using very improbable combinations of research rather than just the conventional "lots of track layers and rush" path, after all.
Also, keep in mind that it's more efficient to build multiple factors in a single sector and leaving the surrounding sectors empty except for resource producers (Coal Mines, Steel Mills, etc). Many of the support buildings for the more advanced vehicles take a long time to build; building just one of them in a sector with four factories is much better than trying to build four of them in four different adjacent sectors with only one factory each. Build these concentrated manufacturing sectors in the land locked middle sectors of the North to maximize the number of sectors to draw resources from.
Concentrating a group of unit's fire on one target is good for Humans, but not so good for Martians, true to the book. For Humans, much of their strategy is grouping multiple puny guns together to fire at only one Martian at a time. They're greatly restricted in movement by the landscape, but because of their small stature seldom block each other's shot at those 50 meter tall Martian tripods. Martians have little restriction in movement through the landscape because of their tall walking tripods, but find it often a restriction in getting their line of sight weapons to bear --their beam weapons are easily blocked by the landscape or any of their own units. Grouping Martians together means much of their fire power is wasted: Only the front line of a group has a clear shot to attack with. This particularly becomes apparent when attempting to fight street to street and with buildings in the way. Be careful when laying out beam weapon defenses also since those in the back will be unable to shoot until the front line is destroyed. In the book munitions have a nasty habit of exploding when hit by a heat ray, making things much tougher for humans. The default settings have humans more resilient than this to make the game playable.
Trivia: The landscapes are actual imports from aerial photos of the UK.
Richard Burton's introduction monologue is taken from the 1978 recording. Nigel Hawthorne (Madness of King George III, Demolition Man) was hired by the Rage to do further vocal work. Doesn't good vocal acting shine? There is also conjecture that one of the Martian's voices is played by Paul Darrow. (Avon from Blake's 7)
Jeff Wayne was in contact throughout the design of the entire game and made sure the plot lines didn't conflict with his original work. He even composed new music just for the game.
It is rumored that the game was fixed on a release coinciding with the 100 anniversary of the publishing of H.G.Well's original book in 1898. Despite the December 1998 copyright, most people didn't see it until 1999, and probably didn't care.
Rage started the project back in 1995, before 3D accelerator cards hit the market. The designer notes with regret he'd have liked to have included graphics accelerator support if he could do it over again.
There is a strategy guide available --$15 from Amazon currently. I found it rather useful and better than the average strategy guide, but the author advocates a bit conservative of a game. He probably used a much more aggressively tweaked beta-version. It certainly spells out the armor, attack strength and range (in pixels) explicitly for every unit.
No patch is forthcoming. The dev team has broken up and is on to other projects. Rage Software still continues, but GT Interactive (who bought the game from Rage) logged a $50 million loss for 1998 and is currently looking for a buyer.
Yes, Human Farms and Blood are part of the original book by Wells. The Martians have evolved to no longer needing digestion organs like stomachs or intestines to turn food into blood, they just drink blood directly and use the saved space in their bodies for more brains. Mankind strongly resembles a blood host animal on Mars, which is why the Earth looks so good -lot's of food. The Martians plan to eventually set up something like chicken coops to grow men in for food.
Fighting Machines, Handling Machines and Digging Machines are all vehicle names original to the book. Likewise the Red Weed and the Black Dust.
In the book's end when the invasion of Earth doesn't go so well, the Martians may have attempted to colonize Venus.
Fans of the game may also want to scan the web for "Space:1889".
Patch: There is no patch. The game works out of the box.
Known Bugs and workarounds:
See also GT's documented bugs for the game at http://www.gtisonline.com/pc/waroftheworlds.html
Delay changing maps: (see also Cheats:Registry)
The delay is from loading authentic geographical maps from Britain -these things are huge. Unfortunately this has been unnecessarily lengthened by the programmers (who developed on a very high level system and didn't notice) to force you to see the in-between map for some amount of time. You can either click the left button each time, or you can hack the registry to set the delay in changing maps to 0, eliminating all unnecessary delays (this is very trivial to do -see Cheat:Registry section). Some people have also used software utilities to move this down.
Bill notes:
I have done 2 things on my system. I have edited the Registry for the "Briefing" and Debriefing" delay entries down to 0. I forget the exact location, but if you are familiar with editing the registry you should be able to find them. If you are not familiar with editing the registry you perhaps should not mess with it. The second thing I did was buy a product called Vramdir ($10) which I used to put the games harddrive directory into system RAM. I also put my swapfile into system RAM with Vramdir. My lag time is down to about 4 or 5 seconds going to the BattleMap and about 1 second going to the WarMap. But, I also have a PII-450 with 128 meg of RAM.
I put C:\Program Files\Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds in Vramdir. I also partitioned my harddrive into logical drives and identified one (D: in my case) to be the WIN95(8) swapfile and then put the D: drive in Vramdir. Also, don't forget that Vramdir only works for 30 minutes after startup in the free download version. (So you may want to reboot your system fresh once you figure it out to see if it actually improves performance for you.)
Note you can also reduce visits to sectors by filling the building queue with several buildings to be constructed and laying their foundations all at once. If you forget which resources are in a given sector, it's still usually faster to lay them out while on the screen and delete them later on (if necessary) from the WarMap than it is to go see-saw back and forth several times between maps.
I too have noticed some faster response from using Vramdir on my system. Well worth downloading.
Stalemate forcing a withdrawal: Occasionally a stalemate will happen where the humans are unable to destroy the remaining martian buildings in a sector because of movement limitations. You are then forced to self-destruct your own buildings or retreat before you can leave the screen. You can also use the cheats to remedy the problem by destroying the other side, if you wish.
Battleships are over-eager: Settling a ship to attack land based units will rarely result in the ship jumping the beach and damaging itself. This was intentional by the designers as a hamper to the human side. Don't ask your ships to fire too deep inland -they'll gladly suicide to get the shot off if that's what you need, but it's a waste. Use mortar bikes to scout out units and then retreat into the battleship's firing range instead. Building higher level ships with farther gun ranges makes this less likely to happen, BTW.
Land vehicles do a lemming and drown themselves. Likewise, tell your ground units to go drown in the sea or a river and sometimes (randomly) they'll stupidly follow. Don't do this -although rarely the Martians are smart enough to blow up the bridges and you have no choice. One player has reported a very rare luring of a martian unit to charge off a cliff and into the sea when attacking with submarines, destroying it.
Bermuda Triangle: Some players report that storming out with a full fleet of five ships will sometimes end up with some becoming lost at sea when they harbor.
Scott Hunter adds: As for the Bermuda Triangle bug, yea, I've experienced that many times. It's wholly dependant on the map into which you move forces/find forces participating in combat (i.e. the territory which you are defending): if the available 'legal' ocean space is too small to accommodate the naval vessels you have in the strike force, the program will delete those forces. The computer must calculate an initial starting position for every unit, and failure to find accommodating space forces the computer to remedy the situation. Poof. No more massive armada. And the computer`s idea of "enough physical space" is far less frugal than any arrangement of space we players could devise. You have to be careful.
Running out of memory calculating 3-D graphics: All units are rendered in 3-D without an accelerator, so having tons of units on the screen (Weenie- swarming is a common tactic for some) with lots more buildings can cause the game to boot back to Windows as it runs out of memory.
1) Shut down all other processes before launching the game to free up memory. 2) Buy a monster system. Top grade system users never see this problem at all -particularly users with lots of L2 cpu cache (also known as SRAM, as opposed to ordinary DRAM) 3) Reduce your resolution and turn off all fancy graphics like lighting effects before that giant 100+ unit battle. 4) Turn off drawing of all non-combat units with Unit View mode. (F1) 5) Try turning on the Reaper in the registry. (Does not work for all systems) 6) Add more memory! The recommended minimum is 32 MB and 64 MB is suggested! Sure, I played the game on a 16 MB system too, but I wasn't surprised when I got problems as a result. Now that I've upgraded my 16M system to 64M, the chugging has disappeared and only main delay is getting the CD-ROM up to speed when changing music tracks. What a difference! I no longer need to use VRAMDIR with 64M -Win '98 does a good enough job on its own.
Check out http://www.vikingcomponents.com if you're interested in upgrading your memory -they seem to have every system available listed in their database. They also have an excellent "Support" section that consists of Adobe script sheets showing you how to do the upgrade yourself (with photos). Check out the sheet first and see if you feel comfortable following the directions. I found a good price on Viking's upgrade kit at http://www.insight.com YMMV ("Your mileage may vary.")
Remember! Always ground yourself before working with static sensitive equipment (like memory). Any wire that runs 10 feet through the ground is a good ground. For most people this means touching a cold water pipe inlet under the bathroom sink, since these are all metal and eventually run through the ground. The goal is to discharge any static electricity your body may have before you destroy the chips by shock them.
Also note that attacking in a less cluttered corner of the battle map and clearing units in that area first will reduce the total number of units to render for that sector. Lure all enemy vehicles to their deaths before tackling the fences, defensive guns and buildings to reduce the number of graphics on the screen -a smart tactical move anyway.
London is the most graphically intensive sector. Wareman noted:
I've encountered the London crash "bug" when playing on my AMD K6 machine, but I haven't seen it on my Pentium II. Perhaps that could be a cause. In any case, I was able to still enter the London battle on the AMD K6 by going into options and turning off many of the graphic options (shadows, lighting, and shading, and maybe cranking it down to 8-bit sound). London is the most complex map in the game and thus needs quite a bit of 'oomph' to make it into memory. I hope that helps you.
Doesn't work with NT because no ActiveX 6.x for NT yet: NT 4.0 with service pack 5 is rumored to solve most compatibility issues with Xactive 6.x, but I can't confirm. It's at: http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/sp5/
Papyrus said: I'm not a developer, but NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5.0 does support DirectX 6.x, but I don't know how well. So *theoretically* any win32 game w/ DX5,6 requirements should work. NT 4.0 SP3 and SP4 are DirectX 3 compatible, I say compatible because not all of DX 3.x components are employed, for example joystick ...
Can't move ironclads up left side of map from the bottom shipyard (as Human): Not a software bug. You need to build Communication Centers ("CC") all along the coastal sectors before ironclads can move up along them. In cases where there is only a one sector gap between Communication Centers you can move in through one CC and move out with the other, but it's a slow way of moving because of communication delays; your ship will come to a stop in the in-between sector awaiting further orders until you tell send them on their way again. Far better to just be done with it and build the CCs needed. You'll then be able to send the ships up a given coast with just one command.
Can't move vehicles past the original border: Again, not a software bug. You can send vehicles only one sector past your Communication Centers, so if you want to advance, you'll need to win one of those border sectors and hold onto it long enough to build a Communication Center in it. Doing this will allow you to advance your border and send vehicles deeper into enemy territory. Needless to say, losing your own Communication Center does the opposite.
It is not enough to defeat the enemy in combat. You also have to construct buildings (like CCs) to allow you to control a sector and actually use it. Try reading the WotW Tutorial to get a feel for how the game is played.
I keep building resources but I'm still running out! Not a bug, just not understanding the game. Most sectors are only good for one or two resources -building Coal Mines in a sector that has zero coal is stupid. You also get dimishing returns with each further resource you build, so building a Coal Mine that will only give you 2 for that sector is also a waste of time. Concentrate on the sectors rich in what you need and let the rail lines move it to where it's needed for you.
Also, don't stock pile vehicles in the back sectors. They suck off resources even when idle, and they're going to do the same amount of damage to the enemy no matter when you engage (provided the enemy doesn't get a chance to repair in-between), so it's more efficient to move vehicles into combat quickly rather than wait.
Why do my ironclads rush out to close with the Martians rather than stay in the deep water where they're safe? You need to research level 2 ironclads to get a farther firing range that will allow them to safely bombard from the deep waters where Martians can't tread. Here's the ranges from the player's guide:
Formidable Class Ironclad - 1800 pixels Warrior Class Ironclad - 2400 pixels Invincible Class Ironclad - 3000 pixels
Cheats:
youlikeit 100 % efficiency icomeback Display all research atchooo Clear all Martians punyhumans Clear all humans
Making snapshot saves of games: You can save games by making copies of the game slot files in the C:/ProgramFiles/ Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds/Saved Games directory. Human.001 is the game in slot 1, for instance; it ignores other file names that it doesn't recognize as being gameslots saves in the same directory, so I'll exit the game and copy Human.001 to have a letter in front of it ie. aHuman.001, bHuman.001+ To restore I just copy whatever version I want to restore to replace the current Human.001 and I'm on my way.
This works for all five slot numbers on both sides.
Making screenshots of the game: In Windows, use the Print Screen key and the current screen will be saved to the clipboard, thanks to Windows. You can then save it as a file for later loading. (Not really a cheat, but people keep asking)
Switching sides, spying: Under the C:/Program Files/Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds/SavedGames directory, Human.001+ Human.005 are the games played as Human that have been saved in those game slots, and likewise there are Martian.001 through Martian.005 for games played from the Martian side. You can copy games from the Human file names to names for slots on the Martian side and then look at the Martian side with the Martian CD. To do this take a game played in slot 1 as Human.001 and copy it to Martian.001 (you may have to move your current martian.001). Now start the game from the Martian CD as a Martian. You should see the same campaign title you had for the Human game in the resume campaigns section. Resume this game, and now you're playing the Martian side of your game. You'll be able to see where all Martian units really are, what research it's doing, etc -you can also continue play from there with the AI filling in for the side you just left. For a real challenge, try copying a savefile from when you've almost won and attempt for an extreme comeback playing from the other side.
NOTE: The AI only decides what units to build when a factory empties itself; if all the factories are set to build a unit until infinity, it will never be able to change it. Empty all your factory queues to 1 unit left being built or the AI won't have much to do.
Predicting the Martian pod drop pattern:
The pod landing sequence is fixed at the beginning before you advance a single minute. This is useful if you hate not knowing how the pods will drop/want to get an advantageous pod drop pattern. Start a new game, make a backup of the file in that slot before advancing the time a single minute, then fast forward the date through the invasion to see how it happens without wasting time moving units or anything. If you like it, copy back your saved version into that slot and play it out for real --the pod drops will repeat in the same pattern you saw before. If not, discard the version and fast forward newly made versions until you find one worth playing out.
Does the AI cheat? It doesn't build the support buildings needed for a factory to produce a given unit, it only has to research the unit itself.
It also knows the strength of adjoining sectors at all times (it uses this to plan invasions). It may or may not only know the vehicle strength of a sector -some people have conjectured it ignores the defensive implements like fences and fixed guns when deciding to invade. In RTS combat it's just as blind as you are, if not more so. As a Martian, attacking at night generally means you can waltz right in and clobber the Humans before they can find you.
What are some of the more obscure units? Go ahead, spoil it for me. This is all very well covered in the Players guide, but here goes: Earth: Submersibles hide underwater where heat rays can't reach. Drills are straight out of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" with cannons mounted on the sides, able to submerge safe underground and rise just in time to get their shots off. Things get really bizarre when these are in the game.
Martians: Drones are kamikaze one shot missiles that do 400 damage to their target when they hit. They're excellent for surprise attacks against command centers. The Sensors allow you to see further into the fog of war than the enemy, really nice when attacking at night. They also allow you to see mines by displaying them on the main map. There's these glue extruding vehicles that freeze enemies into place, helpless, while other units can shoot them. Finally there's a mind control vehicle that will inspire fear, freeze and lunacy in the enemy, depending on how far you've researched. The Tempest is just meaner and more dangerous than the fighting machine, but does not have multiple vehicles to a unit.
Registry: Dave and Charlie, when they wrote the code, thankfully put a lot of values into the registry, mostly so they could easily tweak the code during the game balance phase later. People have discovered the scores of folders they've left of changeable values and have been changing them ever since for custom games. Most importantly, everyone uses the registry to eliminate any unnecessary delays in changing maps by setting the "delay" value both in the brief and debrief registry folders to zero -this is very easy to do.
For those few not in the know of all things Windows (like me), from the start button bring up "Run". In the pop-up that occurs type "regedit" to get the registry.
You'll see a list of folders. Open the folders along this path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Rage\Jeff Wayne's 'The War of the Worlds'\1.00.000. You too can now share in the fun --Rage put in a lot of environmental variables into the registry that you can modify. See http://members.tripod.com/~fbjor/games/wowreg.htm for an ongoing list.
Exit and re-start WotW to make the values take effect, feel free to change an application's values in the registry because if you really screw it up you can always reinstall it again. Don't muck with your OS's values, however --you can easily end up needing to make a boot disk, etc. (See: http://www.everythingcomputers.com)
To reduce your delay changing maps go into the folder "Briefing". You'll see some variables with their values appear in the right side of regedit, including Delay. Right click on the icon for the variable Delay and a pop-up appears asking you for a new value. Enter '0'. Do the same for the folder "Debriefing" which also has a value Delay. This will reduce the delay on most systems, but not eliminate it altogether. See also 'Known bugs: Changing maps delay'.
An ongoing list of registry values for WotW and what they mean is being kept at: http://members.tripod.com/~fbjor/games/wowreg.htm by fbjor.
I've played the game a lot of times and it's easy now. How can I make it more difficult?
1) Stop building defenses with your sappers/diggers and only fight with your vehicles.
2) Build a very good foundation for the AI by building lots of resources, etc, then switch sides for a comeback. (see Cheats section)
I'd like to collect some of these scenarios and post them to the FAQ site for people to download - hopefully people can build some massively fortified defensive structures and be a bit tricky with their sector layouts to make it interesting.
3) Change these values in WotW's Tweaks folder in the registry: AI Retain Force: 0.05 (default 0.2000000) AI Outnumber Force: 1.500000 (default 1.1) AI strength table Martian Multiplier: 9.000000 (default 3.000000) AI strength table Human Multiplier: 4.000000 (default 1.000000)
AI Outnumber force is the ratio to have in attack force before entering it. So 1.1 means "have 110% of a sectors strength before entering it. This is the strength numbers including multipliers. I find a raw force of 1.5 works best against my style of playing -you want the AI to enter a sector with enough force to finish the job. Adjust to taste.
AI retain force is the amount of force to retain in a sector when attacking. The default of 0.2 means after you get enough force to attack, leave 20% of it behind! No good. Put all AI forces into a frontal assault.
AI strength table multipliers: When the computer plays these sides, make them this much stronger. So while the Martians are by default 3x as strong as the humans, we're now making the AI 9 times as strong.
4) Since the humans rely on swarming with their numbers, you can also play with setting these values when playing human: Max Boats in Sector:2 (or even 1 if you don't use submarines) Max units in sector: 10 (or even try 7)
(Scott Hunter - shunter@cableregina.com) adds : A Right Honourable Challenge
If after coming to grips with the mechanics & rules you find the going too easy in War Of The Worlds, try this maneuver. Throughout your game, during combat, select a single group and right-click & hold to bring up the behaviour/special abilities menu, find the Roam & Attack command, and select it (pass the cursor over it and release). Do this for each group you have on the BattleMap until all are roaming about, attacking the enemy with all the skill of... the enemy.
You mustn`t do this with all of your combat groups selected at once, lest they *all* acquire the same target - we want a real firefight, a pitched melee to ensue. Each group will wander off in their own peculiar direction at their own intervals (as you command them), engaging the computer enemy on a more equal footing given the few A.I. detriments inherent in the game.
Poof: combat Chaos.
Besides, this way Human defenses may be brought to bear in a fair and balanced manner against real live players. Again, both sides are now operating under the same tactical intellect.
Will this work very well for human Human players and their Ironclads? Probably not, but you can control those directly anyway. (You know you want to.) Any special abilities will have to be manually administered, so player tactical interaction still figures into the equation. Abide by the combat results and play it out. As long as you maintain your discipline and do not interfere otherwise, you should have loads of fun. Try it!
Has anyone got the multiplayer options in the registry to work? Some, but not fully -we're still learning which registry entries are needed. As we progress I'm including how in this FAQ. Currently some people playing over the internet have said that multiplayer worked but that the game views got out of sync after a while with just "Enable Network Version" turned on. It's quite possible that sync problems can only be avoided by modem and serial line play, the internet being currently too lagged to allow decent play.
Other things that may need to be changed:
In networking: Messages Guaranteed: Set to 1 to stop out of sync problems? I am Human: Enable for Human player, or both players since they're human? Session Name: Change to a name that matches the game slot title ie. "War of the Worlds - "?
In 1.00.00 Game Frequency: default 30, may need to be set lower depending on network lag.
In System Game max time (ms): default 25 Again, may need to set higher depending on lag. Game min time (ms): default 20
More data from an early beta review at http://www.gamecenter.com/Peeks/Warworlds/warworlds4.html
Players looking for all-out slugfests between a lot of players on the Internet might be disappointed with The War of the Worlds. At the moment, plans are in place to only allow two players to compete head-to-head.
"We know we're going to get questioned on this a lot, but for right now, the focus on this title is on the single-player portion of the game," says Lewis. "The real-time portion of the game is so tightly interwoven into the strategic game that it shatters the experience to separate them, and the game is being designed and balanced for two forces, the humans and the Martians." He adds, "That doesn't mean that our plans are set in stone, but these are our priorities for right now."
More info:
Setting to "1" the "Enable network option" entry in the 1.00.00 registry gives some partially working code:
You'll now see a "Network campaign" option in the menu and the normal game is now called "Single player campaign".
If you're playing Human you get choose to either start a new network campaign or load a saved network campaign from the single player slots you had before. You then will be in receive mode. If you're Martian you are prompted for the method to connect to the other player. Unfortunately I don't have a second system to check out how well any of this works beyond this.
Also note that playing single player campaigns with the multiplayer registry entry on will not use the "SaveGame" directory, but will instead save the game as Human.000 (or Martian.000) in the main game directory path. Since these are used as the initial game files for the non-multiplayer game, be sure to back sure to make copies of Human.000 and Martian.000 into a safe directory before playing with this! (Worst case though, you can always re-install the game to restore these, or just copy them directly over from the top level of the game CD.)
Also, some games (like Total Annihilation: Kingdoms) are now only allowing internet play across direct TCP/IP connections in an attempt to avoid lag. Someone out there may want to try this.
Has anyone succeeded playing Martians vs. Martians or Humans Vs Humans muli-player? Not yet. Someone suggested the "I am Human" registry entry is there to allow this. It's a possibility.
Internet sites of interest: http://www/ezsf.net/pierce/wotw where to find updates to this FAQ http://www.gonegold.com/gguide/wotw.shtml has links to all reviews http://forums.gtgames.com/wow/ is a forum devoted to JWWotWs http://members.tripod.com/~fbjor/games/wow.htm is another page devoted to WotW http://members.aol.com/skyyeyes/wow.txt the original H.G. Wells novel, thanks to Project Gutenberg http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/ a fan site for all things WotW
Appendix I: Current Questions A hit list of questions I want the answers to!
Is it possible to reset the date in game files, and how? How to retrigger the pod drops into a saved game for a second invasion. How to legthen the pod invasion period of the game to give more pod drops to the Martians. How to get a successful two player game going? Is it possible to play Martian vs Martian or Human vs Human? Which way to tweak the registry research variables to speed up/slow down the research rates, for both player and the AI.
Appendix II: Known registry effects
Thanks to pearly@spencer-98.freeserve.co.uk, we now know that armour multipliers are used during actual building and vehicle creation. So if you up these values in the middle of a game, objects built before your change will all suddenly start smoking and appear damaged. Newly created objects will be okay, however.
EnhancedRayFocusMechanismMultiplier TightBeamMultiplier SecondaryBeamAmplifiersMultiplier Modifying these upwards will allow the martians to fire over a farther distance, but will also increase the objecting finding load on the targetting algs (they have to search a larger area). Pushing them to the point where the Martians were able to fire across a whole map crashed the game on for pearly.
AI Eff Threshold: Minimum efficency threshold the AI will allow. Unfortunately this is overrulled to build Command Centers (and Power Stations for Martians), as well as by the Frontline Attractors. The AI is not smart enough to move resource guzzling vehicles out of a sector where construction is proceeding at 5%, unfortuantely.
AI Frontline Attractor: While this does attract units to move twords the front line, I have yet to set this high enough to prevent the AI from having one vehicle per back sector, but it generally makes units above the one per sector minimum move forward to the lines. This may result in starvation of resources on your front, however.
AI Frontline Attractor for Defence: I believe this attracts sappers/building machines to be more likely to build defenses twords the front line, but has made little difference so far in observation. This may be because of resource starvation on the front.
AI Outnumber force is the ratio to have in attack force before entering it. So 1.1 means "have 110% of a sectors strength before entering it. This is the strength numbers including multipliers. I find a raw force of 1.5 works best against my style of playing -you want the AI to enter a sector with enough force to finish the job. Adjust to taste.
AI retain force is the amount of force to retain in a sector when attacking. The default of 0.2 means after you get enough force to attack, leave 20% of it behind! No good. Put all AI forces into a frontal assault.
AI strength table Martian Multiplier: (default 3) AI strength table Human Multiplier; (default 1) When the computer plays a side, make the units this much stronger. So while the Martians are by default 3x as strong as the humans, a more difficult game is with the AI 9x as strong.
AI Invasion Threshold PC: (default 150) Number of days to wait after the initial Martian pod drop before starting the invasion to the South. This is actually an important period where the Martian AI sets up infrastructure (like resource factories) that it otherwise wouldn't get to do. Possibly only produces construction and builder machines during this phase, and shifts to scout and fighting machines afterwards, haven't been able to confirm. Reduce this if you don't like the safe haven of the first year knowing they won't attack when playing Human.
wjschneider@hotmail.com added:
Another item you can change in Debug is "Edit Functionality". When this is on you can click on an enemy vehicle (either side) and direct its actions (including self destruct). You can blow up bridges and buildings too. I have noticed though if I am playing with the cheat for all research on, when I try to blow up a bridge the game boots out to windows.