N.E.R.O (Yet another obscure game find.)

[Eilim]

While needing a Roboforge fix and browsing their forums (another obscure game I'd pimp if it wasn't abandoned to obscurity at this point.), I ran into a link to this site NERO. Home of the game "Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives".

Probably not a game for everyone, but its definetly hooked me as of now. While I'm a an admitted sucker for battling AI games, this one is a bit different. Instead of having to program/script the AI, you have to teach and "breed" your soldiers.

After about 15 minutes I've finally gotten my soldiers to somewhat track enemies through a obstacles and attempt to engage at a distance. If I could only get them to avoid fire without them going completely insane I'd be all set.

I really don't know how to explain this one very well, and can only say check out the link and give it a shot if your into the more esoteric games. Who knows, maybe if enough people like it we could get a little FOFC tourney going.

[hukarez]

Is this along the vein of Omerta and X-Kings? I haven't had much time to go through the link yet (at work).

[Eilim]

Nope, not a web based mmorpg.

Its more like RobotWars or Tankwars (minus the scripting) or better yet, Darwinbots.

Its sort of a 50/50 split between game and intellectual exercise.

Your "soldiers" are a programmed artificial intelligence that starts very basic and is trained via positive/negative response.

During training you set the "lifespan" of your soldiers. During their lifecycle they get points based on meeting parameters you set. When the lifecycle is over, and a soldier dies a new one is "born". Over time, the newborn soldiers inheret the traits of the highest point scoring soldiers of the previous generation.

Along with this happening naturally over time you are given some extra controls such as smite (removing a soldiers brain pattern/DNA from the gene pool.) and congregate (remove all soldiers and replace all with clones of the selected soldiers gene strand.) allowing you to have finer manipulation of the learning/evolution of your soldiers. Though this sometimes can have some bizare results.

I'm still just scratching the surface of training/gene manipulation at this point, but am having a blast with it. While sometimes you can really speed up things using the smite/congregate tools, you can also really mess your soldiers up and have to start over (luckily you have an undo congregate to save yourself if your not to click happy like I sometimes get.) and it seems some behaviors just take time to be trained. At which point I just get my training course set up, my behavioral modifiers set and send it to the background while browsing the web and let darwin's law run its course.

The game comes with I think 15 or so courses/battlefield presets and a similar number of precreated armies you can fight and train against. You also can merge soldiers from different trainings groups to create a army with more complexity, and even train them some more after the merging (say combining men trained as snipers with some mad chargers.). But the more you train them together, the more their behaviors will become similar.

Well, now that I've probably sent half the people reading this running in terror, and made the other half fall asleep... I can say I'm *really* getting into this game, but I'm a sucker for AI training/modification based games (I own all versions of the "creatures" series). Throw in the competitiveness of the head to head capabilities of the game and the hook is set.

[NevStar]

sounds interesting.

Vaguely reminds me of a C64 game from way back when. You had a tank that you wrote the AI script for. As I was only about 6 at the time, the best AI I could think of was for the tank to stay in one place until it scanned an enemy & then run the bombTheHellOutOf() subroutine.

I can't for the life of me remember the name of that one.

[Pumpy Tudors]

This game looks amazing to me. I'll give it a shot this evening when I have some time. I can't believe that I hadn't seen this thread before now.

[Eaglesfan27]

This games sounds very intriguing to me as well. I'm sure I'll try it sometime this weekend.

[Pumpy Tudors]

I just got started with NERO, but I like it. I'm training my guys to go around a wall right now. I think the next thing I'm going to try is training them to attack a moving target from a distance. This is really cool. Every army is different, and I'm looking forward to seeing what my guys can do against some other armies, once I've given my boys a little more training.

[Eilim]

Nevstar: I own a *bunch* of games like that. Had some for my old c-64, even have a cool game with the same concept for the playstation (Carnage Heart, I think it was called.) and probably about 5 or 6 CDs worth of commercial,shareware, and freeware games for the pc with the same type of gameplay. I just can't get enough of them. "Roboforge" was my favorite but the developers dropped off the face of the planet before squashing all the bugs. Heck, I think I might still have the source code lying around from when I tried to write one of my own games like that.

Eaglesfan27: Hope you enjoy the game. Its a somewhat slow developing game with regards to your troops training, but thats the nice thing about being able to run it in a window and just let it sit in the background while browsing the web or chatting on irc/IM.

Pumpy: One thing you want to remember is to set a milestone mark everytime you add a signifigant change to your training parameters/goals. If you don't, your troops can sometimes forget some of their earlier teachings.

Once you get to the point that you have decently trained troops of different disciplines and can mix them into a single squad you can get some really cool results.