![]() I'm starting to get my head around some of this stuff, but it would still be weird to watch one of my battles, I suspect. Monster packs of different sizes move in different ways, for starters, and then there are buildings: walls and roads, taverns that attract packs, arsenals that give them weapons, catapults that fling them across the map. It doesn't always do what I want it to do.ĭeep down, the game revolves around understanding the simple rules that govern the behaviour of your automata - the simple rules that come together to create complex outcomes. Despite the objects I can place to guide them, I'm dealing with something that feels a lot like organic life here. ![]() The problem comes when I try to get them to attack the enemy. By and large, over the course of my first few skirmishes, I have had no trouble building up my troops. You do this by intermingling them, since packs of monsters that meet on the field will double their numbers, splitting off into separate packs when they reach a critical mass. Life often intervenes.Īutomata Empire is wonderful stuff: a game that's all about creating feedback loops as you try to turn a handful of automata into a gaggle, a gang, an overwhelming force. Automata Empire popped up on Steam the other day, and it turns Conway's Game of Life into a sort of RTS in which you, well, do what you generally do in an RTS: build your forces and crush the enemy. Some never emerged at all.Īll of which, I think, makes the case that the zero-player game was never really a zero-player game. Some sort of fell into it and spent decades sounding out its depths, only to emerge, blinking, into a world that no longer valued tie-dyes quite so highly. This was a starting formation that would create gliders, or patterns that "would move across the screen, periodically reverting to the same shape." Conway offered $50 to the inventor - or discoverer? - of the first glider gun, but even without that incentive people needed little encouragement to spend their time rooting around in Life. For years, according to the brilliant write-up in Steven Levy's Hackers, the holy grail of Lifers was something called a "glider gun". Most often, your shape shifts and warps and inverts a few times and then starts to decay: most dribble away to nothing after a few generations. You plug in a starting shape and see what happens. It's been called a zero-player game.Ĭonway's Game of Life is fascinating to mess around with. ![]() Time passes, shapes emerge through simple interactions. John Conway is a British mathematician, and Life is a cellular automata - a spreadsheet, in essence, in which cells populate and depopulate depending on criteria such as the state of the cells that surround them. These are all elements of a strange game that tore a path through the hacking community in the early 1970s: LIFE, also known as Conway's Game of Life. Beehives, honey farms, spaceships, powder kegs.
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