Introduction The Game The Clash of Civilizations is a computer strategy game that will sketch out pretty much the whole of history in game form. From its inception, the player will guide his civilization while making decisions about every aspect of its development. You've seen that before, of course, but one of the main goals of this project is to require less micro-management from the player (it will remain optional). One benefit of this would be the 4-hr game where you'd go from antiquity to the present while making only broad decisions. These might vary from player to player, but would include your civilization's diplomatic stance, economy, culture, government, and overall military strategy. Our goal is to develop a fast, entertaining, and realistic game which also gives players the option to "drill down" into any area they choose, there to exert a fairly fine level of control. Further setting Clash apart from others in the genre, truly our "Holy Grail", is a sophisticated AI far superior to that available in the commercial games. This version of the game is a demo of design concepts, it is not the completed version, but despite having bugs, it is playable. The design of the game is likely to change for later versions, but we are currently testing out ideas to see if they work and whether we should continue to improve them, or if we should replace them with something else. If you have any comments on Clash of Civilizations, then please post a message in our forums, which are available at http://clash.apolyton.net/ This manual is still quite brief and for later versions I will try to make it more comprehensive by adding tutorials and other features which would help the player, but a lot of these ideas won't come about until the later versions of the game. If you have any ideas for things that you would like to see included in this file, please e-mail me at chris.wilkinson@excite.com What's New in Demo 4 Isometric View Unit Graphics Improved AI New Toolbar Buttons Power Rings Alternate Tilesets TF/Unit window Reduced Starting Forces Ownership Marker Fixed Certain Bugs Bugs Known Bugs Tiles occasionally overlap each other. General Graphical problems. Crashing of the game. Error Messages - Please ignore these. As Clash of Civilizations is still in its infancy, there are a number of bugs in the game, but most of them are non-fatal (except that the game usually crashes after about 500 turns), so they can be ignored. If you encounter a bug, please don't contact us as the framework of the game is going to be re-designed, the there is no point fixing bugs in code which is going to be rendered obsolete. Workarounds If you don't have a TF with a white box, and there are still TFs to move, hit the 'w' key. If things aren't working, try hitting the one-turn button and see if that fixes it.