It’s been a long road, but finally after 2 years of alternately being lazy, and slaving away at every waking moment, IT”S HERE!

Thanks to Lurker (Lua Gadgetry), KDR11k (Lua Gadgetry), [RoX]John (Loadscreens), Zoombie (Story), Google_Frog (Testing and mex widget), [CA]Fox (Testing), and various other members of the community for their participation and support!

About the game:

On the planet I’ammas, a form of space/time warping has been perfected, allowing the I’ammans to travel from the surface of their planet to the most distant stars. However, the I’ammans were divided when it came to how to use these new machines, called “Central Processing”.

The Terrestrialists believed that if I’ammas could bring forth intelligent life, the rest of the universe could as well. What if, a Terrestrialist would say, we made contact with these races and found they had a greater military than us? Why risk it when we can stay home and be safe.

Explorers took an opposite approach. They pointed out the declining resources of I’ammas, the scarcity of resources on the other planets of their star system. They wanted to expand and to explore.

One day, a massed exodus of the Explorers took place. Quietly, a third of the population of I’ammas left. The bottom dropped out of the stock market. The government reeled under the economic crash. Inflation shot through the roof. And the Terrestrialists were left on I’ammas, a bitter people who looked for a scapegoat.

The Explorers found a distant world they named New I’ammas. Plague ran rampant after a few years of settlement and many Explorers started thinking that leaving the homeworld was a bad idea. But, still, they pushed forward. New colonies were founded and the Explorers entered a golden age as the plagues were controlled and beaten, then forgotten.

Then they bumped against the Xenos. The Xenos were quadrupedal aliens that lived on a resource rich world. They had just started fighting their first truly industrial war: Tanks, trucks, airplanes and crude atomics. But they were no match against the Explorers, who started to fight against the Xenos. Later, Explorer historians would claim the Xenos fired first.

Meanwhile, the Terrestrialists found a leader that could guide them out of recession and into glory. Gend, a quick thinking and intelligent woman who quickly maneuvered to the top of the Terrestrialist council. Within a few years, she had wrangled up a makeshift exploration program and military, partially to defend them against the imagined hostile aliens the Terrestrialists assumed lived throughout the galaxy and partially for payback against the Explorers.

The Terrestrialists jumped to a planet they hoped would have resources. What they found were Xenos. They fought. And then the Terrestrialist and Explorer forces bumped into one another. Someone fired first. And the war, fueled by a little more than two decades of bitterness and a moment of misunderstanding, was started.

How do I play Evolution RTS?

As the storyline tells, both sides are the same race who took largely different paths technologically after the split. The Terrestrialist opted for speed and precision, whereas the Explorers took after brute force and crushing, decisive, domination. The gameplay for each side is completely different in terms of “How it’s done”. There are a few distinct things you will notice immediately upon starting the game.

First and foremost, there is no commander. You start out with a minibase. This minibase has all the bare essentials for building a full scale base. Included in the minibase are, 2 solars, 1 factory, 2 engineers, 3 medium laser platforms, 3 basic antiair towers. You will notice fairly quickly that at the start of the game your metal income is 0, which means that you should put up a Metal Extractor before anything else. At first your economy will not support the building of more than one or 2 units. Suggested would be a 3rd engineer or perhaps a lighttank for scouting. Factories have a constant resource drain of 11.1 Metal/100 Energy no matter what is being built. Engineers have a constant drain of 7.5 Metal/ 65 Energy. You can use this as a guage of what you can afford. The game comes stock with it’s own GUI which has been optimized to show the maximum of beneficial things while still being easy to navigate.

When you have selected a factory you will notice that you have quite a large list of things that can be built. The things at the top of the list are generally basic tanks (Light, Medium, Heavy). These are the lifeblood of your army. It is very important to back up heavy or specialized units with a mix of these tanks. Failure to do so may cause you some anxiety as you watch your newly constructed (and very expensive) battletank get massacred because it did not have any units defending it. Units lower on the list have very specialized purposes and are generally quite a bit more expensive, be careful not to rely on any one tank class to win your battles for you. Each tank has a specialized purpose and is not suited for all roles on it’s own. Another thing to note is that all tanks make using of Anti-Gravity technology, so crossing bodies of water is not a problem.

The Default GameMode is Tug-o-War. In this mode each team is awarded a certain amount of tickets, after a preset amount of time 3 points moving randomly about the map can be captured. Capturing one of the points will cause your enemies tickets to countdown more quickly. The object of the game is to get your enemy to zero tickets at which point, you win the game. The other score modes that are available are countdown and multidomination. Countdown, each side is given a set amount of tickets, the more control points you hold, the slower your tickets will count down. The object is to cause your enemies tickets to hit zero, at whcih point you win the game. MultiDomination, Capture all 3 points on the map and hold them for 30 seconds and you score 100 points. First team to 1000 points wins. These gamemodes can also be tweaked and adjusted as well as disabled completely via the modoptions settings in the lobby.

Terrestrialists:

As a Terrestrialist general you need to understand that precision and surgical strikes are the key to winning an encounter with Explorer forces. Your units are faster and pack more punch than Explorer forces, however that comes at the price of not having much armor. Your army is a precision instrument much like a scalpel as opposed to the bludgeon that the Explorers prefer to use. If you use your army right, you can slice the Explorer forces to pieces.

Nearly every killed unit drops an AmmoBox. These ammoboxes can be instantly reclaimed by simply moving an engineer close to them. This is a great way to bolster your stored resources quickly and effeciently. Do not try to stand toe to toe with Explorer Heavy forces, this is a waste of resources and will cause your army to be crushed very quickly. You will need to take note of the units available to you and their specialized roles. For example the Omega Spider. The Omega causes an emp effect, knocking out the electronics in other tanks for a short time. Omegas are essential when dealing with the heavier units in the Explorer arsenal.

As a General rule, Terrestrialist forces have longer range, the downside is the fact that Terrestrialist forces use mostly energy weapons resulting in a lack of long range ballistics. This means that in many cases you need an unobstructed line of sight to your target to be the most effective.

The Terrestrialist Airforce is deadly effective when compared to the Explorer Airforces. In particular bombers (Carpet bombers) and gunships work wonderfully as point defense vs raids.

The Engineers also have access to a few very useful tools to help protect yourself vs Explorer raids, for Example: Mines. These light mines pack a punch and are great for whittling down the heavier Explorer units so that they may be dispatched with ease.

Explorers:

As an Explorer general you need to understand that brute force and crushing blows are the key to winning an encounter with Terrestrialist forces. Your units are Slower and and can take much more punishment than Terrestrialist forces, however that comes at the price of a slower reaction time. Your army is a Sledgehammer poised to crush the lesser Terrestrialist forces. If you use your army right, you can obliterate the Terrestrialist army like an annoying mosquito.

Nearly every killed unit drops an AmmoBox. These ammoboxes can be reclaimed, or you can spawn a small gunship drone by simply moving an engineer close to them. This is a great way to cause havoc in your enemies ranks by distracting and effective raiding. When possible it is always a good idea to flank the lesser Terrestrialist forces and close with them using your heavier might to obliterate them. You will need to take note of the units available to you and their specialized roles. For example the Spas riot tank. Slow moving and very slow aiming, some generals have complained, but that complaining stopped immediately once they noted the destructive force of it’s shotgun styled fire. The Spas is designed as a defensive unit, but with good generalship, can be used as a devistatingly effective offensive weapon. It’s 5 shots spread out and cause massive concussionlike force to strike the lighter Terrestrialist units. If you can fire a Spas into a mob of Terrestrialist units, you will learn the true definition of “Crowd Control”.

Unlike their Terrestrialist foes, Explorer forces rely mainly upon ballistic weaponry, as such, fortified positions can be bombarded into submission fairly easily via Lobster artillery tanks. Additionally these artillery units can be told to use High-Trajectory which is infinitely useful when needing to shoot over a large obstruction (for example, a hill).

The Explorer airforce is fairly medeocre at the base level, but medeocrity stops there. At the upgraded level, Explorer Airforces can take an incredible amount of punishment and still return home. This is something to remember when you are facing an opponent using a lot of antiair emplacements.

Explorer forces have an extremely useful ability in the fact that many units can morph into larger, more heavily armored versions of themselves even while on the battlefield. Be sure to use heavy units when at all possible. Terrestrialist forces aren’t so worrysome when all they can do is scratch the paint.

Where do I download the game?!

The latest versions of the game are always available by following this link: http://evolutionrts.info/evolutionpatches

You will need to download all files listed (Always the latest) and place them in the mods folder of your spring installation. It has been reported that Archivemover will occasionally report a file as corrupted. Rest assured the file is not corrupted, it is simply too large for Archivemover to handle. Future non-milestone releases will generally be made in mutator format, so that updating will only take a moment.