"Memrrtiks, Suashem: The Missing Manual". Press Z to start playing. You control a black tractor-shaped thing. Your goal is to shoot and avoid the black ghost-shaped enemies. Your ship shoots constantly in the last direction you moved, unless you hold down Z to "strafe". Ghosts appear in groups of 2 to 6 and home in on you. Square "ripples" will show you where the ghosts are about to appear. It can be hard to tell the center of the ripples, but there are only a few patterns and you'll come to recognize them. After four groups, you'll see an INCOMING warning, and there will be a stampede of lots of little ghosts or a few giant ghosts crossing the screen. As far as I can tell, there's no indication of which direction(s) the stampede will come from. The next wave of ghosts will appear while the stampede is still crossing, so keep an eye out for their ripples. When you get a high score, your score number will be superimposed on top of the screen, making the game much more difficult.
(4) When new towns are needed, they spring up in a random location where there are trees, within a set distance from an existing town. At the same time, a road is created following the shortest path to the nearest towns. (5) People tend to walk between nearby towns either by following the same path the last person took (like ants) or by following a road. (6) If you build a map with two towns a long distance apart, a lot of your population will die from setting out down the road to visit the other town and starving before they get there. (7) As well as eating, people will only reproduce in a town. (8) A town with Population 0 tends to get struck by a meteorite. (9) If you press B, your town will turn blue and the people will stop building new towns. This sometimes breaks the expansion and starvation cycle that otherwise usually takes place. (10) "The disease" is just old age.
Here is what I've learned about the behavior of people, mostly by experiment on maps filled with nothing but Trees. (1) First and most important TREES = FOOD. The people seek out Tree terrain, chop down the tree leaving Grass 2 terrain, then carry the tree back to the nearest town, where it becomes food. If you destroy all the cities with meteors, but manage to leave some people alive who were out foraging, they'll move along the map continuing to harvest trees, but eventually die of starvation because they have no place to eat. (2) If your people are starving, it's because they've harvested all the trees they can reach. Grass 2 will randomly grow into Tree, but left to their own devices people will reproduce and consume trees faster than they can regrow. (3) People build new Towns when there are no more Tree squares to harvest within range of their current town. Building new towns is actually a sign of resource depletion, rather than population growth.
I think in the single player mode, the timer should count UP rather than DOWN. And your final points should be based on how long it took you to clear 95% of the ore on the screen.
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