Search And Destroy is an ongoing project of mine. It's a strategy game written in Java and inspired by Walter Bright's old war game Empire.  It's only in pre-alpha stages and it's not ready to play.  I've included it here so when I talk about it in my blog readers have access to it as reference point.


Game Basics

The goal of the game is simple, defeat the other players and gain control of all the cities on the map.   You start out owning one city that is initially producing armies.  As armies are produced, they appear and you can move them around and try and capture other cities.   Create Sea Transports or Air Transports to carry armies to new continents.  Create other units to defend against and or attack your opponents.



Moving Units:

Once you have create a unit you need to make it move.  The easiest way to do this is to click on the unit and drag the arrow that appears to the location you want the unit to move it.   You can drag the arrow into unexplored territory if you wish.

You can also use any of the navigation keys (Q, E, A, D, Z and C keys or the arrow keys, home, end, pgup, pgdn) to move the unit a single space.  If you want to make a long move via the keyboard you can press M and then use the navigation keys to move the arrow to the desired destination.   If you don't want to use the keyboard commands you can also select these commands from the units context menu or the main Order menu.

Special Moves.

Search and Destroy offers some convenience commands to make doing basic things easy.

    Explore: (X).  A unit will explore until it cannot reach any more unexplored territory.  For ships that means that will explore a long long time if you let them.
  
    Home: (H).  A unit will return to the nearest city owned by the player.   This is a good command for damaged ships or aircrafts that are low on fuel.

    Sentry/Load: (S)   Tell a unit to not move and hold it's position.   If the unit is a transport it will wake up automatically when it has a full load.

Transports:

Transports are the heart of the game.  Without using transports you can't move off the continent you start on.  You need to create transports in order to expand your empire.   Air Transports (Cargo planes) can only carry infantry, while Sea Transports can carry any mix of Armour and Infantry.  Air transports can only carry 1 infantry unit per mission while Sea Transports can carry a combined weight of 6 where infantry weigh 1 and armor weigh 2.


Unit Paths:

Assigning orders to individual units can get tedious.  One method you can use to automatically get units moving is to create Paths.   Paths can be created via the City menu 'Set Unit Path' option or by SHIFT-drag gesture that starts on an owned city.  A path tells all units that enter (or are created in) a city to move to the end of the path.   Paths can be specific to sea, air or ground movement and a city can have different paths for each movement type.  Paths can end at any location on the board.
  


Playing the Game:

If you have Java Web Start you can load the game by pressing the following icon.   In the current build you will play both sides of the battle - not very exciting I know, but the robot player still needs a lot of work.   You also can't save the game yet or change maps or do much of the stuff that you would want in a finished game.

Search and Destroy version 0.3


Changes since 0.2

Added lots of bug fixes for path finding, load/unload, exploration and such.
Added path support.
Added about dialog
Added menu bar and context menu

To Do

tons and tons.