Attack of the Cellular Automata

The computer game of Life (first created by Tom Conway) spawned the whole field of study of cellular automata. Will Wright used cellular automata to build SimCity. However, I always thought that it might be fun to fight a war with cellular automata. In this game, the playfield would be a standard array of cellular automata, and the two players would occupy opposite corners. The goal of the game is simple: destroy the enemy's fortress. You do this by launching gliders in his direction. He fends off your gliders with his own. Both of you have the ability to place standard units near your fortress. Gliders are one example; glider factories are another. But you can also place defensive units such as crosses and stars that act like temporary walls. The most important units you can place are "resource factories." These are very expensive, stable units that generate "resource points." These resource points are spent every time you place a unit; if you don't have any resource points, you can't place any units. So you must build and protect your resource factories.

Using standard game of Life rules, the defense would always have a large advantage over the offense, so some tweaks would be necessary to balance the system. There are plenty of ways to do this. One design solution would be to permit players to modify the rules of individual cells by hitting them with special weapons. For example, one could build a "bomber glider" set to detonate after a specified number of generations; when it explodes, all the cells within the blast radius are modified in such a way as to prevent enemy activity from taking place in those cells for a set period of time. Players could thereby build a safe channel that could be traversed by their own gliders only.

Bomber gliders could affect their targets in a variety of ways. The basic rules of cellular generation could be altered to render an area dead or overproductive. A dead area blocks activity, while an overproductive region generates lots of dangerous radiation.