The Engineer Pull

(and other tips)

You can use your engineers to draw away some viruses from an undesirable location. This can be either used to clear out an area (although this can be tricky), or to bolster your troops. Basically, you move an engineer near some viruses, when you see nearby viruses move towards it, control your engineer to move away to a spot where you have laser-toting Darwinians. The Darwinians will kill the viruses following your engineer, and the engineer can then collect the souls. The trick is to not pull too many, or you risk getting your engineer destroyed. You can do this to pull the viruses from virtually any spot on the map. They'll follow through water, over hills, anywhere. Once they've locked on, you can take them wherever you want, for whatever purpose. Rather than order your Darwinians into a mob of viruses away from your incubators (and engineers), have the mob come to you on terrain you control.

I'll add some more tips later. In the meantime, feel free to post your own!

Set up a route with officers and don't bunches of Darwinians around so as soon as they are released from the incubators they can be off on their way to the safe area without any help from you.

When I first found a virus following me across the water I thought it was a bug. Surely the viruses shouldn't be able to go on water?

Sure they can. So do spiders, and all the other stuff. When they sense a target, they go after it, no matter where it goes. Don't think that a little bit of virtual water is going to save you.

Some upgrade tips:

1. Grenades and lasers. More range means more time to react to changing situations and hit things without drawing too much enemy attention. Get these upgraded at least once as soon as you can.
2. Engineers. They carry more souls, but this can be a problem in areas that are especially hot. Sometimes you just want to grab a few souls and not lose your engineer, rather than spend a lot of time in enemy controlled area and lose a big load of souls. I'd recommend not upgrading these right away. Wait to upgrade them to a bit later on.
3. Darwinians. If they can protect themselves, this is a GOOD thing. Even when they have grenades, they may kill a few of themselves, but they'll also get that nasty spider after a few hits. Frankly, getting the Darwinians lasers would be the first upgrade I'd make.
4. Officers. I'd actually recommend not upgrading these all the way. I've found the last level to be fairly worthless. So your officers has a shield. Big deal, you also have fewer soldiers. Also, if you're not careful about issuing orders, you may end up getting one very well shielded officer and no troops.
5. Airstrike. A good one to upgrade at least once, but probably not right away.
6. Squadies. UPGRADE. Almost more important than upgrading the weapons they use. More squadies mean more firepower, regardless of range. They also maintain effectiveness longer because there are more of them.
7. Rockets. If you actually find a lot of use for them, you should upgrade their range. It starts out fairly pathetic, I think. I rarely find that I use rockets though.
8. Task Manager. I recommend upgrading it at least once, ASAP. It's up to you if you go any further. It's good for some of the later levels to have many engineers.
9. Armor. Range is good. In the later levels, you'll want lots of range.

Guy, on Apr 2 2005, 05:56 AM, said:

When I first found a virus following me across the water I thought it was a bug. Surely the viruses shouldn't be able to go on water?
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The reason this was implemented was because people could use engineers to lead mass quantities of viruses into the water and to their death. I thought they should've just had them not follow into water, but instead they did it this way.

mrxak said:

7. Rockets. If you actually find a lot of use for them, you should upgrade their range. It starts out fairly pathetic, I think. I rarely find that I use rockets though.

I find rockets incredibly useful when facing soul destroyers, ant nests and spam, but that might be just me.

I'd recommend upgrading rockets at least once or twice.

Andcarne's mouse button fix is very usefull. It makes it so the left button is for movement, while the right is for action / shooting / etc...

Andcarne, on Apr 1 2005, 03:55 AM, said:

Open ~/Library/Applications Support/Darwinia/full/preferences.txt (~ means your home directory) and change the line:

ControlMouseButtons = 1

to

ControlMouseButtons = 2

That will disable the single mouse button controls. I do think it might be a good idea to have a checkbox in the in-game options screens.
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Guy, on Apr 2 2005, 02:05 AM, said:

To fire secondary, left-click while holding the right button.
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Andcarne, on Apr 2 2005, 08:22 PM, said:

I find rockets incredibly useful when facing soul destroyers, ant nests and spam, but that might be just me.

I'd recommend upgrading rockets at least once or twice.
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Am I doing something wrong, or do non-upgraded rockets have almost no firing range, and always damage the squad that fired them?

You're correct. Non-upgraded rockets suck. But when you get them upgraded, I find they're great.

I found that you can do insanely well in the second level by upgrading the Darwinians once and officers once... The officer research isn't really guarded, so an engineer can just grab it. Also, you can just skip your engineer around the first bunch of viruses to get to the incubator. Get a squad, and do the leading trick a bunch of times.

Once you get a bunch of Darwinians under your command, you can quite easily take the rest of the level. Just remember the squaddies for the egg-layers. I had a whole ton of guys at the end... but I found out that you should never, never change the direction of a radar dish while guys are in transit... even if it's the one on the other side.

But that's a different story...

Yeah, breaking the link is never fun. I've done that by accident a few times.

Note: Make sure to deselect control of a radar dish before you try to do anything else ;).