The 150 maps in Liquid War 5 create slightly different strategies. You frequently have multiple ways to move and, consequently, multiple ways to be attacked. The default Liquid War stage (called “genuine” by the game) is a great example it’s built out of pipes, alcoves, and obstacles, creating places for liquids to seep through, clog up, and fight around each other. Most maps generally have more going on – more interesting geometry to navigate your cursor around. On a wide-open map, a liquid war is a big frantic rush to clobber each other with little room for creativity, like a bunch of lions fighting in a coliseum. To really rough up another liquid, you need to attack it from multiple angles, forcing it to spread out and thin out. If two liquids hit head-on, they stop, thicken, and clot, causing a stalemate.

That’s easier when the liquids are thinner and moving around. When two liquids collide, they try to consume each other. Since those earliest versions, Liquid War has had the same core strategy. (This post is based on version 5.6.3, the penultimate release, because the final release has a strange graphics issue.) Liquid War 5, possibly the first good version, debuted in 1998 and stayed in development for about a decade before Manduit started on Liquid War 6. Thomas Colcombet (Thom-Thom) created the first prototype of Liquid War in 1995 as a programming test for character path-finding his friend Christian Manduit expanded on it, though by his own admission earlier versions were unstable and nearly unplayable. Liquid War started as the generic strategy game it resembles at first glance. (Maybe it’s more like those web games where you play with a fountain of powder.) It gets the beats of a big battle in the simplest terms, mixed with the weird sensory experience of being a puddle of goop. You control a liquid made up of hundreds of particles, fighting against other liquids. Liquid War 5 totally embraces that reduction and runs with it. In a way, it boils the strategy game genre down to its most basic pieces – fighting dots. At such a large scale, whether set in ancient Rome or a distant planet, any battle will look like thousands of multicolored dots running around. The minimap in a strategy game shrinks a huge war into the size of a small window.

Liquid war online