<lmargin%:5><rmargin%:95><font:Arial Bold:20>Battle Mode
<font:Arial:14><spush><font:Arial Bold:16>General Information<spop>
Once you have prepared your team or platoon, you can test it in battle against the CPU or a human opponent. There are two types of battle modes in NERO 2.0: Destruction and Territory Control. To access the battle mode against the CPU, select "Single Player" and then "Sandbox Battle", and configure the teams and the arena. To access the multiplayer battle mode, select "Host" or "Join" from the Mutliplayer menu.
 
<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Single Player Battle":<spop> This option allows you to play play against the computer in single player mode.  You select a battle arena and assign a blue team (your team) and red team (the computer's team).  You can also set a battle type: "Destruction" means an untimed game, while "Territory" starts a sandbox Territory Mode game.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Host Battle":<spop> In this mode, you will advertise your game on the network, for play over a LAN or the internet.  As in the "Sandbox Battle" mode, you can choose an arena and team, as well as set battle options.  You can choose a name that will be displayed when you chat during battle (using the "u" key).  Note that when you click "Begin," your server IP address is sent to the Master Server on the internet, and can also be seen by other computers on your LAN as a NERO game host.  Your game will wait for someone to join either from the internet or the LAN.  The teams will not appear until someone joins the game, at which point both players must press "Begin" to commence the battle.  You will be the blue team.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Join Battle":<spop> In this mode, you can choose the team you want to send to battle and the name you want to appear in chat.  Note that the battle type and arena will be determined by the host.  When you first enter this mode, you will see an empty list box that can display a list of servers waiting for games.  If you press "Query LAN," you will get a list of NERO servers on your LAN.  If you click "Query Master," you will get a list of NERO servers waiting for opponents on the internet.  The list includes information on the type of game (e.g. flag or no flag and the arena) hosted on each server.  Once you find a game you want to join, select it and click on the "Join Server" button.  At that point, you are transferred to the battle arena chosen by the host (the arena was displayed in the list), and both you and your opponent must press "Begin" to commence the battle.  You will be the red team. Note that NERO will not display servers with newer versions of NERO than your own. Therefore, please check nerogame.org for updates to make sure you have the latest version.

In battle, the movement controls are the same as in training. At the top of the screen, you can see the number of remaining soldiers each team has next to the team names. The battle is over when one team's population reaches zero or when time runs out in a timed game.  The team with the most robots left standing is the winner.  You can determine the damage of each robot by observing the brightness of its corresponding ring on the ground:  the darker the ring, the more damaged the robot is. A stat screen pops up at the end of battle displaying the final score.  You can click on the "Red" or "Blue" tabs to get specific stats for individual robots, such as their accuracy and how many enemies they hit.  Since stats are shown for specific brain ID's, this information can be used to determine your best robots, who can then be assembled in "Create Team" mode into even better teams.

Battle is a chance to see how training paid off.  Failures or surprises among your troops can give you ideas for better training in the future.  For example, if they won't go to the flag in a room full of walls, you may realize that you should have trained them with a flag and walls together, and you can go back and do it next time.

Players in battle can chat: press "u" to chat.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>Battle Maps<spop>
There are several included maps intended for battle:
<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Shadow Grove"<spop> in which a large wall separates the warring armies;
<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Mountain Pass"<spop> in which the armies have to deal with large obstacles;
<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Sunken City"<spop>, a desolate urban landscape with several pieces of wreckage serving as obstacles;
<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Andrian Arena"<spop> in which the armies have to deal with various obstacles;
And <spush><font:Arial Bold:16>"Virtual"<spop> maps which are intended for training, but can be used for battle.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>IMPORTANT- Firewalls and Network Play:<spop>
If you want to host a game over the internet through a firewall, you will need to give NERO permission to access the network.  NERO uses ports 28000 and 28002 to send UDP packets over the internet.  Make sure that both your software firewall and, if playing behind a router, that your router's firewall allows UDP traffic through these ports.  If you are hosting behind a router, you might also have to forward these ports to your computer.  More information about port forwarding and your specific router can be found at www.portforward.com.

<spush><font:Arial Bold:16>Battle Demos<spop>
For examples of armies trained on a specific map, pit any of the included Grove armies against one another in "Shadow Grove", and see the different tactics each member of our programming team came up with. BR-Trung-deathfromafar was the overall winner. Other examples of training include pitting an avoiding team versus an aggressive team or an aggressive team versus an aggressive team. We have included a selection of pretrained sample armies for you to play against or further train.