Rules.ini: A Cautionary Tale

A Soviet Base
In The Middle of Somewhere
1429 Hours

Two workers were taking a brief break in the War Factory when another order came in over the loudspeaker above the assembly floor.

"Comrade General requests another War Miner!" it bellowed, echoing throughout the up-to-then quiet building.

"Eh, he must be having trouble with the enemy chasing them down," commented one worker. He and his friend took their places along the assembly line. Between them, the chassis of a War Miner descended from the ceiling, coming to rest just above the floor. The workers began attaching the various parts to it in order: engine, crew cabin, then the chaingun, the ore container, the axles and wheels, and, finally, the tracks.

The worker that had made the previous comment pressed a nearby button to signal the unit had been finished. However, this particular War Miner left the factory at a speed approaching 450 miles an hour, the resulting displacement of air tearing some of the machinery off the walls, and blowing some of the workers back off their feet. Also, in its wake, the Miner left flaming skidmarks on the factory floor, leading out and onto the grass, which also caught on fire. That fire was short-lived, as some of the nearby Tesla Troopers extinguished it with some unlucky Conscripts.

One of the workers picked himself up off the floor, jaw agape, and yelled, "What the hell was that?!"

Free of the factory, the War Miner tore through the base, killing at least three Flak Troopers, and turning a Rhino into an unwitting ramp. The Miner flew through the afternoon air, over the base Radar, and executed a picture perfect landing, after which it tore off into the plains outside the base and towards the nearest ore field. When it arrived, it began gathering the golden globs from the earth, as usual. It kept gathering…and gathering…and gathering…until it had completely stripped the immediate ore field bare. Instead of returning to the refinery to offload its riches, however, it moved at its flaming speed towards the next nearest ore field, and proceeded to completely exhaust that one, as well.

Sixteen ore fields later, the War Miner returned to base, killing six Conscripts and knocking a Flak Track into the barracks like a bowling pin. It backed into the ore refinery to offload, which took the usual time, except this particular shipment put 1,920,495 Credits into the glorious Comrade General's war fund. It again tore through the base, ravenously searching for more ore to mine…

An Allied Base
In The Middle of the Same Somewhere
1437 Hours

A perplexed Guardian GI, deployed and waiting for a Soviet attack, was having quite a time trying to figure out what the hell his commander was doing. You see, the GI was looking upon the 27 War Factories that the commander had ordered constructed, all of which were pumping out at least 12 Chrono Miners per minute. These Miners were directed to wait at the far corner of the base; at least 250 of them had gathered there already.

At that immediate moment, a Soviet tank column entered the base, and the GI began firing his anti-tank missiles, forgetting his perplexities with the Miners. However, one Rhino managed to get through the outer perimeter, and advanced on the herd of Chrono Miners, expecting some easy kills and quick promotions. However, when the Rhino got close, all of the gathered Miners fired a prism beam from some invisible something above their chronospheres.

When this prism beam converged on the Rhino, it began to glow, dimly at first, but then with a fierce white light. After a few seconds, the glowing Rhino imploded upon itself, leaving nothing but a small cube of dense, compressed metal that made a dent in the ground where it landed.

The Guardian GI had, by this time, finished to see the Chrono Miners implode the errant Rhino. Without warning, these Miners were suddenly ordered to move out.

Unfortunately, as they all lumbered towards the base entrance, the Soviet War Miner came flying through the herd, stalking an ore field on the other side of the Allied base. The Chrono Miners all tried to fire on the enemy harvester, with less than successful results; their beams tore holes in the Airforce Command Center, blew the Weather Control Device in half, turned the Chronosphere into Swiss cheese, and a final, last ditch salvo, with all of them firing at once at the quickly retreating Soviet speed demon, instead ended up bathing the Construction Yard with an untold amount of Prism power, quickly imploding the unlucky building into something resembling a large, decorative paperweight.

The Chrono Miners were directed to chase after the Soviet harvester, and so they did, but they were simply no match for the ungodly speed of it. Whenever they got close – that is, whenever the War Miner stopped to grab more ore – they'd fire upon it, only to be foiled by its devastating agility. They chased it into the nearby city, where they finally surrounded it next to a field of fifteen inactive Oil Derricks. Tasting victory, the Chrono Miners fired at the hapless Soviet machine simultaneously, and finally connected.

However, the boxy nature of the War Miner deflected some of the Prism energy – not enough to save it, mind you, as it was turned into a Volkswagen Beetle – but enough to strike the nearby Derricks.

The resulting explosion had a few interesting effects, such as setting every civilian within five miles ablaze, and also blowing out the windows of every building in the city. The most peculiar effect, however, was probably that the thirty closest Chrono Miners were literally blown into next Tuesday, where they landed in the Soviet base that had been built there the previous Friday, and were subsequently slaughtered like farm animals.

Back in the present, the remaining Chrono Miners were sent into low-Earth orbit, where they continued to rain down on the Allied and Soviet bases for several hours like some sort of meteor storm from hell. Every time one of them struck the ground, its mighty Prism beam would fire, turning a Grizzly into a buffalo or a Tesla Tank into a butterfly.

After the war, the victorious Allies met to investigate this odd disaster, and their final report had but one suggestion:

When you edit the rules.ini file, you better know what the hell you're doing.