Cool Stuff

Level 1 - The Space Walk

It's possible to drive your tank over the rocky edges of a level into open space! Here's how:
-Approach the 2 cannons at the end of level 1. Destroy the left one.
-Shoot the right one until he is one nuke from exploding: 8 shots or 2 nukes.
-Face the right canon, and back up. Drive near the right wall. When he's almost at the top of the screen, hit him with a nuke. Immediatly drive backwards and turn around the corner to your bottom right.
-If you've done it right, you'll end the level with a space walk!

Zero Second Time Bonus

-At the end of each level, you get 50 points for every second of unused time. If you can time it right, you can end a level with exactly 0 second left. Assault has a bug, much like the infamous Y2K problem. Instead of recognizing that 0 seconds is worth 0 points, it wraps the timer to its maximum value. On some levels this gives you a time bonus of 17,000!

Making things go away

The hardware board for Assault uses a CPU that's slightly underpowered. (Well, technically it's 4 underpowered CPU's.) For the larger levels with lots of enemy tanks, the game can slow down dramatically. To compensate for the slowdown, enemies distant from you disappear from the level. This distance is a little further than you can nuke when using the lift.

The implications of this on gameplay are:
-When using the lift, you wake up distant enemies. Some of them may start moving away from you, rapidly going beyond this limit. The result is that when you use the lift, you often won't see all of the enemies present on the level. Try playing level one with and without the lift- you'll always get a lower score with the lift. This is because there are fewer enemies left to shoot.
-Stuck on a hard level? Run away! If you run far enough, your problems will just go away.

Making things repair themselves

The same rules for making enemies go away also works on buildings and enemy rubble. When you move far enough away from rubble, it goes away, revealing the clean unharmed ground below. For buildings, this means they rebuild themselves. Sadly, buildings aren't worth any points. On one level (8?), there are small orange tanks hidden in small domes. These domes rebuild, and when shot the rebuilt tanks appear too! While this is only worth 100 points per tank, it makes for a cool trick.

Control when things appear

When you start a level, the Enemies aren't alive. They only wake up when you drive near them. This "near" distance ranges from half a screen to one and a half screens ahead of you. One exception is the lift- then you use it, everything in view suddenly wakes up.
The implications of this on gameplay are:
-Using the lift wakes up a LOT of enemies. Be carefull doing this on levels with enemies that fire missles. They time their shots to arrive when you decend from the lift.
-On the highter levels (9,10), the yellow tanks can be made to appear on command. Approach the edges of a level slowly, and you can make each wave of them appear on queue. It takes practice, but once mastered you can clean up on the points.
-Missles are triggered when you approach them. Considering their point value, it's well worth remembering where they are. Know when they're coming, and fire a nuke as soon as they start to appear.

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