How to manually create this so the game will actually launch? All the other files are confirmed to be where they should be.

Have you tried just doing this:
Do you have a link to this game?

Have installed the official version of the game (versus the one in Linux Mint's repositories) with the even weirder problem of it not running at all. Very strange stuff, unless I need to back down to the current stable version.

Boswars is the main site (that links to all the other data) and the game used to be known as "Battle of Survival" and one other name I don't recall ATM.

Can't figure out why the program hangs at the logo screen no matter what I do; have created the preferences.lua in the proper directory, but it still doesn't launch. Running it via the terminal (to get error and status messages the UI doesn't show) hasn't helped much past it still complaining about preferences.lua! You'd think a well-designed program would rebuild its preferences/settings file if it's missing or corrupted. LOL

Distros are provided so that most users can just install the software provided by the distro and use the software. If you adventure out into using non-distro packages then you're on your own. Usually when people go it alone they are comfortable with the idea and confident they can make it work. Oh and also have the time. I didn't have any problems with that software but I'm not on mint. Why not use the package provided by mint?

The reason I tried the newest one straight off the dev site (after the lack of success with the one in the repo, which was the one that hangs at the logo screen with the error that reports preferences.lua missing) was to see if their package contained all of the files. Apparently, not only does it not, it was also (bleh!) an incomplete snapshot that was stated to be the latest stable version. I did not download the development version from the author's site, but the stable version. That's what's gotten me a bit confused. You'd think the author site would get the file correct, yes?

To be fair, I've run into this problem (with author sites) before, where someone accidentally overwrote the latest stable version with an incomplete snapshot, and it was corrected pretty fast, so I'm merely disappointed, not angry. I am a big fan of the Command and Conquer series, and whilst OpenRA (which runs modified versions of the Red Alert missions) is out (and I have it) was interested in seeing what BOSWARS was all about, so it was a very big disappointment to discover that it did not work. Curiously, I ran across BOSWARS after having done some research into high-quality open-source RTS games. (Also have a copy of Warzone 2100, BTW; good game.)