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In this study, a method is proposed to obtain the initial voltage of the capacitor and the initial relative position of the projectile of a reluctance coil gun using a genetic algorithm to make the projectile launch at a specified muzzle velocity with high efficiency. Firstly, the equivalent inductance change during the launching process is used as a link for multi-physics field analysis, and a set of electromagnetic dynamics equations is derived to correct the effect of magnetic saturation on the inductance according to the current value in the coil. Further the set of equations is constructed as a Simulink discretized numerical computational program and called by a genetic algorithm written in MATLAB to approximate the optimal solution by generation-by-generation optimization. When the specified projectile muzzle velocity is set to 10 m/s, the initial voltage of the capacitor calculated using the genetic algorithm is 156 V, and the initial position of the projectile is −14.3 mm. We input the parameters into the finite element analysis model and the launch experiment platform, and the obtained projectile muzzle velocity is 9.67 m/s and 9.8 m/s respectively, and the efficiency is close to the optimal value, also the comparison of voltage and current waveforms also shows that the method proposed in this study is effective.INDEX TERMS reluctance coil gun, equivalent inductance, genetic algorithm, specified muzzle velocity, launching efficiency.