1 .TH Introduction "An Overview of Empire"
2 .NA Overview "An Overview of the Game"
7 Empire is an military/economic simulation of make-believe
8 countries in a make-believe world.
9 The military part is emphasized.
10 The economic part is still there,
11 but as a prerequisite to a working military.
17 Each player is the ruler of a country.
18 As leader of your country,
19 you give commands that affect your country
20 (e.g., move people around,
21 re-designate sectors, etc).
22 You also handle all of your country's foreign policy.
24 Empire lets you get reports on the status of your country
25 (``info census'' and others),
26 find out what's going on in other parts of the world
28 and communicate with other countries
31 Although no goal is explicitly stated,
32 most players rapidly derive their own,
33 ranging from the mundane desire to be the biggest,
34 strongest country in the game,
35 to the more refined goals of
36 having the most efficient land use possible,
37 or having the lowest ratio of military to civilians while
44 Empire is played on a hexagonal map
45 partitioned into a rectangular grid of \*(iFM\*(pF\ \(mu\ \*(iFN\*(pF
46 sectors (where \*(iFM\*(pF and \*(iFN\*(pF are typically,
48 powers of two, usually 64, 128, or 256).
49 The world is made up of approximately
50 50% sea, 45% habitable land and 5% uninhabitable mountains.
52 Sectors can be assigned a specific sector type.
53 These types range from banks to nuclear fuel processing plants.
54 See ``info Sector-types'' for more detail.
56 Your personal coordinate system is based on your capital,
57 which is a type of sector.
58 Your capital is generally marked by the coordinates 0,\ 0.
64 The Empire world both does and does not match the real-time world.
65 To better explain this, let us examine the concept of an update.
67 At regular intervals (usually once per day),
68 the entire Empire world is updated.
69 When the world updates, new population is added,
70 ores are dug up and added to stockpiles,
71 food and other commodities are distributed to sectors,
72 the educational and technological levels are updated,
74 It can be thought of as the minimum quantum for growth.
76 On this time scale, an update could be considered
77 to be approximately one generation.
78 Thus the difference from the time scale of the real world.
80 However, certain commands are issued in real-time,
82 These commands have instantaneous effects on the state of your country.
83 Dedicated (or merely experienced) Empire players will often
84 log on to monitor their country.
85 And most attackers will wait until the small hours of the morning
86 to carry out their attacks, for obvious reasons.
88 If you do not log in to Empire,
89 any automatic policies you have set up will be carried out.
90 However, Empire will not try to fix any mistakes you have made;
91 unless you are very careful,
92 it's probably not a good idea to rely on these automatics.
95 Bureaucratic Time Units (BTU's)
98 To prevent the more fanatical Empire players
99 from staying logged on all the time,
100 Empire places a limit on the amount of time you may be logged in
102 This limit is settable by the deity, usually 1000 minutes.
103 If you run out of time, too bad!
104 You can't log in again until the counter resets itself
105 (usually at midnight).
107 The other control on the number of commands that you may issue
108 are called ``Bureaucratic Time Units'' or BTU's.
109 A BTU is an arbitrary amount of bureaucratic bookkeeping that
110 your government must spend to perform a certain function.
111 Most commands that are not merely informative cost BTU's.
113 BTU's are generated by your country's capital.
114 The more efficient your capital, the more BTU's that are generated.
115 The number of BTU's also depend on the game's settings.. See the
116 output of the 'version' command for an estimate of BTU generation speeds.
117 However, you may have a maximum of 512 BTU's at any one time.
118 And once your BTU's reach zero, you may not issue any commands
121 Three things to note about BTU's:
125 Since commands use up BTU's,
126 this limits the number of commands
127 that a player may issue over a particular time period.
128 This has the effect of preventing the Empire fanatic
129 from overruning other players with less free time to log on.
132 The build-up of BTU's is constant and does not depend on being
134 This allows players to participate when it is convenient rather
135 than at some fixed time
136 (such as most board games, or the stock market).
139 The BTU concept helps compensate for the fact that,
140 in concept, the governments of each country are always
141 ``playing'' although the player representing that country
142 may only log in periodically.
146 How long will a game take?
149 Probably from one to four months.
150 You should expect to spend one to four hours a day playing.
151 Also expect that if you do spend this amount of time playing,
152 your grades or work will suffer.
153 You just can't spend that much time playing and either
154 study or be productive.
157 What should I do now?
160 When a new country enters the game,
161 it starts out with an amount of money and two sectors.
162 These sectors are sanctuaries
163 and have an initial amount of people and commodities.
164 Until you \*Qbreak sanctuary\*U,
165 your country is effectively in stasis.
166 Nothing will change until you actually log in and
168 (such as designating a capital to begin accumulating BTU's).
170 The absolutely minimal set of information pages you should read are:
171 break, map, ann, wire, tel, read, expl, move, res, cen, dist, thresh, lev,
172 com, prod, budget, Sector-types.
175 A Comment from Peter S. Langston (the author of the original Empire game)
178 It should be remembered that Empire is merely an interesting pastime;
179 in the vernacular, \*Qit's just a game\*U.
180 There are many amusing stories of people
181 that took the game too seriously;
182 one tells of a corporate Vice President
183 who walked into the computer room and flipped the main
184 circuit breaker in order to stop an attack on his country;
185 another tells of the Harvard student
186 that refused to go to bed until everyone logged out of Empire
187 and of the other players who took turns staying up late....
189 While many players take Empire very seriously,
190 an equal number of players use it as a safe environment
191 in which they can act out their fantasies.
192 On occasion the fantasies involved are remarkably aggressive or hostile.
193 It has been my experience that the people with the most belligerent
194 countries are often the people with the kindest hearts;
195 anti-social game play doesn't necessarily reflect the \*Qtrue\*U
197 (or else I have some VERY weird friends).
203 The game \*QEmpire\*U is the most recent in a series
204 of territorial conquest, political/economic simulation games
205 initially inspired by a board game of the same name
206 played at Reed College (Portland, Oregon).
207 Earlier versions were written at Reed by Peter Langston
208 and at The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington)
209 by Chas Douglas, Peter Langston, Ben Norton, Mike Rainwater and others;
210 of particular note are the games \*QGalaxy\*U (Langston)
211 and \*QCivil\*U (Norton).
212 The previous version was written in 1985 partly on the HRSTS Unix system at
213 the Harvard Science Center, (Cambridge, Mass.),
214 partly on the Unix system at Commercial Union
215 Leasing Corporation, (New York, N.\ Y.)
216 and partly on the Unix system at Davis Polk & Wardwell,
218 by Peter Langston with invaluable goading from
219 Joe Stetson, Robert Bradbury, Nat Howard, Brian Redman, Adam Buchsbaum,
220 and a myriad of others.
221 Since Langston never released source code for his version,
222 Dave Pare and friends de-compiled it in that same year and have
224 which is very different. Since then many re-writes and fixes have been
225 put in and none of the original code exists anymore.
226 Many people have enhanced the
227 code, most notably, Dave Pare added plane units in 1986, Jeff Bailey
228 added many configurable options in the KSU distribution, Thomas
229 Ruschak added land units and missions in 1992-1993 and released the
230 "Chainsaw" server, and Ken Stevens rewrote much of the server code in
231 1995 and released the "Empire2" server, and Steve McClure and the Wolfpack
233 of other changes and released the "Empire4" server in August of 1996.
236 .SA "Novice, Expert, Introduction"
projects / empserver / blob