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 could be made up of approximately
50 50% sea, 45% habitable land and 5% 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 initially centered on your capital.
62 The Empire world both does and does not match the real-time world.
63 To better explain this, let us examine the concept of an update.
65 At regular intervals (usually once per day),
66 the entire Empire world is updated.
67 When the world updates, new population is added,
68 ores are dug up and added to stockpiles,
69 food and other commodities are distributed to sectors,
70 the educational and technological levels are updated,
72 It can be thought of as the minimum quantum for growth.
74 On this time scale, an update could be considered
75 to be approximately one generation.
76 Thus the difference from the time scale of the real world.
78 However, certain commands are issued in real-time,
80 These commands have instantaneous effects on the state of your country.
81 Dedicated (or merely experienced) Empire players will often
82 log on to monitor their country.
83 And most attackers will wait until the small hours of the morning
84 to carry out their attacks, for obvious reasons.
86 If you do not log in to Empire,
87 any automatic policies you have set up will be carried out.
88 However, Empire will not try to fix any mistakes you have made;
89 unless you are very careful,
90 it's probably not a good idea to rely on these automatics.
93 Bureaucratic Time Units (BTUs)
96 To prevent the more fanatical Empire players
97 from staying logged on all the time,
98 Empire places a limit on the amount of time you may be logged in
100 This limit is settable by the deity, usually 1000 minutes.
101 If you run out of time, too bad!
102 You can't log in again until the counter resets itself
103 (usually at midnight).
105 The other control on the number of commands that you may issue
106 are called ``Bureaucratic Time Units'' or BTUs.
107 A BTU is an arbitrary amount of bureaucratic bookkeeping that
108 your government must spend to perform a certain function.
109 Most commands that are not merely informative cost BTUs.
111 BTUs are generated by your country's capital.
112 The more efficient your capital, the more BTUs that are generated.
113 The number of BTUs also depend on the game's settings.. See the
114 output of the 'version' command for an estimate of BTU generation speeds.
115 However, you may have a maximum of 512 BTUs at any one time.
116 And once your BTUs reach zero, you may not issue any commands
119 Three things to note about BTUs:
123 Since commands use up BTUs,
124 this limits the number of commands
125 that a player may issue over a particular time period.
126 This has the effect of preventing the Empire fanatic
127 from overruning other players with less free time to log on.
130 The build-up of BTUs is constant and does not depend on being
132 This allows players to participate when it is convenient rather
133 than at some fixed time
134 (such as most board games, or the stock market).
137 The BTU concept helps compensate for the fact that,
138 in concept, the governments of each country are always
139 ``playing'' although the player representing that country
140 may only log in periodically.
144 How long will a game take?
147 Probably from one to four months.
148 You should expect to spend one to four hours a day playing.
149 Also expect that if you do spend this amount of time playing,
150 your grades or work will suffer.
151 You just can't spend that much time playing and either
152 study or be productive.
155 What should I do now?
158 When a new country enters the game,
159 it starts out with an amount of money and two sectors.
160 These sectors are sanctuaries
161 and have an initial amount of people and commodities.
162 Until you \*Qbreak sanctuary\*U,
163 your country is effectively in stasis.
164 Nothing will change until you actually log in and
166 (such as designating a capital to begin accumulating BTUs).
168 The absolutely minimal set of information pages you should read are:
169 break, map, ann, wire, tel, read, expl, move, res, cen, dist, thresh, lev,
170 com, prod, budget, Sector-types.
173 A Comment from Peter S. Langston (the author of the original Empire game)
176 It should be remembered that Empire is merely an interesting pastime;
177 in the vernacular, \*Qit's just a game\*U.
178 There are many amusing stories of people
179 that took the game too seriously;
180 one tells of a corporate Vice President
181 who walked into the computer room and flipped the main
182 circuit breaker in order to stop an attack on his country;
183 another tells of the Harvard student
184 that refused to go to bed until everyone logged out of Empire
185 and of the other players who took turns staying up late....
187 While many players take Empire very seriously,
188 an equal number of players use it as a safe environment
189 in which they can act out their fantasies.
190 On occasion the fantasies involved are remarkably aggressive or hostile.
191 It has been my experience that the people with the most belligerent
192 countries are often the people with the kindest hearts;
193 anti-social game play doesn't necessarily reflect the \*Qtrue\*U
195 (or else I have some VERY weird friends).
201 The game \*QEmpire\*U is the most recent in a series
202 of territorial conquest, political/economic simulation games
203 initially inspired by a board game of the same name
204 played at Reed College (Portland, Oregon).
205 Earlier versions were written at Reed by Peter Langston
206 and at The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington)
207 by Chas Douglas, Peter Langston, Ben Norton, Mike Rainwater and others;
208 of particular note are the games \*QGalaxy\*U (Langston)
209 and \*QCivil\*U (Norton).
210 The previous version was written in 1985 partly on the HRSTS Unix system at
211 the Harvard Science Center, (Cambridge, Mass.),
212 partly on the Unix system at Commercial Union
213 Leasing Corporation, (New York, N.\ Y.)
214 and partly on the Unix system at Davis Polk & Wardwell,
216 by Peter Langston with invaluable goading from
217 Joe Stetson, Robert Bradbury, Nat Howard, Brian Redman, Adam Buchsbaum,
218 and a myriad of others.
220 Since Langston never released source code for his version,
221 Dave Pare and friends de-compiled it in that same year and have
223 which is very different. Since then many re-writes and fixes have been
224 put in and none of the original code exists anymore.
225 Many people have enhanced the
226 code, most notably, Dave Pare added plane units in 1986, Jeff Bailey
227 added many configurable options in the KSU distribution, Thomas
228 Ruschak added land units and missions in 1992-1993 and released the
229 "Chainsaw" server, and Ken Stevens rewrote much of the server code in
230 1995 and released the "Empire 2" server.
231 Steve McClure and the Wolfpack made lots
232 of other changes and released "Empire 4" in August of 1996.
233 The game is still maintained by the Wolfpack team. Markus Armbruster
234 serves as technical lead since 2004.
237 .SA "Novice, Expert, Introduction"
projects / empserver / blob