Welcome to Empire 4, code-named Wolfpack. Empire is a multi-player, client/server Internet based war game. Copyright (C) 1986-2009, Dave Pare, Jeff Bailey, Thomas Ruschak, Ken Stevens, Steve McClure This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License (in file `COPYING'), or (at your option) any later version. See file `CREDITS' for a list of contributors. Directory `doc' has additional information. File `doc/README' describes the files there and what they talk about. To build the server and set up a game, follow the steps below. (1) Unpacking the source tree If you downloaded a tarball, unpack it. If you cloned a git repository, run bootstrap. This requires recent versions of Autoconf and Automake to be installed. (2) Building a server Prerequisites: IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (POSIX.1-2001), GNU make, a curses library, Perl, and either nroff or GNU troff (`groff'). See file `INSTALL' for detailed compilation and installation instructions. Quick guide for the impatient: run configure; make; make install. The last step is optional; everything runs fine right from the build tree. If make fails without doing anything, you're probably not using GNU make. Some systems have it installed as `gmake'. Solaris supports POSIX.1-2001, but you need to set up your environment for that. Try passing SHELL=/usr/xpg4/bin/sh PATH=/usr/xpg6/bin:/usr/xpg4/bin:$PATH to make. See standards(5) for details. (3) Creating a game * Create a configuration for your game. make install installs one in $prefix/etc/empire/econfig ($prefix is /usr/local unless you chose something else with configure). You can use pconfig to create another one. * Edit your configuration file. See doc/econfig for more information. Unless you put your configuration file in the default location (where make install installs it), you have to use -e with all programs to make them use your configuration. * Run files to set up your data directory. * Run fairland to create a world. For a sample world, try `fairland 10 30'. This creates file ./newcap_script, which will be used below. You can edit it to change country names and passwords. Check out fairland's manual page for more information. * Start the server. For development, you want to run it with -d in a debugger, see doc/debugging. Do not use -d for a real game! * Log in as deity POGO with password peter. This guide assumes you use the included client `empire', but other clients should work as well. For help, try `info'. To change the deity password, use `change re '. * Create countries with `exec newcap_script'. Your game is now up! Naturally, there's more to running a real game than that, but that's beyond the scope of this file. Please report bugs to or via SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/empserver (registration required). For more information or help, try rec.games.empire on Usenet, or send e-mail to and we'll try to answer if we can. Also check out our web site at "http://www.wolfpackempire.com". Have fun! Wolfpack!