                          Concept : Empire Overview

A BRIEF HISTORY
This  version of the game "Empire", known as BSD Empire, is the most recent in
a series of territorial conquest, political/economic  simulation   games  ini-
tially inspired by a board game of the same name played at Reed College (Port-
land, Oregon).  Originally, Empire was written on PDP/11 (with all of 64k  i/d
space)  by  Peter Langston and others.  Then came the VAX/11 series computers,
and virtual memory, and from object code distributed by Langston  in  the  mid
1980's was formed the basis of the current BSD Empire game.

Dave  Pare  and  Jim Reuter were responsible for turning Peter's VAX/11 object
code distribution into tens of thousands of lines  of  semi-readable  C  code,
giving  birth  to  the initial version entitled "UCSD Empire".  Various things
were added, such as planes, missiles, periodic updates,  performance  enhance-
ments, and -- naturally -- new bugs.

This  somewhat  unstable  game  was  sent  northward  to  Berkeley, where Dave
Sharnoff whipped it into shape with the help of his ucsd-empire mailing  list.
With  the  source  code  fairly  widely  available,  many bugs were fixed, new

                          Concept : Empire Overview

features such as satellites were introduced, and it became clear after  a  few
years that the code had degenerated into a hodgepodge of hacks.

A major restructuring effort took place during the summer of 1989, by the mem-
bers of the XCF, a foolish group of people that had plenty of  spare  time  to
help  Dave  Pare  perform  the rewrite.  What you see now is the result of the
restructuring effort; an attempt was made to regularize the interface  so  all
the commands have the same "flavor", while also greatly improving the program-
mer interface.

THE OBJECT OF THE GAME
Empire falls into the broad category of simulation games  and  involves  mili-
tary, political, and economic factors.  Although no goal is explicitly stated,
players rapidly derive their own, ranging from the mundane desire  to  be  the
biggest,  mightiest  country  in the game and "conquer" all others to the more
refined goals of having the most efficient land use  possible  or  the  lowest
ratio of military to civilians while still surviving, etcetera.

                          Concept : Empire Overview

WHY USE A COMPUTER?
The  role  of the computer in Empire is that of modeling the physical/economic
system.  Players interact through the computer rather than with the  computer.
The  game  is played in a "real-time" environment; players log on and allocate
resources, attack neighbors, send diplomatic communiques, etc. whenever it  is
convenient.  The program keeps track of these activities, maintaining a record
of time spent and arranging for time to accumulate when players are not logged
in to the game.  Accumulated time is expressed in "Bureaucratic Time Units" or
"B.T.U.s".

BTUs?
The purpose of the B.T.U. Concept is three-fold:
I) Commands use up B.T.U.s.  This limits  the  number  of  commands  that  any
player  can give in any particular time period.  Thus the fanatics can't over-
run the players with less free time by tenacity alone.
II) The build up of B.T.U.s not being dependent on being logged on at any par-
ticular  time  allows players to participate when it is convenient rather than
at some fixed time (as in the case of monopoly, the stock market, etc).
III) The B.T.U. arrangement helps compensate for the fact that in concept, the
governments   of  each  country  are  always  "playing"  although  the  player

                          Concept : Empire Overview

representing that country may only play periodically.

GEOGRAPHY
The geography of the game is embodied in a rectangular  map  partitioned  into
M x N  sectors (where M and N are powers of two, usually 64, 128, or 256) that
is approximately 50% sea, 45% habitable land and 5%  uninhabitable  mountains.
This  "map"  is  generated by a program (the "creation") that places volcanoes
pseudo-randomly, lets large meteors and small meteorites impact  the  surface,
strews  gold  deposits  and oil deposits around, covers the planet with water,
dries some of the water to form seas and land masses, runs rivers  from  moun-
tain peaks down to the seas, allows sedimentation to create oil and fertility,
and uses simple tectonics to expose oil and ores, etc. (Some maps  are  gener-
ated  using other tools, including Xland, an X-client that lets the deity draw
the land using a mouse)

WHERE DO THE COUNTRIES COME FROM?
New countries may join the game at any time.  Upon entry into the game  a  new
country is given two adjacent sectors.  These sectors are initially designated
"sanctuaries" and are inviolable.  (Each country uses its own coordinate  sys-
tem  with  sector  0,0  being the current capital, a sanctuary initially.  The

                          Concept : Empire Overview

initial two sectors are always numbered 0,0 and 2,0.)  The new nation may con-
fine  itself  to  these two sectors for any length of time and thereby be safe
from attack.  However, in order to build or expand, it is necessary  to  leave
the  safety  of  the sanctuary.  The sectors of land that were sanctuaries can
then be redesignated as any of a multitude of  other  land-use  types  ranging
from  weather  stations  to  gold  mines to munitions plants.  Usually the two
starting sectors are 'perfect', i.e. have 100% mineral content, 100 gold,  100
oil, and 100 uranium. Thus, it is likely that these sectors will remain a cen-
ter of industry for a long time, so plan accordingly.

FURTHER READING
For further information, here are a few "info" command topics that  are  basic
to the understanding of the game:

   bye      designate  map           spy       break
   census   food       move          syntax    distribute
   nation   info       sector-types  time      {commands}

A FINAL NOTE
It  should  be remembered that Empire is merely an interesting pastime; in the

                          Concept : Empire Overview

vernacular, "it's just a game".  There are many amusing stories of people  who
took  the  game  too  seriously;  one  tells of a corporate Vice President who
walked into the computer room  one  Saturday  and  flipped  the  main  circuit
breaker  in  order to stop an attack on his country; another tells of the Har-
vard student who refused to go to bed until everyone logged out of Empire  and
the other players who took turns staying up late...

At  this point Peter Langston would suggest that the people who act so nastily
to you in the game aren't really such boors in real life, and  that  the  game
doesn't  necessarily reflect the true being underneath.  He is probably right.
Unfortunately, Empire is and always has been a game of manufacturing  military
hardware.   Almost  every  product that can be produced in Empire has military
application, and the problem with producing military hardware is that once you
have it, it is so tempting to use it "just to see how it works".

So  if  you  log  in one morning to find out that your country has been turned
into a sea of question-marks, and your navy is resting on the bottom, and your
air-force  is  scrap  metal  or  on the market under someone else's flag, just
remember that you hold the moral high ground  because  you  didn't  spend  all
night playing some silly game!

                          Concept : Empire Overview

See Also: bugs, commands

