                     Introduction : An Overview of Empire

NAME
   Overview - An Overview of the Game

Level: Basic

What is Empire?

   Empire is an military/economic simulation of make-believe  countries  in  a
   make-believe world.  The military part is emphasized.  The economic part is
   still there, but as a prerequisite to a working military.

What part do I play?

   Each player is the ruler of a country.  As leader of your country, you give
   commands  that  affect your country (e.g., move people around, re-designate
   sectors, etc).  You also handle all of your country's foreign policy.

   Empire lets you get reports on the status of your country (``info  census''
   and  others),  find out what's going on in other parts of the world (``info
   news''), and communicate with other countries (``info telegram'').

   Although no goal is explicitly stated, most players  rapidly  derive  their
   own,  ranging  from the mundane desire to be the biggest, strongest country
   in the game, to the more refined goals of having the  most  efficient  land
   use  possible,  or  having  the lowest ratio of military to civilians while
   still surviving.

The World of Empire

   Empire is played on a hexagonal map partitioned into a rectangular grid  of
   M x N  sectors (where M and N are typically, but not necessarily, powers of
   two, usually 64, 128, or 256).  The world is made up of  approximately  50%
   sea, 45% habitable land and 5% uninhabitable mountains.

   Sectors can be assigned a specific sector type.   These  types  range  from
   banks  to  nuclear  fuel  processing plants.  See ``info Sector-types'' for
   more detail.

   Your personal coordinate system is based on your capital, which is  a  type
   of sector.  Your capital is generally marked by the coordinates 0, 0.

The Empire Time Scale

   The Empire world both does and does not  match  the  real-time  world.   To
   better explain this, let us examine the concept of an update.

   At regular intervals (usually once per day), the  entire  Empire  world  is
   updated.   When the world updates, new population is added, ores are dug up
   and added to stockpiles, food and other commodities are distributed to sec-
   tors,  the educational and technological levels are updated, and so on.  It
   can be thought of as the minimum quantum for growth.

   On this time scale, an update could be considered to be  approximately  one
   generation.  Thus the difference from the time scale of the real world.

   However, certain commands are issued in real-time, such as attacks.   These
   commands  have  instantaneous  effects on the state of your country.  Dedi-
   cated (or merely experienced) Empire players will often log on  to  monitor
   their  country.   And most attackers will wait until the small hours of the
   morning to carry out their attacks, for obvious reasons.

   If you do not log in to Empire, any automatic policies you have set up will
   be  carried out.  However, Empire will not try to fix any mistakes you have
   made; unless you are very careful, it's probably not a good idea to rely on
   these automatics.

Bureaucratic Time Units (BTU's)

   To prevent the more fanatical Empire players from staying logged on all the
   time,  Empire places a limit on the amount of time you may be logged in per
   day.  This limit is settable by the deity, usually 1000  minutes.   If  you
   run  out of time, too bad!  You can't log in again until the counter resets
   itself (usually at midnight).

   The other control on the number of commands that you may issue  are  called
   ``Bureaucratic  Time  Units''  or  BTU's.   A BTU is an arbitrary amount of
   bureaucratic bookkeeping that your government must spend to perform a  cer-
   tain function.  Most commands that are not merely informative cost BTU's.

   BTU's are generated by your country's capital.   The  more  efficient  your
   capital,  the  more  BTU's  that  are  generated.  The number of BTU's also
   depend on the game's settings.. See the output of the 'version' command for
   an  estimate  of BTU generation speeds.  However, you may have a maximum of
   512 BTU's at any one time.  And once your BTU's reach  zero,  you  may  not
   issue any commands that use BTU's.

   Three things to note about BTU's:

    1)  Since commands use up BTU's, this limits the number of commands that a
        player  may  issue over a particular time period.  This has the effect
        of preventing the Empire fanatic from overruning  other  players  with
        less free time to log on.

    2)  The build-up of BTU's is constant and does not depend on being  logged
        in.   This  allows players to participate when it is convenient rather
        than at some fixed time (such  as  most  board  games,  or  the  stock
        market).

    3)  The BTU concept helps compensate for the fact that,  in  concept,  the
        governments of each country are always ``playing'' although the player
        representing that country may only log in periodically.

How long will a game take?

   Probably from one to four months.  You should expect to spend one  to  four
   hours  a day playing.  Also expect that if you do spend this amount of time
   playing, your grades or work will suffer.  You just can't spend  that  much
   time playing and either study or be productive.

What should I do now?

   When a new country enters the game, it starts out with an amount  of  money
   and  two sectors.  These sectors are sanctuaries and have an initial amount
   of people and commodities.  Until you  break  sanctuary,  your  country  is
   effectively  in  stasis.  Nothing will change until you actually log in and
   force a change (such as designating a capital to begin accumulating BTU's).

   The absolutely minimal set of information pages you should read are: break,
   map,  ann,  wire,  tel, read, expl, move, res, cen, dist, thresh, lev, com,
   prod, budget, Sector-types.

A Comment from Peter S. Langston (the author of the original Empire game)

   It should be remembered that Empire is merely an  interesting  pastime;  in
   the vernacular, it's just a game.  There are many amusing stories of people
   that took the game too seriously; one tells of a corporate  Vice  President
   who  walked  into the computer room and flipped the main circuit breaker in
   order to stop an attack on his country; another tells of the  Harvard  stu-
   dent  that  refused to go to bed until everyone logged out of Empire and of
   the other players who took turns staying up late....

   While many players take Empire very seriously, an equal number  of  players
   use it as a safe environment in which they can act out their fantasies.  On
   occasion the fantasies involved are remarkably aggressive or  hostile.   It
   has  been my experience that the people with the most belligerent countries
   are often the people with the kindest hearts; anti-social game play doesn't
   necessarily  reflect  the  true  being underneath (or else I have some VERY
   weird friends).

A Brief History

   The game Empire is the most recent in a  series  of  territorial  conquest,
   political/economic  simulation  games initially inspired by a board game of
   the same name played at Reed College (Portland, Oregon).  Earlier  versions
   were  written  at Reed by Peter Langston and at The Evergreen State College
   (Olympia, Washington) by Chas Douglas, Peter  Langston,  Ben  Norton,  Mike
   Rainwater  and  others;  of particular note are the games Galaxy (Langston)
   and Civil (Norton).  The previous version was written in 1985 partly on the
   HRSTS Unix system at the Harvard Science Center, (Cambridge, Mass.), partly
   on the Unix system at Commercial  Union  Leasing  Corporation,  (New  York,
   N. Y.)  and  partly on the Unix system at Davis Polk & Wardwell, (New York,
   N. Y.) by Peter Langston with invaluable goading from Joe  Stetson,  Robert
   Bradbury, Nat Howard, Brian Redman, Adam Buchsbaum, and a myriad of others.
   Since Langston never released source code for his version,  Dave  Pare  and
   friends  de-compiled  it  in  that  same year and have created this version
   which is very different.  Since then, many people have enhanced  the  code,
   most  notably,  Dave  Pare  added plane units in 1986, Thomas Ruschak added
   land units and missions in 1992-1993 and released  the  "Chainsaw"  server,
   and  Ken  Stevens  rewrote much of the server code in 1995 and released the
   "Empire2" server.

SEE ALSO
   Novice, Expert, Introduction

