                          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  Sharn-
off 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  features
such as satellites were introduced, and it became clear after a few years that

                          Concept : Empire Overview

the code had degenerated into a hodgepodge of hacks.

A major restructuring effort took place during the  summer  of  1989,  by  the
members 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.

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
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

                          Concept : Empire Overview

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.

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
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

                          Concept : Empire Overview

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!

See Also: bugs, commands

