                     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 could be made up of approximately
   50% sea, 45% habitable land and 5% 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 initially centered on your capital.

The Empire Time Scale

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

   At regular intervals (usually once per day), the entire Empire world is up-
   dated.  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.  Dedicat-
   ed (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 (BTUs)

   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 BTUs.  A BTU is an arbitrary amount  of  bu-
   reaucratic bookkeeping that your government must spend to perform a certain
   function.  Most commands that are not merely informative cost BTUs.

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

   Three things to note about BTUs:

    1)  Since  commands use up BTUs, 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 BTUs 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  mar-
        ket).

    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 BTUs).

   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 peo-
   ple that took the game too seriously; one tells of a corporate Vice  Presi-
   dent 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
   student  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 re-writes and fixes have been put
   in and none of the original code exists anymore.  Many people have enhanced
   the code, most notably, Dave Pare added plane units in  1986,  Jeff  Bailey
   added  many  configurable  options  in the KSU distribution, 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 re-
   leased the "Empire 2" server.  Steve McClure and the Wolfpack made lots  of
   other changes and released "Empire 4" in August of 1996.  The game is still
   maintained by the Wolfpack team.  Markus  Armbruster  serves  as  technical
   lead since 2004.

SEE ALSO
   Novice, Expert, Introduction

