                     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 bet-
   ter 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 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 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 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 "Chain-
   saw"  server,  and  Ken Stevens rewrote much of the server code in 1995 and
   released the "Empire2" server, and Steve McClure and the Wolfpack made lots
   of other changes and released the "Empire4" server in August of 1996.

SEE ALSO
   Novice, Expert, Introduction

