[HN Gopher] Introduction: User's Guide to Empire (1991)
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       Introduction: User's Guide to Empire (1991)
        
       Author : segfaultbuserr
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2021-01-24 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.empire.cx)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.empire.cx)
        
       | tra3 wrote:
       | Main page has more info: https://www.empire.cx/
       | 
       | > Empire is a real time, multiplayer, Internet-based game,
       | featuring military, diplomatic, and economic goals.
       | 
       | Why link to a wall of text? Am I missing something?
       | 
       | Has anyone played it?
        
       | john-tells-all wrote:
       | I played Empire! I loved it! Or, I tried to love it, it was _way_
       | too complex for me to understand. I poked around, tried to build
       | some things, then left.
       | 
       | Nowadays I watch Youtubers play Rimworld, a spiritual descendant
       | of Empire. :)
        
       | kjhughes wrote:
       | If you enjoy playing Factorio, Age of Empires, 0 A.D, Clash of
       | Clans, or other such modern RTS games, you probably would have
       | loved Empire.
       | 
       | Think Age of Empires via a command line over the Internet (pre-
       | web) in open source.
       | 
       | Empire was the context for one of my favorite, earliest
       | programming hacks. Games went on for weeks, sometimes months, in
       | real-time, 24/7. After meticulously expanding and building and
       | tuning a country's economy, the stakes were high to run the
       | country efficiently and be able to persevere when inevitable
       | conflicts arise. Intense battles, driven by leaders via command
       | line interfaces at any time of day or night, were common.
       | 
       | Ve (Visual Empire) was an offline, visual map based on curses
       | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)) that
       | was helpful strategically but of minimum use tactically in the
       | heat of battle. To gain a tactical advantage, JustUs adapted it
       | to be a command center. While opponent leaders were rushing to
       | type individual military and economic commands, re-issue map
       | display commands, re-issue status commands, etc to see the
       | results of an attack or economic tweak, JustUs could coolly issue
       | "super commands" that aggregated the basic commands to achieve
       | higher level goals, immediately updating the state of the world
       | in two dimensions rather than one. A single super command
       | typically would expand to dozens of primitive commands, all
       | issuing in fractions of a second rather than many minutes,
       | yielding significant advantages in battle and economic
       | management. One ally with whom I shared Veo (Visual Empire
       | Online), Keith Graham, aka Dreamlands, contributed some
       | pathfinding code that found least cost routing between two points
       | on the map -- very useful in super commands that could resupply
       | entire regions of the economy or battlefield rather than the
       | sector-to-sector primitive commands that came with the game's
       | stock client.
       | 
       | Nowadays, many multiplayer games prohibit programmatic access for
       | understandable fairness reasons -- not everyone can code.
       | However, back then, it was a lot of fun, and I'm not sure whether
       | I enjoyed the game or the hacking more.
       | 
       | Broken links note: Some of the links that are broken on the
       | empire.cx site, including the original Empire Hall of Fame
       | posting
       | (http://www.wolfpackempire.com/firstempirehalloffame.txt), are
       | operational when viewed from http://www.wolfpackempire.com/
       | instead.
        
         | evgen wrote:
         | Wow, what a blast from the past. Playing Empire was a favorite
         | obsession in my undergrad years (Batak was my preferred country
         | name back in the day.) I loved the explore and expand part of
         | the game, building countries and setting up a productive
         | economic engine. The fighting? Not so much. I was a tasty
         | little hors d'oeuvre for someone better at conquest in the
         | later stages of the game. The luckiest someone like that could
         | get would be to have me on their border to set up a well run,
         | but ineptly defended country.
         | 
         | Good times.
        
           | kjhughes wrote:
           | Hey Batak! You're being way too modest, but agreed, good
           | times!
           | 
           | The opening @evgen mentioned would involve exploring out to
           | unowned, undeveloped sectors known as "wilderness", which
           | would have various natural resources that could be developed
           | once occupied and populated. Wiring up a balanced economy
           | that could support continued expansion quickly was a fun
           | challenge.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-24 23:01 UTC)