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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 Empire

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) 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 http://www.wolfpackempire.com/firstempirehalloffame.txt), are operational when viewed from http://www.wolfpackempire.com/ http://www.wolfpackempire.com/ instead.

evgen 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

evgen 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.