From: smithw@col.hp.com (Walter Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.empire
Subject: Re: Just out of curiosity...
Date: 29 Dec 1992 20:56:07 GMT
Organization: Colorado Springs IT Center
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: fajita19.cs.itc.hp.com

camelsho@magna.ksu.ksu.edu (   James A Seymour) writes:
> Do you like start islands?  Why or why not?

Hate 'em...when you have decent players, it's nearly impossible 
to have a good war right off the bat.  I'd rather break and 
find myself surrounded than be stuck on a start-island with 
no one to fight...

> SUBJECT: Where is empire headed?
> The coders out there are doing some good stuff.  However, I have
> to wonder if our game is becoming just too damned complex.  For
> instance, there are players here at Kansas State that would be
> lost without the Xemp client.  The number of commands is just
> daunting to these neophytes who have come to rely on the client to
> do the work, instead of learning the commands.  

Here at HP, we have our own modified version of standard empire.  Jay 
Phillips and Bill Frolik have hacked it up quite a bit over the last 
few years.  Bill had added in fuel for ships a long time ago, and 
it's worked well.  It's different than Chainsaw; you can get mobility
without fuel, but you can't use it without fuel.  Also there are 
tanks and trains, a no-teleport market that works, spies that you 
can move around other people's countries (and try to sabotage their
dist centers, steal planes, etc.) and now the removal of the highway 
sector type; it is now rolled into "infrastructure" that you build 
up within a sector, and costs money.  Gotta have a lot of cash if 
you want  networks of 100% roads leading all over your country...
Bill also has done a major rewrite of the airplane code; planes now 
fly at different speeds, and at different altitudes; a fighter-1 isn't
going to be able to intercept a high-flying spyplane-2 anymore.  Also, 
the ability of a plane to intercept is based on distance from target and
plane speed.  If the defending planes are slower than the attacker, and
the attacker is closer to the target, he'll get in before the defenders 
have time to intercept.  The attacker might get intercepted on his way
back *out* of enemy airspace, though...no more free ride home...
We also have autorouting of planes (give starting and ending coords, and
the game will generate the path; no more "bomb 122 . pin gyyguugygygguggugyugyugyguyug"
mess...and there is an autodistribute command...

So yes, the game here at HP is definitly more complex than 4 years ago 
when I started playing.  The complexity has taken 2 forms; the first, added 
realism, like the new plane mods and roads as infrastructure.  The second 
is things like autopathing and disting.  Adds more complexity to some of 
the commands (you can restrict the path the game generates for a bombing
mission to various sector types, like water...) but makes things a lot 
easier to play.  

As for tools, Bill has made so many changes, so fast, that it's been pretty 
hard for the tools to keep up with them all. A few of the players here (I think) 
have managed to keep XEMP *somewhat* up-to-date, and some others have been 
producing tools to do various tasks for them (like a program that identifies 
foreign ships on radar and attacks them, so people can't sneak up on you 
overnight..) but for the most part, the pace of changes has required 
mostly using the standard client.  I mostly use that and VE.  

> As a matter of fact, scripts and piping out to egrep to isolate
> info were seemingly foriegn concepts to these relative newbies.
> Take away xemp and they are toast.

Must be 'cause I was taught by somewhat of an old-timer, Carl Hommel
at Apollo Computer,that I still like dumping things to files and 
writing scripts to analyze them...one of our players here is 
going beyond that, and wrote a set of tools by hacking the client 
itself; it logs into the game and does various things for him, 
without having to write to files; it reads the info as the server 
passes it to the client...now if he could only get my old auto_attacker 
merged into his tool...:-)  (Hi John..:-)

> BUT, back on the subject, is the game becoming to complex?
> OR, is it just coming into its own?  Is empire entering its
> golden period of enlightenment?  

The latter; I think the changes Bill has been making to the code 
here make the game FAR better.  I played a chainsaw game this fall, 
and it was good, (loved multi-fire, now Bill's added that here) 
but not having the spies and tanks and autorouting was a bummer. 
And now with the new changes to planes, it's even better! 

> The tools and "new" clients
> allow people to play without having to have the knowledge that
> was hard to gain in the days of yore.  (Notice, i said "play"
> not "master") 

Tools will let people play with less effort, and enjoy the game 
with less time spent.  But an experienced player who knows the 
tools well enough to write them, will probobly kill him..:-) 
Personally, I think the best part of empire is the tool-writing 
part.  Most of the UNIX/C stuff I've learned was motivated by 
playing empire, and wanting to be able to write tools.  Instead 
of just being a game, as empire becomes more and more complex, 
it will be more and more of a learning tool for programmers. 
Which should help justify its existance on college machines, 
when the schools might be looking to cut disk useage,....
 
> What are your views on the subject?

Well, I've said a mouthful..:-0
Walter Smith
smithw@cs.itc.hp.com

Newsgroups: rec.games.empire