From: rlw@atlanta.dg.com (Richard Wright)
Subject: Re: Empire: What is it?
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 19:23:27 GMT
Organization: Data General Corp. ASSD, Atlanta, GA

In article <quan.727652532@sol>, quan@sol.surv.utas.edu.au (Stephen Quan) writes:
|> stevem@solbourne.com (Stephen Matson) writes:
|> 
|> > I keep hearing about a game called Empire. It seems that it might be a 
|> >good game from what I hear. I am however unaware as to what it is. Could
|> >someone hear post or e-mail me a brief rundown as to what Empire is? Is 
|> >it space based or planet based?
|> 
|> I think everybody has been referring to a game that I've always known as
|> Galactic Empire [played it on an Apple II many years ago].  

No, I think by "Empire", we are talking about the original "Empire", 
which was a character-based wargame written in the 70's for DEC
PDP machines. It was REAL simple (and REAL addictive). 

In the original Empire, you started out with one city, which was set to
produce armies. You had no idea what the world looked like and had to
map out the continents and seas by moving your pieces around to explore.
As you captured more cities, you could set their production to armies,
fighter planes, troop ships, destroyers, submarines, battleships, cruisers
and aircraft carriers. Somewhere in this world was a computer-controlled
enemy that you had to defeat (sometimes by obliterating him, sometimes
he surrendered). 

The screen consisted of a map representation of whatever area you were
currently exploring with different characters representing land, water,
your armies ('a'), enemy armies ('A'), cities ('X','O' or '*'). Movement
was controlled by the keys:

	    up left  up  up right	
		Q    W    E
	      
	left	A    S    D  right     (S was for 'sleep' or 'sentry')

		Z    X    C
	   dwn left  dwn  dwn right

As multiuser systems became available, a two-player version came about.
The two-player version I remember (1979) was for a Data General machine
and had an extra feature - Nuclear Missles! (took forever to build one,
but it not only destroyed 9 squares, it rendered them uninhabitable
forever).

I have a MSDOS version that faithfully reproduces the original. A 
company (Interstel?) produced a pseudo-graphical (EGA) version in the
early eighties. I have that as well, but the original is still better
in my mind. 

As far as I know, the original Empire (in all it's incarnations) was
considered public domain (except the Interstel commercial version).
I'm sure the sources (Fortran IV probably) are around here somewhere. 

					Richard
					  
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