cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (05/24/88)
Empire - The Wargame of the Century
Published by Interstel Corp (about $40)
For those of you who learned to program (or had access to) DEC
mainframes and minis you have probably played this game already.
It was originally written by Walter Bright in Fortran and was
quite popular on the DEC-10's and 20's at most schools. Walter sold
the rights to Interstel who ported it to the Atari ST, and now to the
Amiga. This version is given as 2.03.
Empire is a combination strategy tactics game where you and a computer
(or human) opponent try to take over the 'world'. To do this, you are
given one city which probably is producing armies. Using the armies it
produces you capture other cities, which are commanded to make either
armies, fighters, or a ship of one sort or another. After conquering
all of the cities on the continent you should have one of your cities
build a troop transport (one of the ship types) to carry some armies
onto another continent to continue the conquest. Besides troop transports,
you can have your cities build submarines, destroyers, cruisers, aircraft
carriers, and battleships. Each differentiated by the amount of damage
it can do, it's speed, detectabilty, and it's defensive abilities.
Additionally, your cities can build fighters that can move quickly
across the map.
The interface has been adapted to the window/menu orientation of the
Amiga while retaining a lot of the keyboard commands that players of
the original will recall. Informational messages are displayed via
requesters and several reports, such as which cities are producing what
and how close they are to completion, are available. The programmer
doing the adaptation made some pretty silly goofs like using RawKey
codes rather than converting them with RawKeyConvert(). This causes
the movement key '3' on the keypad (which should mean down-right) on
the Amiga 1000 to be non-functional. Generally the code works well (and
it should since it has been worked on since the late seventies) and
no major bugs have shown themselves in a couple of campaigns.
The program is copyprotected with 'word from the Manual' (WFTFM) which
is a pain of course since they don't tell you if how to count lines
(are titles lines? do you count blank lines?) Fortunately it asks enough
times that you can get to an unambiuous one and answer correctly. It
doesn't hog the system so you can run a campaign while doing compiles and
such and that works flawlessly. I conquered several cities while waiting
for a BIX download to complete. The graphics are fairly 'cheesy' square
pieces that would probably be better off as a colorfont. But then again
they are lots better than the characters that the original used.
The play is good and it is addicting. I spent many hours playing this
game in school and will probably spend many more hours playing it on
the Amiga. You can save a game in progress (in school some of my games
went for several days) and there is an option to save a game after a
move and modem it over to your opponents system so that they can make
a move, implementing a pretty reasonable play-by-mail scheme.
There have not really been any improvements in the game since '78 so
things like tanks, and possibly missles or bombers would be nice.
I don't think I would change it from what it is today.
On an informational note, this 'Empire' should not be confused with
another game called Empire that was written by Peter Langston and
associates. There is a version of that available for the Amiga as
well (one is written in Draco and available on a Fish Disk) however
it emphasizes the strategic more than the tactical aspects of
conquest.
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.