mass (06/22/82)
>From Mark Satterfield IW-BTL
As a highly active empire player I have
discovered a few bugs in the empire game.
I am not sure whether later versions of
the game have been released which have
this bugs fixed but I will mention them just in case.
I am not sure whether these can be termed bugs
or programmed features.
1) Submarines can fire 13 times and go
from 127 back to 127 in mobility units which
is caused by byte wraparound. Tending the
submarines from another ship enables the
13 firings. This really is mind boggling to
the country you fired on because they cannot
find a sub which they know has fired on them.
2) When tending a ship with military from a
ship with civilians, the civilians turn into military.
You can tend a ship from any ship.
3) If ships are in a harbor and that harbor
is later redesignated some other kind of sector
the ship can not be bombed from planes.
4) There were times when land mysteryly evolved into water.
5) An unfair aspect of the weather, If your country
has the DEITY's sector in it, You were constantly
inflicted with bad weather. I suppose this is related
to the weather algorithm - starting storms at the origin
of the world.
6) If you hit break in the middle of an global enlist you
are only charged 2 BTUs.
7) If you receive too many telegrams you are not
allowed into the game, it core dumps on you.
8) By using two terminals and logging into the game
as the same country, you can multiply your assets.
9) You can only navigate 32 ships at a time. This
is really a hassle when you have a large fleet.
10) Not a bug, but a hassle: when their are about
2000 ships in the game flying over water can really
cost you alot of time. It appears the game checks every
ship to see if you are flying over it.
11) I could not create a world which is 128x128. I believe
this is a limitation on the PDP 11/70s program space.
These are the only items I can think of for now.
I have been looking for a upto date version of empire
which will run on a VAX 11/780 under BTL-UNIX. If
Peter Langston reads this I would like to communicate
with you via a phone number( I promise not to call collect ).
Anyone with this information please reply.
PS I would recommend this world conquest game to anyone.
But you should run it on a machine larger than a DEC PDP 11/70.
It can completely swallow that machine.