kcwellsch@watdaisy.UUCP (Ken C. Wellsch) (07/04/84)
Excuse this bit of reminiscing...
I've been involved with the game of Empire for some time
now. I first saw it on a distribution tape over four years ago,
even before I knew much about UNIX. Last summer I was able
to get at those tapes and got Empire running on the local
system I was using. This was a PDP 11/44 running Version 7.
The version of Empire I guess was quite old, since the
documentation for commands etc. had section pages that said
"preliminary edition 1978". The summer was spent as it seems
many others have done, cleaning up bugs and rewriting routines.
I have been reading "net.games.emp" news group for several
months now and have seen some interesting works. Other then the
usual "request for source" and the reply "it isn't available", I've
seen a few hints at what the latest version(s) of Empire for
the VAXs (Berkeley 4.2) contain.
So I'll get to the point of my entry -
- I would really appreciate if some kind soul could
send me (or post) information about the latest
version of Empire. From what I have looked at
(the fly.c fix, and ve.c) there are some fairly
interesting features that have been added.
( What are the new commodities `dust', `lcm', `hcm' ...?)
- Assuming it isn't a copyright enfringement, I'd love
a copy of "empdef.h" and "empglb.c" (if that still
exists) to see first-hand the latest additions.
- Probably asking too much - We created a manual for
our version from the stuff in INFO. Does such a thing
exist out there for the newest version?
I'd just send a tape to the gentleman who posted such an
offer but I really don't want the binaries since our VAXs here
are well supervised and games are not popular. I'm also a long
way from that good'old PDP 11/44 (In Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada)
so I have no machine to run Empire on. But I really enjoy keeping up
on the game (honestly I'm more interested in inner
workings/implementation anyway) which is why I make this request.
Thanks!
Ken Wellsch
{decvax,clyde,ihnp4}!watmath!watdaisy!kcwellschjim@randvax.UUCP (Jim Gillogly) (07/06/84)
-------- I haven't seen the new version of Empire yet, but the new commodities you asked about are: dust: gold dust, which gets turned into gold bars if you let it. if you're hard up, it can be contracted for more money than bars (but you're spending your principal). lcm: light construction materials, an intermediate stage between iron ore and things like research and education. hcm: heavy construction materials, intermediate between ore and things like guns and ships. Note that building some things requires both lcm and hcm; I seem to remember that you need dust in something also (atom bombs?). The net effect is that you need a lot more care in setting up your delivery routes, since the development process now has more steps.
alb@alice.UUCP (Adam L. Buchsbaum) (07/08/84)
Sounds like you had a really old version of Empire there. Like the square map, pre-food version. Now that's old. After that came the current edition (of which there are now two versions). The current edition has a hex-map, food (you have to feed every sector), and those ''new'' commodities (like dust, lcm, and hcm) which were already explained in another followup. It also has nukes. The new version (April 1984) fixes many bugs (including the famed spy and aircraft carrier bugs), has done away with the defend command (now, every fort within range defends), has added the nuke command (to get a report on nukes), and has switched the dust-->bar process from the gold mines to the banks (used to be that dust sitting in a gold mine automatically hardened into bars, which could never be crushed back to dust except by Deific intervention; now, the only way to make bars is to ship the dust to a bank; much more useful to have dust than bars anyway.), among other things.