From: tedrick@netcom.com (Tom Tedrick) Subject: Re: Origins of Empire Date: 1996/11/24 Message-ID: #1/1 sender: tedrick@netcom23.netcom.com references: organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) newsgroups: rec.games.empire Peter Langston started it all. I got mixed up in it in 1983 when I was teaching at UC Berkeley and one of my students, Dave (muir) Sharnoff introduced me to the game. At the time it was a huge micromanagement headache with fantasic bugs, but it was the best war game going on the net though primitive in the extreme. Dave (Mr. Frog) Pare did a huge coding project to translate the old code into C. My main interest was in mobile warfare (i.e. Erwin Rommel's tactics) at the time, and strategy in general (lines of communication, etc.) so during the 1980s I tried to get the game to simulate various types of combat along the lines of J.F.C. Fuller's somewhat Satanic theories about strategy. The Berkeley versions heavily emphasized minimizing the complexity of the game without taking out the fun of the strategic elements, since the Computer Science dept. at Berkeley was doing a lot of research in complexity theory and all the CS students there were indoctrinated into the complexity theory way of looking at things. The two Daves and their buddies did most of the coding, and by default I got to decide a lot of the strategic design questions since noone else was into studying strategy like I was. Most of the interesting stuff in the game (planes, torpedo, etc.) dates from the middle 1980s. (since I was also into economics I stuck a market scheme into the game, but it had to be redone later due to the teleportation problem). The last thing I did was dream up a land unit scheme and Thomas (Scum) Ruschak and I were working on it when I was kicked off the net a few years ago. Out of that came the Chainsaw versions. Unfortunately land units never got implemented right since I didn't have net access during the critical time. When I came back to the net a year or two ago the game had been nearly ruined by the people who came after Scum. Whether it can be saved is an open question. Hopefully the Wolfpack code will do the trick. By the way, the empire history files are misleading, since they were mainly created to reward the hackers muir conscripted into doing his work for him :-) There were a huge number of people who played a role in the 1980s, from Gunjin (Keith Thompson) to Dreamlands (Keith Graham) to Evil Empire (Dave Nye) to Mirkwood to Redline to Justus to Subby to Lersing to Fodderland to Jim Griffith to ... well let's just say that in my alcholic haze it would be better to look at Subby's hall of fame because I would surely forget someone (and maybe we can start a new flame war about who was who in the good old days :-) Pat Loney (who was a newbie deity when I was already semi-retired :-) and Steve McClure are doing great work in reviving the game nowadays.