Just
as Space War is a the grand-daddy of action games, Empire is the ancestor of
strategy games. It was originally developed at the Evergreen State College in
Olympia Washington in 1973 on an HP2000C computer.
You
thought Civ 2 was complicated – try Empire. There’s a reason this was written by Phd students!
I
played Empire Deluxe on a Mac in the late eighties. Looking back on it, it seemed like an early version of Civilisation.
You had tanks, ships, aircraft, carriers and so on moving about on a
gridded map of islands.
This
screen shot is a Windows client for a game which is hosted elsewhere. You can also telnet to the game but that doesn’t make for a good screen
shot!
It
has all the aspects of games like Civilisation:
Interaction
between economics and military production
It
has a shroud which hides unseen terrain
Alliances
and diplomacy
Above
all, the game play consists of a perhaps one or two dozen basic actions applied
repetitively to achieve long term aims
*
You have three options to play Empire. First: you can do it the old fashioned way and Telnet to an empire server. To do this: telnet to: hp3000.empireclassic.com and login with “hello player.empire1”. Also check out classic trek and adventure on the same system. The rules for this game are here. Second: you can download a client and play the game with a more friendly frontend. The best place to go for this is Empire.cx. Finally you can download a more-or-less-standalone version of the game - this is pretty close to the version I played ten years ago - here.