putting the "R" in an RTS

On Oct 16, 10:40 am, Ken Stevens <khstev... DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> What do you think are the most important features missing from Empire
> that prevent it from mass appeal?
>
> Empire is such a fantastic game, that I think it's a crying shame that
> in a world of millions of Internet gamers, we can scare up one game
> with twelve players. Some of whom I suspect are "old timers".
>
> The obvious bugaboo here is the client interface.

I don't agree at all. To me the obvious problem is empire wants to be
two things. 1) A long-term game with an epic arch, and 2) a real-
time experience.

The client may affect how pretty part two is, but part one is the
killer. This is a long-term game, spanning weeks if not months, where
the successful nations are maintained around the clock. Often, this
is done with co-rulers. A nation will not survive if the update is
missed or even mismanaged. A nation will not survive if attacked with
no immediate response.

So, there are only about a dozen internet users worldwide who are
willing to do this. Many many many players have come, learned, and
even established competency but just can't maintain the necessary
lifestyle. Too many of the players who have done this successfully
consider this a good thing and a badge of honor.

My fun in empire comes not at all from the "who can type the fastest"
game, nor from the "who can micromanage the mostest" game nor from the
"who can give up sleep, school and family" game. I now play many
different games that do the things empire does well, but each in their
own better way. No game makes it all work: building an economy,
conquering an empire, encouraging diplomacy that relies less on past
relationships and more on facts-on-the-ground, smash-mouth combat,
technology and war toys. Empire is pretty good at 4 out of 5! But no
real-time game can last several weeks.

The client is the least of the problems.
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

First off, we have fourteen (not twelve) active countries, plus a deity, in
the current running long term game, PZ7. And of those fourteen countries,
there's easily two dozen players/people associated with them via co-rulers,
etc.

I am one of the old school players, who plays via emp_client mode (AKA
text), as I feel the matrix is best viewed encoded, as the image translators
work for the construct program.

We have way more than the two dozen players I mentioned above. The
Empire_Call_4_Players list has 80 active players on it, plus I routinely
'hit' all the old-schoolerz such as yourself, and what do you know...
Many of the old schoolerz's emails bounce, as they are probably email
addresses that are 10-20+ years old. So if you have any contact info
on them, send them a telegram and see if they are enjoying their new
X-BOX 360, or Halo 3, or Barbies Pet Adventure 3, or whatever.

I'm not a coder, I'm a player/deity. The current code base works.
Those boys of wolfpack did some awesome work getting 4.x as
stable as it is. (thanks guys!)

As far as getting new players up to speed, we have newbie games
from time to time. Plus, I've run a "Training Zoo" game before, where
I gave update by update analysis for each country for what they are
or aren't doing (that was a lot of work!). I think the best way to
learn is from a friend. We need a 'bring a friend to empire' game,
as I think Overlord once suggested.

It doesn't take much of a system to run a game. All of my previous
games were run on a Celeron 366MHz with 256Megs and a 10GB
HDD running Win2K. Net access is via a residential DSL at
1.5M/384K. I just upgraded the sheepfarm 'puter to a Celeron
1.8GHz with 1GB DDR2 and 80GB HDD and WinXPpro.

How much more realism do you need than the effects like:
"BLAM", "THWOMP", "KABOOOOOOOM", etc.?
In my opinion, the eye candy is the only thing going for so called
"new games" anymore, as they lack depth and game balance.
Empire has 20+ years of significant intelligent design.

BUNGY (not to be confused with Bungie)




"Ken Stevens" <khstevens RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192556443.592156.134490@q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> What do you think are the most important features missing from Empire
> that prevent it from mass appeal?
>
> Empire is such a fantastic game, that I think it's a crying shame that
> in a world of millions of Internet gamers, we can scare up one game
> with twelve players. Some of whom I suspect are "old timers".
>
> The obvious bugaboo here is the client interface. Compared to other
> RTS clients, or even RTS/TBS hybrids like Civilization, the Empire
> interface, WinACE, feels unpolished. Personlly, I believe the primary
> reason for this is that WinACE is effectively a GUI wrapper around
> what is still primarily a text-based game.
>
> I think that what would be required to grow the Empire community is 3
> things.
>
> 1) A machine-oriented client-server protocol, so that the client can
> focus on a great user experience, instead of parsing text. xdump is a
> stopgap for updating the display. I'm talking here about an entirely
> separate channel of communication that does not involve human readable
> typed commands.
> 2) An overhaul of WinACE. The fact that WinACE is written in VB 6
> limits our options here. I ran WinACE through the VB 6 to .NET
> upgrader tool and it came back with 585 hours of work. But even with
> that, you're in VB.net which is way better than VB 6, but still not a
> "real" programming language. I think the language of choice right now
> for an Empire client would be C#.
> 3) Putting the "R" in RTS. If an enemy sails a ship past your coast,
> you should see the ship sailing in real time. If they overfly your
> territory, you should see their planes flying over your country in
> real time. Same goes for shelling, etc. etc. This dramatically
> enhances the user experience.
>
> What do you think? Are there any coders out there who would be
> interested in an initiative like this? I think Empire is such a
> fantastic game that it would be a shame if our 12 players turned into
> 6 players, and then 2 players, and then a fond memory....
>
> Ken Stevens
> One of the co-authors of Empire
>
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

On Oct 17, 2:48 am, Ken Stevens <khstev....DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you can fit all of the active players in a high school gym, your game is in trouble.

Depends on if it smells of old sweat or not

Small, Big, In between. The important question is are the people
involved having fun.

An interesting question is does anyone remember how they found out
about Empire? I think I ran into it as a newsgroup. *if* recruiting is
the goal that might be an important question.

John

PS Negative trade ship percentages?!? What are you drinking?
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

> PS Negative trade ship percentages?!? What are you drinking?

Hey, the home brewery is already getting an extra cut for having
their exported suds marketed as "premium imports". The negative
cut for the other guy is for the cost of filling out all the paperwork
to process the beer deliveries.
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

> Ken Stevens
> One of the co-authors of Empire

One of the many, many, many problems with Empire is that people tend
to think that since it is a very complex game, the reasons people
don't play must be complex.

There are two main reasons why people are not flocking to play
Empire. Okay, there are three reasons.

1: Not many people know about the game. I'll table that discussion.

2: You need a huge time commitment around every update. And you need
that time commitment for months at a time. The problem that really
arises is the players that can put in the most time gain a huge
advantage.

3: Everything happens at the update. Your stuff, his stuff,
evereybody's stuff. It all happens at the update. So if you can't
make the update on a consistant basis, you are SOL.

I would not mind seeing some real time simulation in the game. Things
like integrated production and ships moving in real time and
efficiency builds as a function of time would all be great. In my
ancient opinion, anybody that can figure out a way to completely
remove updates deserves a round of muffle muffle muffle on Posh
Spice's new portable bean bag chairs.

I also personally believe that the game is a bit too much tactical and
not strategic enough. Fleets and armies are not really fleets and
armies. They are collections of ships and units. And they have no
zone of control other than the sector they are in. Really, it would
be nice to get rid of sectors and have the "space" in the game go from
digital to analog. (Am I typing too fast for you Geoff?)

Finally, in regards to time spent on the game, there are Good Times
and there are Bad Times. Moving civ's and uw's around to tweek
production is BT. Making sure my shell plants have enough hcms is
BT. Ferrying fleets of civ's via 24 cargo ships from one island to
another (and the uw's back) is BT.

Putting subs on missions outside a Diplomat harbor is GT. Spending an
hour trying to pull down BlackBox's island full of prop based
interceptors is GT. Para-dropping all over beep's home island at 3:00
AM is GT.

But that is just what trips my trigger. Those of us that can remember
the micro-management nightmares of RES_POP tend to swear at all the
time consumed by such options in the game. But we cannot ignore the
fact that there were many more players during that era (despite the
fact there there were fewer people on the internet). So one man's
saddle soap may be another's Jack Danniels.

And most importantly, old people tend to ramble on - a lot.

Pat
AKA Overlord
Retired, Retired, and Retired.
Former Deity and player since 1990
Winner of the Winterfest Tournement
Veteran of Riverworld
Member of the original Wolfpack Team
Creator of European Empire
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

On Oct 18, 4:06 pm, EmpDe... RemoveThis @gmail.com wrote:

> But that is just what trips my trigger. Those of us that can remember
> the micro-management nightmares of RES_POP tend to swear at all the
> time consumed by such options in the game. But we cannot ignore the
> fact that there were many more players during that era (despite the
> fact there there were fewer people on the internet). So one man's
> saddle soap may be another's Jack Danniels.
>
> And most importantly, old people tend to ramble on - a lot.
>

The cure for that is Jack Daniels. Like a wolf pack keeping the elk
herd healthy, alcohol kills the weaker brain cells first, improving
the herd.


> Veteran of Riverworld


Interesting that you list that. I was young and that was the
first (and only) game I've run other than the following continuous
blitz series. Running that one game gave me a lot of hours as a
deity, and of course opinions. }:}

At the time I wondered how people could dedicate that much time,
and time at specific hours, for months on end. 10 months from 1993 to
1994 in particular. This was when you needed a landline for Internet
service, and usually a desktop or terminal associated with your
university (few ISPs around yet). So no logging on from the train or
your cell phone to handle emergencies. Almost exactly half the
countries had corulers. The winner (Mirkwood) did not, though he did
look for someone to hand over the reigns to.

RW didn't have RES_POP, but it had ridiculous levels of
micromanagement. tradeships (leading to the best tradeship raid ever,
Nirvana's 18-kill run). Small islands, depletable and sparse
resources, mountains to route dist paths over to utilize islands.
Towards the second half, even though updates were only every 4 days,
people had to be online constantly to utilize their BTUs and conduct
shelling, fend off invasions, build and nav tradeships, patrol for
subs, and launch their own massive invasions against the next 6-sector
island in the chain.

The game lasted so long that some of the players who left early
came back months later for the replacement/coruler list, and didn't
realize it was still the same game running. Since neither they nor I
remembered, I called it good and relaxed the one country per player
per game rule.

How, and more importantly, *why* did you do that? Today, with
remote login capabilities widely available, would 100 people do that
again? I suspect that the wide availability of wireless Internet
service would discourage rather than encourage. You knew back then
that the person who was always online was stuck somewhere and unable
to have a life or job, and wanted and worked for the win. Now they
can do it while sitting in a meeting or tech talk (me last week), and
you are that much more likely to be struck during the work day rather
than the more convenient 5am.


We live in a different world. We probably can't recreate the
conditions that existed during Empire's heyday, but we have a lot of
long-term experience with large games. I still like traditional
empire pretty much as it is, micro management, text, Mantarr-calls-all-
the-local-phone-companies-to-get-my-number-and-call-me-still-blitzed-
at-5am-to-tell-me-to-get-online Empire, but that doesn't mean we can't
make another game for the always on but frequently-busy world we live
in now.


One feature older worlds had that the newer ones lack is lots of
land. The trend has been to smaller and smaller worlds, so you have
to make the best possible use of what you have, and it's small enough
to do so. The micromanagement you can do at 200 sectors can't be done
at 1200 sectors, so you use simpler, more global strategies, and lots
of roads. One of the games I was in that was the most fun was a
legacy (pre-chainsaw) codebase, with lots of known bugs. 3/4 of the
players dropped out, and 5 of us remained. We were 1000-sector
countries, were exploiting all kinds of creation bugs (I was unaware
they were even considered bugs, they were just present in production)
and throwing huge wings of planes at each other. Grossly inefficient
tactically, but you'd designate an airport and build a wing of
bombers, then bomb using every plane in a single command from that
airport. Most of your bombers would get chewed up by fighters, but a
few might make it through and flatten the target sector. Then you;d
do the same with 20 transports from another airport to take the
target. There were no units, planes were the only way to advance past
the border.

You might lose 6 sectors along a border, and it was no big deal, you'd
take it back and then some with your deeper airports. Today losing 6
sectors means you've lost the continent and no longer have a foothold,
let alone retaliatory capability.


What would you think of an empire config tweaked to have the game last
a year, but allow for massive countries where you could be grossly
inefficient and still survive when you needed to be, and only
micromanage when you were bored and had time? What configurations
would lead to this game?


-harmless
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

On Oct 18, 7:06 pm, EmpDe... RemoveThis @gmail.com wrote:

> I would not mind seeing some real time simulation in the game. Things
> like integrated production and ships moving in real time and
> efficiency builds as a function of time would all be great. In my
> ancient opinion, anybody that can figure out a way to completely
> remove updates deserves a round of muffle muffle muffle on Posh
> Spice's new portable bean bag chairs.
>

zomg I just about fell off my chair when I read that. You are TOO
funny. Lol lol.


>
> And most importantly, old people tend to ramble on - a lot.

Pat,

You can ramble on as much as you like. It's great to hear a voice
like yours. Hey what ever happened to Tom Tedrick? Did the Men in
Black finally get him?


> Pat
> AKA Overlord
> Retired, Retired, and Retired.
> Former Deity and player since 1990
> Winner of the Winterfest Tournement
> Veteran of Riverworld
> Member of the original Wolfpack Team
> Creator of European Empire

Excellent excellent discussion here. Sorry I was a bit negative in my
last post. I was feeling bummed. But I've just come back from a
night of "Beer Tasting" at a local brewery and everything's all better
now.

So is this update thing really the #1 showstopper for this game? I
read in an earlier post (I think Markus) that said attempts were made
to remove updates and smooth out mobility, production, etc but they
failed. Can someone speak to that? What approach was taken and why
did it fail? I could make a few guesses here, but I'd like to hear
from the people who witnessed it.

Has there ever been any thought to making Empire a turn based game?
I.e. all the orders are saved up and then executed simultaneously at
the update.
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

"Ken Stevens" <khstevens RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192556443.592156.134490@q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> What do you think are the most important features missing from Empire
> that prevent it from mass appeal?

I'm preparing a longer post with my thoughts but briefly I think the major
problem
is not what's missing but what's there, mostly the updates.

I'm not crazy about the way most games degenerate into tech races, but
that's a failing Empire shares with many similar games.

> Empire is such a fantastic game, that I think it's a crying shame that
> in a world of millions of Internet gamers, we can scare up one game
> with twelve players. Some of whom I suspect are "old timers".

Guilty. 8-}

>
> The obvious bugaboo here is the client interface. Compared to other
> RTS clients, or even RTS/TBS hybrids like Civilization, the Empire
> interface, WinACE, feels unpolished. Personlly, I believe the primary
> reason for this is that WinACE is effectively a GUI wrapper around
> what is still primarily a text-based game.

I disagree somewhat. My major issues are with the server.

<snip>
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

<john.woolsey DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192564787.411140.29660@q3g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> I think we have to look at what makes Empire popular in the first
> place. It is a complicated building model based on a very simple
> premise. Although there is much advertizing to be gained by beautiful
> real time interfaces, what Empire provides is a solid game with a very
> complicated model with no easy solution.
>
> What I am trying to say is Empire is popular based on Content. Not on
> pretty graphics or complicated to program real time interfaces. When I
> use WinAce I think about how I can see what is going on with the world
> laid out below me. Not how nice the battleship looks when its guns
> fire.

Totally agree. Eye candy does not impress me.

>
> The problem with new players is that Empire is very hard to learn. It
> is like Nettrek where people punt you from the servers before you even
> figure out they are talking to you. Any newbie player in Empire
> expects to lose because they don't understand the game. That is hardly
> good for getting new players.
>
> So my suggestion on how to improve on Empire is to make multiple
> models.
>
> Make a newbie model with two plane types two ship types and only lcms.
> to simplify the economy.
>
> Make an economic model with a fixed number of sectors and no ability
> to invade. The winner has the highest economic output.
>
> Make a fighting model where each sector can build anything and the
> real problem you are solving is fighting with ships or planes or land
> units.

I mostly agree with these points. See my post later in this thread.

>
> On the flip side making a simpler empire would make Java porting
> easier.
>
> John
> Ruler of rulers.
> Give me that in centimeters!
>
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

"Bungholio" <empire_bungholioNOSAPM.RemoveThis@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:W6cRi.4474$GR1.1340@trnddc08...
> First off, we have fourteen (not twelve) active countries, plus a deity,
in
> the current running long term game, PZ7. And of those fourteen countries,
> there's easily two dozen players/people associated with them via
co-rulers,
> etc.
>
> I am one of the old school players, who plays via emp_client mode (AKA
> text), as I feel the matrix is best viewed encoded, as the image
translators
> work for the construct program.
>
> We have way more than the two dozen players I mentioned above. The
> Empire_Call_4_Players list has 80 active players on it, plus I routinely
> 'hit' all the old-schoolerz such as yourself, and what do you know...
> Many of the old schoolerz's emails bounce, as they are probably email
> addresses that are 10-20+ years old. So if you have any contact info
> on them, send them a telegram and see if they are enjoying their new
> X-BOX 360, or Halo 3, or Barbies Pet Adventure 3, or whatever.
>
> I'm not a coder, I'm a player/deity. The current code base works.
> Those boys of wolfpack did some awesome work getting 4.x as
> stable as it is. (thanks guys!)
>
> As far as getting new players up to speed, we have newbie games
> from time to time. Plus, I've run a "Training Zoo" game before, where
> I gave update by update analysis for each country for what they are
> or aren't doing (that was a lot of work!). I think the best way to
> learn is from a friend. We need a 'bring a friend to empire' game,
> as I think Overlord once suggested.
>
> It doesn't take much of a system to run a game. All of my previous
> games were run on a Celeron 366MHz with 256Megs and a 10GB
> HDD running Win2K. Net access is via a residential DSL at
> 1.5M/384K. I just upgraded the sheepfarm 'puter to a Celeron
> 1.8GHz with 1GB DDR2 and 80GB HDD and WinXPpro.
>
> How much more realism do you need than the effects like:
> "BLAM", "THWOMP", "KABOOOOOOOM", etc.?
> In my opinion, the eye candy is the only thing going for so called
> "new games" anymore, as they lack depth and game balance.
> Empire has 20+ years of significant intelligent design.
>
> BUNGY (not to be confused with Bungie)

Forgive me but your argument seems to be everything's fine, do nothing.
Which doesn't do anything to address the issue of declining interest in
Empire.

As for your last paragraph, have you played Empire Earth, especially
against live opponents? The graphics, while beautiful, do not fall in
the category of eye candy, IMO.

Gerry Murphy
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

<john.woolsey RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192647733.364129.284540@k35g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
> On Oct 17, 2:48 am, Ken Stevens <khstev... RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you can fit all of the active players in a high school gym, your game
is in trouble.
>
> Depends on if it smells of old sweat or not
>
> Small, Big, In between. The important question is are the people
> involved having fun.
>
> An interesting question is does anyone remember how they found out
> about Empire?

This goes back further than I like to remember but:

A friend who was the administrator of our department's unix system
learned that I, like he, was into wargaming as it was then,
paper maps, cardboard counters, turn-based, etc.
He mentioned that there was this game on the system, asked if
I'd like to try it and gave me a copy of the manual.

I still cherish the look on his face when my first question to him was,
"How do I attack you?"

Gerry Murphy
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

<EmpDeity.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192748778.433334.217920@i38g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>
> > Ken Stevens
> > One of the co-authors of Empire
>
> One of the many, many, many problems with Empire is that people tend
> to think that since it is a very complex game, the reasons people
> don't play must be complex.
>
> There are two main reasons why people are not flocking to play
> Empire. Okay, there are three reasons.
>
> 1: Not many people know about the game. I'll table that discussion.
>
> 2: You need a huge time commitment around every update. And you need
> that time commitment for months at a time. The problem that really
> arises is the players that can put in the most time gain a huge
> advantage.
>
> 3: Everything happens at the update. Your stuff, his stuff,
> evereybody's stuff. It all happens at the update. So if you can't
> make the update on a consistant basis, you are SOL.
>
> I would not mind seeing some real time simulation in the game. Things
> like integrated production and ships moving in real time and
> efficiency builds as a function of time would all be great. In my
> ancient opinion, anybody that can figure out a way to completely
> remove updates deserves a round of muffle muffle muffle on Posh
> Spice's new portable bean bag chairs.
>
> I also personally believe that the game is a bit too much tactical and
> not strategic enough. Fleets and armies are not really fleets and
> armies. They are collections of ships and units. And they have no
> zone of control other than the sector they are in. Really, it would
> be nice to get rid of sectors and have the "space" in the game go from
> digital to analog. (Am I typing too fast for you Geoff?)
>
> Finally, in regards to time spent on the game, there are Good Times
> and there are Bad Times. Moving civ's and uw's around to tweek
> production is BT. Making sure my shell plants have enough hcms is
> BT. Ferrying fleets of civ's via 24 cargo ships from one island to
> another (and the uw's back) is BT.
>
> Putting subs on missions outside a Diplomat harbor is GT. Spending an
> hour trying to pull down BlackBox's island full of prop based
> interceptors is GT. Para-dropping all over beep's home island at 3:00
> AM is GT.
>
> But that is just what trips my trigger. Those of us that can remember
> the micro-management nightmares of RES_POP tend to swear at all the
> time consumed by such options in the game. But we cannot ignore the
> fact that there were many more players during that era (despite the
> fact there there were fewer people on the internet). So one man's
> saddle soap may be another's Jack Danniels.
>
> And most importantly, old people tend to ramble on - a lot.
>
> Pat
> AKA Overlord
> Retired, Retired, and Retired.
> Former Deity and player since 1990
> Winner of the Winterfest Tournement
> Veteran of Riverworld
> Member of the original Wolfpack Team
> Creator of European Empire
>

Pretty much totally agree. See my response to mballinger's post.

Regards,

Gerry Murphy
 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS 

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 >> Stay informed about: putting the "R" in an RTS