| What a coincidence! I just bought Empire last night after wasting
many hours of Digital's time playing it on vaxen (I finally had
to delete it from my account in an effort to get useful work done
:-) ). As far as comparing Amiga empire to VAX empire, it depends
on which version you are talking about. The last VAX version I had
several years ago was labeled "experimental" and had several
enhancements to the "original" version I used to play. Armies got
2 moves per turn, fighters could carry bombs, there were helicopters,
etc. The Amiga version does not have these features but seems to
be a very straight forward port of the original game. As a matter
of fact, one of the guys written up in the back is supposed to be
the original author of empire and it mentions the versions for PDP-11
and VAX as well as saying the game has been distributed by DECUS
since 1980.
As for the game itself, the key assignments are different and they
make some use of menues, but it basically is 99 and 44/100 % pure
empire as played on your old VT100: 60 by 100 world map with ocean,
land and cities which make armies, fighters and ships. They do
use cute icons instead of letters for the various units and the
board looks prettier, but its all very familiar. It seems to be
slightly more cumbersome to control things than the VAX version,
but that may just be my lack of familiarity with the new key/menu
layout. Offsetting any slight problem with controlling units are
several new commands/modes which the Vax version did not have, some
of which I have yet to fully understand. One I like is the Group
mode for issuing commands to a number of units at once. Draw a
box around all the units you want and issue a single key stroke
(to wake up a bunch of armies in Sentry mode for example) instead
of individually selecting each unit. There are also a number of
new commands I have not tried for automatic control of units.
Destroyers may be assigned to "escort" mode around transports for
example. The only real nit I can find is with the cities reporting
they have completed something at the end of a turn. They put up
an Amiga style requester box saying "City so and so has finished
an army, OK?" and you have to hit return or click on "continue"
to proceed. Later on in the game this gets rather tedious as 10
or 12 cities report after every turn. But even that is not really
a major problem.
The program gives you a number of new startup options. You can
have up to three players which can be the computer or human, you
can modify the "efficiency" of a given players units, and there
are what seem to be complete tools for building your own world map
(although I have not yet tried those). There is also a bit about
playing with other machines via modems, but this doesn't seem to
be completely implemented yet.
The bottom line is that I spent four hours playing a game last night
(I won of course :-)). I don't think I play it too often because
it takes so long, but is nice to have an old favorite laying around.
Enjoy,
Kevin C.
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I can't say how many hours I've spent playing Empire since I got
it on Tuesday. It's a good thing I'm on vacation and my wife is
out of town!
As someone who's played Empire since it's very beginings I'd say
this is a nice version. They fixed some of the more irritating things
such as allowing armys to march into the ocean or building ships
in landlocked cities. One thing I really like is they allow ships
(only certain ones) to "bombard" armies without "breaking up on
shore" like you used to. Cruisers are worth the price now, having
one or two around makes invasions a lot easier.
Have any of you played with the map creation feature? Going by some
of the extra maps on the disk it's pretty nice. I'm currently playing
one game in the Med with their special map. A lot of fun to see
the Med take shape!
All-in-all, I think this will be my most played game with interruptions
for JET and INTERCEPTOR.
-Ray
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