Any of a family of military simulations derived
from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. A number of
multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist,
and one single-player version implemented for both Unix and VMS;
the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are
notoriously addictive. Of various commercial derivatives the
best known is probably "Empire Deluxe" on PCs and Amigas.
Modern empire is a real-time wargame played over the internet
by up to 120 players. Typical games last from 24 hours (blitz) to
a couple of months (long term). The amount of sleep you can get
while playing is a function of the rate at which updates occur and
the number of co-rulers of your country. Empire server software is
available for unix-like machines, and clients for Unix and other
platforms. A comprehensive history of the game is available at
http://empire.idlpaper.com/infopages/History.html. The
Empire resource site is at http://empire.idlpaper.com/.
