# The Story

Contents
You are a Viking, and, one fine day, after drinking a bit to much beer, you fall out with the leader of your settlement. After several unpleasantries, the upshot of it all is that you and two of your equally drunken companions have to make a break for it!. An historic moment, because you three guys establish a new nation. Since you are obviously even too lazy to work, your companions vote you to be King. So let's have a look and see whether you have what it takes to build up a new and powerful kingdom, or whether you are just another one of life's losers. To make things a wee bit tricky there just happens to be a few more of your sort, trying to establish their own kingdoms; so a few problems along the way are certainly foreseeable. Your main task is to command your own citizens.

# Citizens

Your nation consists of up to 70 citizens each of whom have one of a number of possible professions. Every citizen consumes food which is produced by your farms. Additionally, each individual has his own measure of health. This may be decreased through hunger or during fights. It can be increased through healing by one of your scientists. If his health is zero an individual dies. To recruit individuals and train them for their profession, you need different kinds of buildings and materials.

## Worker

Workers are completely peaceful members of your nation. They do all the hard work for you. You can use them to harvest gold from mines or to chop down trees to produce wood. They can also construct buildings or perform excavation work to dig moats or to heap mounds or walls. And finally they can build hidden traps. Workers can be recruited at town halls. They should never be involved in any encounters because they are absolutely helpless in conflict situations. Workers obey orders of the following type: move, harvest, construct and excavate.

## Pawn

Pawns are lightly armored and poorly armed troopers. As a result of their limited trappings they can move quite quickly. Pawns can be recruited from town halls. In a fight they are quick but vulnerable forces for short range fights. They obey move and fight orders.

## Knight

Knights are the standard infantry soldiers of your army. Both their armor and weapons make them particularly strong in short range fights. But the resulting heavy loads disable them from very quick movement. To train a knight you need a camp. Knights obey move and fight orders.

## Archer

The bows of the archers are dangerous weapons in long range fights. They are also effective for short range fights. Because of their light armor the archers should be prevented from close man-to-man encounters. Archers are quite mobile. To arm them with arrows you require a mill. They obey move and fight orders.

## Scientists

Due to their high degree of knowledge and experience scientists are completely peaceful members of society. They can heal wounded citizens. Or they can be used to repair buildings. Their large experience enables them to persuade foreign workers to surrender to your nation. To educate scientists you require a university. Scientists can travel very fast because they carry no extra equipment like weapons or armor. They obey to move and cast orders.

## Merchant

A worker can be trained to become a merchant. This is done by giving an upgrade order to a worker. Merchants can be important members of your nation if you have established good trading links. A merchant can sell wood to get gold, or he can buy wood and pay for it with gold. To establish trading you require a market place. If you give a trade order to a merchant he will start to transport trading goods between the market place and the specified trading point. A trading point can be specified by aiming the trade order over a point.

## Trading Points

Trading points a special locations at the four sides of the landscape. There are two kinds of trading points.

You get 300 gold coins for 100 units of wood
You get 300 units of wood for 100 coins of gold

## Scouts

Scouts are specially trained pawns. To train a pawn to become a scout, you need a fort. Here the pawns learn how to explore foreign regions and to hide themselves. As a consequence of this a scout can perform a hide order.Doing this a scout becomes invisible for opponent troops more then one field away from the scout. For them the scout looks like a bush. Additionally a scout can see much further than other units.

## Catapults

Catapults are very powerful weapons for long range fights. With these machines stones can be thrown at buildings, walls or citizens of other nations. Catapults require to be a minimal distance from the desired goal. Therefore they cannot be used in short range fights. After use the catapults must always be reloaded. This takes a while and therefore the frequency of thrown stones is relatively low. Catapults are heavy and thus cannot be moved quickly. To construct a catapult you require a smith to build the iron parts. Catapults obey move and fight orders.

# Ships

Ships are essential if the landscape consists of islands. Without ships it would be impossible to leave your home island to conquer other islands. Sooner or later the resources of your initial island will be exhausted, so the ability to leave this island is crucial for survival. Ships are built in docks. A ship can carry upto 12 men. In order to row a ship anywhere at least one man must be on board. As for any other unit, the ship has a measure of health. This represents the current damage status of the ship. If the health is zero the ship is completely damaged and it will sink. In this situation all the men on the ship will be forced to swim for their lives. Unfortunatly you forgot to teach your men how to swim :-). On clicking on a ship a ship control panel will be displayed.

## Ship Control Panel

- The sail order causes the ship to sail towards the specified point.
- The concentrate order causes the selected members of the crew to walk to the specified point. This point may be some point on land, if the ship is at the coast, or it may be a point on another ship if it is alongside. A ship can only be entered if it is empty, or if there are already some of your men on the ship.
- The attack order causes your ship to move into long range fight distance to the specified goal. Once this distance is reached the ship tries to remain within this distance, even if the goal is moving. This order can be used to enable the archers and catapults on your ship to attack an enemy.
- The enter order is used to bring your ship alongside another ship. After docking beside the goal ship a heavy fight between your crew and the others will ensue. Once both ships are locked to one other there is no escape until the fight is decided. After killing all crew members in the other ship one of your men will enter the other ship.

As mentioned above empty ships can be entered by anybody. This can be used to steal a ship if there is nobody looking after it. To give orders to the crew members, they must be marked in the ship control panel. This can either be done using the mouse (left = mark, middle = toggle), or it can be done by the to crew select buttons at the buttom of the control panel.

This button toggles marking the captain of your ship (the first man on ship).
This one will toggle marking the whole crew, but the captain's marking will be untouched.

If more than one ship is marked by multiple selection it becomes impossible to give orders to individual crew members. Therefore the ship control panel disappears in this case. If a ship is hit by any weapon of an opponent, the hit either causes damage to the ship itself or to the ship's crew. The crew members can be healed by scientists on the ship. If the ship is damaged there is no way of repairing it. This means ships can never be repaired, therefore you should always have at least one site with docks to build new ships if the existing are becoming too greatly damaged.

# Buildings

Your workers can construct different kinds of buildings. Each building has its own special purpose. The state of a building is measured in terms of the health of its administration officer. This health may be decreased by fights. If the health of a building is zero, the building will break down. The damage can be repaired under the guidance of one of your scientists. Normally a building supports only a limited number of citizens of a special kind. The construction of buildings will consume gold and wood. The amount of material required is shown in the order panel. The gold-colored numbers denote the wood. All buildings (except farms, forts and markets) can perform recruiting orders.

## Town Halls

A town hall is essential for your nation. Without a town hall you can't construct other buildings. Additionally town halls are the central trading places for your nation. The gold and wood harvested by your workers is stored in your town halls. Town halls can recruit workers and pawns. The number of existing town halls per nation is limited to two for scenarios on land and it is limited to four for those with oceans. Of course town halls can be reconstructed if they have been broken down. All other kinds of buildings can be constructed in arbitrary numbers.

## Farms

Farms are needed to produce food. Without a farm, your food will rapidly decrease and there is the danger of a famine. In this case of your citizens will all die before you can count to ten. Farms need flat land to grow plants, therefore you should make sure that there is enough free land around a farm.

## Camps, Mills, Smiths, Universities

Each of these buildings supports a special type of citizen. See the table below.

Building Support
Name | Profession | Supported
Town Hall | Worker, Pawn | Unlimited
Farm | - | -
Camp | Knights | 10
Mill | Archers | 10
University | Scientists | 5
Smith | Catapults | 2
Fort | Scouts | 4
Market | Merchants | 10
Docks | Schips | Unlimited

## Fort

A fort is used to train pawns to become scouts. Therefore a pawn enters the fort and leaves it as a scout. A fort can support up to 4 scouts.

## Market

A market is used to store material for trading. Additionally it is needed to train workers to become merchants. A market can support up to 10 merchants. The merchants travel from market to trading points and back. You may have only one market. Therefore it is important to choose a good place for that market to minimized the length of your trading routes.

## Docks

Docks are used to build ships. Each dock can build as many ships as you wish. But a ship itself is not armed. Therefore it makes no sense to build a lot of ships if you do not have enough men to form the crews. To build a dock you need 3x3 squares at height 1 adjacent to the water. Normally buildings are not that resistant to attacks because they can be protected by walls. But docks cannot be surrounded by walls, therefore docks are built much more robustly to protect them against attacks from sea.

# Orders

There are various classes of orders which can be given to the different citizens and the administration of buildings. Each profession or building supports different mixtures of orders. When a citizen receives a new order he forgets his current order and starts obeying the new one. In case of the IDLE order this means an immediate stop.

## Move Orders

There are two kinds of move orders. The difference lies in their behavior if a multiple selection is active. In case of a single selection there is no difference between these two orders.

Ordering move will preserve the actual formation of the selected citizens. During their march, the formation may temporarily be interrupted, but at the final position the initial formation will be restored. The move order is only accepted if all members of the multiple select can reach their destination point. The citizen selected first will be moved exactly to the destination point.

After ordering concentrate, all selected citizens will try to reach the destination point as near as possible. This means formations are lost and not all citizens exactly reach the destination point, but in principle the destination point must be reachable by each of them, otherwise the order is not accepted.

While carrying out a move operation the route may be blocked by obstacles such as a walls, buildings, etc. Additionally each individual has its own idea of a nice route. Therefore it may happen that the citizens work along unexpected routes. E.g. they may decide to leave a fortification, even if you prefer a way somewhere behind your walls. In this case you have to provide subgoals to force your men to use the routes you'd like to see them taking.

Many orders like harvest or fight may produce movements implicitly if this is required to come closer to an important point (e.g. to hit an opponent).

## Guard Order

All your fighting citizens obey the guard order. The man looks out for enemies and if any goal is seen within a range of 6 fields, then it is attacked automatically.

## Fight Orders

There a 4 different ways of starting a fight. The explicit attack order is used to force the selected troops to attack the citizen or buildings at the destination point, if there are any. In the case of catapults it is also possible to order an attack to destroy a wall.

The order search and destroy causes the selected troops to attack any foreign citizen or building near the destination point. If an enemy leaves the destination area it will not be followed by your troops. Search and destroy can be used to clear a selected area of enemies without causing a redistribution of your troop concentrations.

The order follow and destroy works like search and destroy, but the enemy is followed by your troops. This may result in a radical redistribution of the troops, but it is quite useful for eliminating scattered enemies that have no chance of receiving reinforcement.

And finally each of your armed men performs self-defence if it is approached by an enemy in range of his own weapon. But the men don't walk, they don't even run away. Thus a Scientist will cast all his own citizens and buildings which are close to him if their health is below maximum.

Finally it should be mentioned that it is impossible to attack your own citizens, but you may attack your own buildings. E.g. if mines have been exhausted, it is quite useful to destroy your own town halls and to rebuild them near a fresh mine somewhere else.

## Recruit Orders

If you select buildings, the possible recruit orders of the building are shown in the order panel. Recruiting and training a citizen consumes gold and wood, the amount needed is shown in order panel behind the orders. After selection of a building it is shown, how many citizens can still be recruited, before the support capacity of the building is exhausted. All buildings except a town hall and a farm have the ability to perform recruit automatically, if the current resources are above a specifiable level. There are two dials in the order panel that allow adjustment of these levels. The zero-button is a toggle button, if it is pressed, the building starts to produce as much units as possible, if it's released, the production is stopped immediately.

## Construct Orders

If there is enough gold and wood available and if there exists a least one town hall, after selection of a worker, the order panel shows what kind of buildings can be constructed. At the destination point of this order, there must be a square of flat land. After receiving the construction order, the worker will walk to the destination point and he will start to construct the building. This process takes a while. If the worker is interrupted during construction, e.g. by other orders or by being killed (haha), the construction site breaks down and the gold and wood for construction is lost, without finishing any building.

## Excavation Orders

A worker can perform two kinds of excavation orders. He may either dig or heap. Digging decreases the height of the landscape by one step, and heaping increases the height. Depending on the heights of the neighboring fields this can be used to build walls, moats, or bridges. See the description of the landscape to understand the consequence of these orders.

If an heap or dig order is to be performed on a square this can be ordered by heap to and dig to. E.g. if these operations are applied along a column or line of width one, it can easily be used to build walls or moats. Heaping and digging requires small amounts of gold and wood to buy building material. As a special case of digging a worker can construct traps. These hidden holes may be quite useful for weakening enemy forces during their marches.

## Harvest Orders

Harvest orders are given to workers. The destination point of the harvest order can either be a mine or a tree or a bush.
In the case of a mine the worker will start to dig gold from the mine, until it is empty.
In the case of a tree or bush, the worker will continue to harvest wood in an area around the initial destination point until all trees and bushes have been cut.
The harvested wood and the gold from the mines is carried to the home town hall of the worker.

Per default each worker uses the town hall of its own recruitment as home. But the home can be changed by giving a move order to the worker. If the destination point of this order is another of your town halls, the home will be switched to this location.

## Cast Orders

Casts performed by scientists may have one of three effects.
Casting a citizen of the own nation increases the health of this individual to maximum.
Casting a worker of another nation will persuade the worker to become a member of your nation.
Casting one of your own buildings will increase the health of the administration of the building to a maximum.

Using a Cast all, the scientist will sequentially cast all own citizens, own buildings and foreign workers in the destination area.

## Upgrade Order

Upgrade orders can be used to force workers to become merchants and pawns can be forced to become Scouts. The orders need no specification of goals, because the citizen automatically selects the market or the fort to be entered for training.

## Trade Order

The trade order tells a merchant which trading point should be served. The trading point is specified by clicking on it.

## Hide Order

Hide orders can be used to tell scouts where to hide. After clicking on a goal point, the scout starts to move to this point. At this point the scout camouflages himself as a bush.

# The Landscape

The operation area as shown in the tactical panel consists of various types of landscapes. Each type has different properties relevant for the movement of your troops.

## Grass

Most parts of the area are covered by grass. It is easy to travel over grassy land.

## Mud

Whenever some excavation work is done, muddy areas are produced. Travelling over mud is as easy as travelling over grass, but the presence of mud gives an indication that somebody excavated recently.

## Trees

It is impossible to travel trough forests, because they are too dense and your citizens dislike the annoying flies. Anyway trees can be chopped down by workers to produce wood.

## Bushes

As with trees, there is no travelling through bushes, but bushes can also be cut to produce wood.

## Water

Since none of your men knows how to swim, there is no way through the water. If any unit or building is flooded by water this will cause death and destruction. If you dig too deep, then you will hit the water table and flood the hole and all neighboring fields that are below sea level. If any land reaches a height above sea level, then it will automatically turn to dry mud land. This enables workers to cross rivers by applying the heap order for a few times. Building a bridge is thus like building a wall across the water.

## Sea

Sea is water with depth of at least 3. It has exactly the same properties as normal water, but it is impossible to heap or to dig near a sea field. This makes the building of bridges between islands in the ocean impossible.

## Hill

You are standing on an absolutely flat landscape and give a single heap order. The result is a muddy hill, that's it. Running up a hill is slower than on the flat, but it is not an unassailable obstacle.

## Hole

A hole is the result of a single dig order applied to a flat piece of land. Running downhill is no problem, in fact the unit will be quicker while running downhill.

## Walls and Moats

Heaping or digging twice at the same position results in walls and moats. Walls or moats cannot be crossed.

## Fortifications

If a wall is increased in height again, you will get a fortification.

## Landscape in a bit more detail

In fact the story of the different land heights is a bit complicated. Each square of land has four neighbors, each of which may have a height differing from that of the middle square. The difference may be any values from -3 to +3. Depending on this difference, the corresponding edge of the actual square will be anything from a normal peace of land to a fortification. See in the table below for details.

difference | outlook
1 |
2 |
3 |

As you can see, only positive differences are taken into account, the negative ones are not needed because the neighboring fields are changed accordingly in the case of a hole. Any difference larger than 3 is not valid, (some damned programmer disabled that :-), therefore it may happen that an excavation order is simply not executed. Anyway you should try a bit to understand what's going on, and the meaning behind the different landscape layouts. A final hint: normally units can move to any of the 8 neighboring fields, including diagonal moves. When there is a height difference between two fields, diagonal moves are not possible. This is because your citizens are always a bit drunk and they will fall if they have to ascend or descend on a slope. The valid orders also depend on the land type as described below.

Normally a worker can heap or dig to/from any neighbouring square or on the square it is standing on. The only execption is that it is not allowed to heap at a square which is two or more units below the current square the worker is standing on. This means fortifications cannot be enlarged from the inner side, you have to leave your secure walls to do this!

Operations and Land Types
type | move | dig | heap | harvest
grass | + | + | + | -
mud | + | + | + | -
tree | - | - | - | +
bush | - | - | - | +
water | - | + | + | -
sea | - | - | - | -
hill | + | + | + | -
hole | + | + | + | -
wall | - | + | + | -
fortification | - | + | - | -

## Mines

If you order workers to harvest in a mine, they will bring sacks full of gold to their home town halls. But the amount of gold in a single mine is finite and after exhausting this amount, the mine will break down and become worthless. The number of gold coins which you can harvest from a mine is shown in the order panel if you select the mine. Very soon you will find out that positioning town halls near mines will stimulate the growth of your nation enormously. Therefore it is important to know as much as possible about the location of mines. Mines are always visible on the strategic map. In a land there are always 9 mines. In a land with oceans the number of mines may vary with the number of islands. Normally there are 3 mines on each island.

## Traps

Traps are hidden holes. If a unit walks over such a trap, it falls into the hole. This hurts really bad and the health of the unit is decreased. For already weak units this can mean death. As mentioned above, deep holes like traps can not be climbed. Therefore normally one needs a worker to leave a trap and it will be a good idea to be healed by a scientists afterwards. Traps are weapons which enable even weak forces to cause bad damage to strong enemy units. But traps do not distinguish between friend and foe, so be careful in using this near your own favorite routes.

# Fights

There are two type of fights.

## Long Range Fights

Stones and Arrows can be used to attack an enemy over a long distance. The range of a stone is one field larger than the range of an arrow. Arrows are dangerous, but stones take the biscuit. Long range fights are only allowed if the landscape properties allow them. Trees and bushes are no barrier. Any field which is more than two units higher the the field of the shooter cannot be passed by the line of fire. E.g. a fortification can not be passed by a shot from a shooter, at the bottom of the walls. In case of an arrow, the unit on top of the fortification is not hit and an arrow can't damage any wall. In the case of a stone, the unit on top is also not hit but the wall is damaged with a likelihood of 0.3. Damage means the height of the wall is decreased by one.

## Short Range Fights

All weapons (except stones) can also be used for man-to-man fights. In this case both enemies must be located on neighboring fields. In the case of arrows, the fortifications have the same effect as in long range fights. Any other weapon can only by applied if the height difference between the two opponents is less than two. If a hitting unit is lower than the attacked unit, the power of the hit is only 20% of the strength it would have if both stand at the same level (as mentioned above this is not valid for arrows). This means building walls and fortifications improves defensive power significantly. Walls prevent invasion and short range fights, while fortifications prevent attacks with long range weapons.

## Effect of a weapon

The effect of a hit is calculated from the strength of the used weapon and the landscape properties described above. If both fighters are on the same level or if the landscape allows a long range weapon to cause maximal effect, the health of the attacked unit is decreased accordingly to

health = health - max (1, effect - armor)

where the effect and armor are the following :

Armor and Effects
unit | armor | effect
worker | 0 | -
scientist | 0 | -
pawn | 10 | 25
archer | 5 | -
knight | 15 | 30
catapult | 20 | -
ship | 98 | -
building | 25 | -
arrow | - | 30
trap | - | 80
stone | - | 100

## A few Hints

Normally it is always good to :

- protect a troop from long range attacks
- protect long range fighters from short range attacks
- attack foreign long range fighters with short range attacks
- attack any foreign force as long as possible using long range attacks

And of course many other things like keeping formations during a fight, obeying the different move speed of units, etc.

# Materials

Your economy is dependent on various resources. These resources are

## Food

You need something to feed the mouths of your citizens. Food is produced by farms. Therefore you should always have at least one of these structures. Your food will be stored in your town halls. In your administration panel you can get an overview of the current amount of food in store. If this amount is below a certain level,the health of your citizens begins to decrease and finally they will die. The different professions need different quantity of food and therefore they start to hunger at different levels of stored food.

Minimal required food
type | start to hunger at
you | never
worker | 0
pawn | 0
archer | 70
knight | 70
scientist | 0
catapults | 0
ships | never

It is surprising to see how blooming societies are reduced to insignificance if there is no food, on the other hand building a farm and waiting for harvest takes a while, so always be careful with your food and start to build farms early enough. On the other hand farms are wonderful targets for attacks.

## Wood

Your workers can cut wood to produce timber for various purposes. Cutting timber takes a while and you should start to do this early enough, before you plan to built structures, or large armies of archers or catapults.

## Gold

Gold is the driving force of your economy, so you should always have enough. In fact most of your workers will be used to mine gold.

# Control Panels You see various control panels on your screen. With these panels you can retrieve information about your current progress and you can give orders to members of your nation. The screen looks like

## Administration Panel

This panel is shown in the lower part of the order panel. At this panel, you see the number of citizens you are commanding, the amount of wood which is at store and the number of gold coins in your cash-box. Additionally you see how much food is stored for your citizens.

## Order Panel

This panel shows the list of the orders you can submit at the moment. The kind of orders possible depends on the number and type of selected citizens or buildings. Behind each order is shown how much gold (in yellow digits) and how much wood will be consumed if this order is performed.

The orders can be given by pressing the button, or by typing the capital letter on the button. Most commands require a specification of a destination point. This can be done in the tactical map as described below. After your order has been accepted, the button is released again. Additionally you see the health of a unit, if it is selected by single selection. In case of buildings you can also see the degree of completeness of construction and training processes running at the moment.

## Message Panel

In this panel, you receive messages from your citizen. E.g. if you try to submit a command and this command is not executed then there is normally a message in this window.

## Strategic Map

This map gives an overview of the entire area where you can operate. By clicking the left mouse button on a point in this map, your tactical window is centered on this point. It is a good idea always to have an eye on this window, to make sure that there are no unrecognized enemy movements which are not displayed in the tactical panel at the moment.

## Tactical Map

This panel contains a zoomed view of a part of the operation area. In this window you can see all citizens and buildings that are visible for you at the moment. Each of your citizens has only a limited range of view. Everything outside the view of your citizens is gray and unknown for you. The tactical map is used to perform select operations and destination point specification. By clicking with the right mouse button, the map is centered to mouse position. This is only true if there is no destination point specification is pending, in this case, the current order will be canceled.

## Group Control Panel

If you have selected one or more of your citizens, you may put them into a group. This can be done by clicking on one of the grouping buttons in your group control panel. Whenever you click on the corresponding group focus button, the same units will be selected and your windows will be centered on the middle of the group. This enables a quick change between different independently acting groups, even if the groups are far away from each other. Especially in battles it can be very useful for commanding your troops if you have split them to surround the enemy.

## Pause Panel

The pause panel allows each player to stop the game temporally, by pressing the button with his name. E.g. the panel above shows a game where "hua" paused. Pressing the button again shows your willingness to continue the game. If all buttons are released, the game continues.

# Selection Operations

To give orders to citizens or buildings you have to specify the units. This is done by selecting the unit in the tactical map.

A click with the left mouse button selects the unit under the mouse cursor exclusively.

A click with the middle mouse button can be used to toggle from a set of selected units. This means middle mousing an unselected unit adds this unit to selected set, while middle mousing a selected removes it.

A click with the right mouse button has two functions. If any command is waiting for a destination point specification the command is canceled. If no command is pending the tactical map is centered to the current mouse point.

The selected units are surrounded by a red square. If you point on one of your own units, the mouse cursor will be a circle, pointing on a foreign units will switch it to a cross. If you point on yourself (remember you are a knight), the the cursor will change to an owl.

# Destination Point Specifications

Most instructions need the specification of a destination point. E.g. this can be the unit to be attacked, or the place where a building should be constructed.

After pressing the order button in the order panel, you can use the left mouse button to set target to your mouse cursor in the tactical map window. After doing this the order button is released and the selected units begin to execute your order. Sometimes the button will not be released, if this is the case, then your order could not be executed and you should have a look on the message panel to get an idea what's gone wrong. If you press the right mouse button in the tactical window, the current order is canceled, the order button is released, but no new orders are submitted.

A few operations like search and destroy are connected to destination areas. To specify such an area, you specify a destination point as above and this point is used as the center of a quadratic area around this point. The size of the area is fixed for all operations and it is approximately 11x11 squares.

# The Winner of a game

There can only be one winner. If you have been killed the game is over and you fail to get a reputation as a remarkable king. If you manage to survive longer than all the other kings, you are the "cha chan", the king of the kings and one may call you the winner.

# Installation of the Game

## Supported

- At moment, there is an executable for SUNOS 4.1.2 under X11R6 (maybe also X11R5, never tried it).
- The whole thing was compiled under SUNOS, but to my surprise it also runs under SOLARIS (SunOS 5.4) (at least on our machines), just try it.
- There is an executable for LINUX.
- The source code is available, so that it should be possible to compile executables for other architectures.
- This html-document with all its pictures can be retrieved.

All this stuff can be retrieved from http://borneo.gmd.de:80/~hua

## What to do ?

- get the file craft2.tar.z (e.g. via http://borneo.gmd.de:80/~hua)
- create a directory dir
- in dir you do
  - uncompress craft.tar.Z
  - tar xvf craft.tar
- That's it, now you can call "craft" as described above.

## System Requirements

There are precompiled versions for LINUX and SUNOS 4.1.3. The SUNOS version also runs under SOLARIS normally.

- The SUN should be an IPX or better.
- The game is further optimized to be playable on LINUX PC's with 486/100 or better. The main problem is that the game requires a relatively high amount of RAM, therefore the PC should have >= 16Mb RAM.

# How to call the game?

To call the game, you must always be in the directory where the executable "craft" is located. This is needed since the game has no proper installation and therefore only relative paths are used to locate all data files needed.

The game can be called as "craft". Now the option panel is displayed. It is used to setup the general game parameters and the type and number of players and their properties.

- with king
  The human may either have a king or not. If there is a king, the player loses if the king is killed. The king is a knight).
- local sight
  The scope of the player may be limited to a local sight around the citizen, or it may be global.
- num humans
  There are either 2 or 3 human players or one human and one robot player.
- with isalnds
  The game may play "on land" or the landscape may consist of an ocean with various islands.
- seed
  The landscape is generated by random. If a seed is entered (any sring of letters), it is used as start value for the random. Therefore a seed can be used to reproduce the same landscapes by using the same seeds.

Anyway you should make sure that the xhost permissions are properly set, since this game is not a client-server game. The calling task always wants to open windows on the other players' hosts.

# What's new since version 2.x?

- I removed a damned large number of bugs.
- The menues have been changed.
- Scouts have been added.
- Trading has been introduced.
- Ships and worlds with islands have been implemented.
- The battle mode and the points system has been removed.

# The robots

I spent a lot of time improving robots from version 2.x to version 3.x. In version 2 it was quite simple to kill the robot if it was forced to attack a fortification. In the current version, the robot knows a bit more about "how to attack fortifications". It is not perfect, but I hope it plays much better. In a conflict with ships, a single wrong decision can be fatal (e.g. losing a ship with many expansive catapults on it). Therefore the robot does not play that well in worlds with islands, I am still working on it, but it may need much more time. I have tried many other games like C&C, Z or Warcraft and I am proud to say that I think my robots are "quite intelligent" (even if they are still unbelievably stupid) !!!

# A few Remarks from the Author

This game is a more or less serious offspring of our work on adaptive agent systems. The final intention of this game is its use as an experimental environment for different automatic adaptive players. The whole thing should finally run in a client server version, which enables the participants of the game to act in real time concurrently. The quicker one can give orders, the quicker one may do it. The game should have closed rules (is ok), should be quite complex (is true for these silly adaptive methods) and should also motivate a human to play online against these crazy adaptive robots (check it out).

So long, HUA

# Contents

- The Story
- Citizens
  - Worker
  - Pawn
  - Knight
  - Archer
  - Scientists
  - Merchant
  - Trading Points
  - Scouts
  - Catapults
- Ships
  - Ship Control Panel
- Buildings
  - Town Halls
  - Farms
  - Camps, Mills, Smiths, Universities
  - Fort
  - Market
  - Docks
- Orders
  - Move Orders
  - Guard Order
  - Fight Orders
  - Recruit Orders
  - Construct Orders
  - Excavation Orders
  - Harvest Orders
  - Cast Orders
  - Upgrade Order
  - Trade Order
  - Hide Order
- The Landscape
  - Grass
  - Mud
  - Trees
  - Bushes
  - Water
  - Sea
  - Hill
  - Hole
  - Walls and Moats
  - Fortifications
  - Landscape a bit more in Detail
  - Mines
  - Traps
- Fights
  - Long Range Fights
  - Short Range Fights
  - Effect of a weapon
  - A few Hints
- Materials
  - Food
  - Wood
  - Gold
- Control Panels
  - Administration Panel
  - Order Panel
  - Message Panel
  - Strategic Map
  - Tactical Map
  - Group Control Panel
  - Pause Panel
- Selection Operations
- Destination Point Specifications
- The Winner of a game
- Installation of the Game
  - Supported
  - What to do ?
  - System Requirements
- How to call the game ?
- The robots
- A few Remarks from the Author