100 YEARS WAR - ONLINE!! ======================== [Editor's Note: Jim Dunnigan and Al Nofi have been hard at work getting GEnie's latest online game project ready for a Fall release. Alpha-testing for the game is about to begin, to be followed by a heavy period of beta-testing involving scores of players (including yours truly!) 100 Years War Online is scheduled to be available to the gaming public sometime this Fall.] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Online Hundred Years War is GO! For nearly ten years, computer networks such as CompuServe and GEnie there have offered multiplayer games, but none of these have been history based (or, at best, only vaguely so). To remedy this situation, I just signed a contract with GE to design a multiplayer (300 players) game of the Hundred Years War for the GEnie system. Al Nofi (research) and Dan Masterson (programming) will comprise the rest of the team that will recreate 14th and 15th century England and France (plus parts of Italy, Spain, Germany, Scotland, Ireland and sundry other adjacent areas). The game will cover economics, religion and politics in addition to the purely military aspects. As a player, your objective is to insure the growth, prosperity and survival of your family line (each day of real time equals three months of game time). You may start out the game as anything from an impoverished Gascon noble to a mighty earl of England. Your degree of victory is rated on how much you increase what you started with over the century or so it takes England and France to settle their dynastic, military and economic differences. The game allows players to operate on two levels, either as a free wheeling adventurer, living only for battle, tournaments or the hunt (rather common in those times), and/or as an ambitious and able administrator of his estates and participant in the affairs of state. The latter course is more rewarding in the long run, but the former can be more fun for the mash and bash set (there's a little of that it all of us). In this game the computer is used in areas where it does the most good. The medieval economic system is run by the computer. Medieval economies were fairly complex. Although most of the population was farming, about ten percent was not and was instead producing specialized goods that could be bought and sold over wide areas. There was money about, a bureaucracy and a heavily armed nobility. At any given time, at least 1-2 percent of the population was in arms. Most of these troops were mercenaries and they were either paid or you suffered their depredations as brigands. Taxes were raised, somewhat inefficiently and often with such vigor that rebellion resulted. If you decide to spend all your time fighting in wars and tournaments, your fiefs will "run themselves," although less efficiently. In other words, without your personal attention, your bailiffs will be less rigorous and honest. Your wife and children may develop excessive spending habits and, in general, your assets will waste away. You can borrow and lend money, or buy and sell fiefs. Fiefs are the basic economic unit of the game and there are about 1,000 of them. The "fief file" is itself an interesting historical document, containing data dredged up from numerous sources and containing traditional "fiefs" (agricultural areas) as well as towns and religious facilities (church owned fiefs with monasteries, etc). Play the game and you'll quickly discovered that even the largest cities had fewer than 100,000 citizens within its walls. Less than five percent of the population lived in walled towns and cities, most of the remainder lived in small villages surrounded by farmland and pastures. About two percent of the population belonged to the nobility or a nobles household. This group included most of the troops. Thus of the twenty million (pre-plague) population in the area covered by the game, only a few hundred thousand men were fighters. The three hundred players occupy one of three ranks. Every player is at least a "lesser noble" controlling one or more fiefs. Three dozen players are "magnates," or overlords of several lesser nobles and themselves the holders of more fiefs than a lesser noble. One player is the king of England and one really unfortunate wretch is the king of France. To start the game off in the proper spirit, the English players (about one third the total) are allowed a week to discuss things among themselves and elect those of their number deemed most suitable to be magnates and the king. This represents the superior cohesiveness of the English government, even though they did not have elections as such. Those players who chose to be French (or were forced to be French if all the English slots were taken) are randomly assigned as lesser nobles, magnates and king. This maximizes the chances of the wrong person getting into a key position. While combat is the final arbiter of events, there are other ways to get things done. After all, battles are only a forceful way of obtaining a treaty. The English king wants to become the French king and to do so he must control enough French territory to make his coronation as French king convincing. There is a legal system built into the game, covering both civil and church matters. You can be declared an outlaw or excommunicated. You can even be tried and executed. There's a Pope (actually, more than one during this period), heresy and the ever popular Black Death. Money plays a large role in the game. Although several currencies were used in this period, we invented a new one, the ducat (which was actually the name of an Italian currency) so that you wouldn't have to deal with all the different exchange rates. By way of example, 600 ducats equals one English Pound and 135 ducats equals one French Livre, and so on. One ducat also equals one US dollar (1990 vintage). Money is important in this period. Troops were the biggest expense. The feudal levy could still be called out, but only for local defense and only for a limited period of time. On average, a mercenary soldier cost about 2,000 ducats per turn (a season of three months). Most armies in this period contained 5-10,000 men, which meant 10-20 million ducats per turn just for the troops. The king of England only had that much income per turn (in the best of times) and there were other expenses (household, maintenance of fortifications, bribes and payments to officials, etc). The king had several thousand people on his payroll and even a magnate had several hundred servants and soldiers to support (and an income of up to several million ducats per turn). You can borrow money, but basically the English kept the war going for so long because they were better soldiers, their ships controlled the English Channel (most of the time) and they were able to constantly plunder French fiefs. Thus the object of taking your army into the field was not battle, but plunder. Sort of like a game of Monopoly with edged weapons. For players with IBM compatible machines and Macintoshes a Graphic Front End (or GFE) program will incorporate a datacomm program to connect with GEnie (more specifically, the Hundred Years Wargame) and have an editor for writing messages to other players and the graphics capability to display game activities in more detail. Players with other PC types can still play just by connecting with GEnie, but will not have access to all the amenities in the GFE. The GFE costs nothing (except the connect time to download it, a few bucks). When you first connect with this game via GEnie you immediately know you're not in Kansas any more. If it's your first time, you're asked if you want to join the game. If you answer yes you receive a screen full of information on who your character is ("you are William de Clinton, the Baron of Huntington in Cambridgeshire, England, etc", or "you are the Captal de Buch, lord of the Port of Buch and it's castle on the Gascon coast, you own three fiefs and are related to the king of Navarre, etc") and what your resources are (other fiefs owned, annual income, etc) as well as personal information (age, state of health, wife, kids, state of your fortifications, troops under your control, etc). You can then go to the main game screen, where you have the following options; 1 Alarum 3 Where Am I 4 Communicate 5 Action Plan 6 Personal Affairs 7 Official Acts 8 Battle 9 Help and Explanation The Alarum tells you if something urgent has happened (you've died, your primary castle is under siege, you've excommunicated, invaded or whatever else requires urgent attention). Maps are available to show where you (and your fiefs) are and where other players, enemy armies and the like are. There are many options, but all of them are optional. You can sign on and do nothing and your character's life will go on. In this case you would be the medieval equivalent of a couch potato. Taxes are collected and spent in your estate, dishonest officials will embezzle most of the surplus and life will go on with you doing little more than observing. Note that you play through the current eldest male of the family your character belongs to. When the eldest male dies, the next eldest male descendent takes over. If none is available, the line dies and you're out of the game. Among other things, you have to look after the wife and kiddies (which involves some interesting items not normally found in wargames, but essential to medieval military affairs). However, there is much to do and this is the virtue of an online computer game. The key here is the multiple players and the ease of communication and interaction. Multiplayer games are usually more enjoyable than two player encounters, yet solitaire play is the most common because of the difficulty in getting the players together. Online games eliminate these problems. Whenever you get on you can send and receive messages. You can also talk with other players who are on at the same time and join together for tournaments (jousting, duels, etc), hunting or conspiracies or affairs of state (there was often little difference between the two). This form of real time of communication, in a time when it took three weeks to ride from one end of France to another, is justified by the three month length of the game "turns" (one day of real time). Players may allocate their 90 days more productively, performing such drudgery as managing their fiefs or training with arms. But true to the period, they may spend most (or all) of their time out hunting and fighting. Naturally, the more ambitious (and probably the older) players will more readily adapt to building their power through management and diplomacy. The important thing is that up to three hundred individuals in one historically based game will make for an interesting experience. Should some bloody minded sixteen year old find him (or her) self king of France, surrounded by a few equally rapacious nobles and faced with a thirty-five year old plant manager playing the king of England. Well, this game will be fun just to watch. And you will be able to watch. For example, we can have play by play descriptions. Battles during the period were infrequent (perhaps one or two a month of real time, or one or two every seven years of game time). However, you could usually see them coming (money and mercenaries had to be collected, negotiations conducted, etc), so we will announce them and enable any interested GEnie users to view the action in terminal mode. "Hundred Years War: Witness the Battle of Rouen at 9 PM, February 3rd, 1991." The "Heralds" (sysops) will give play by play commentary, battle maps (o's and x's) plus participant interviews, pre and post battle commentary and the like. Everything but tailgate parties. Sort of like a football game with edged weapons, no timeouts and no referees (and very few rules). "Here we are folks, outside the French city of Rouen in the year of our Lord 1376, where the Duke of Normandy and the Count of Paris have marshalled their forces to settle a dispute over who shall be the Duke of Brittainy. The Normans have a contingent of English troops under the Earl of Bedford and are the current favorites. The six thousand Norman troops and eleven thousand French troops are arrayed and combat is expected to commence in about fifteen minutes at 9:40 PM EST. First, however, we have a live interview with his lordship, the Constable of France, the Count of Artois. Tell us, Count, how do you expect to overcome those English longbowmen?" And so on...