Earth: Empires

Earth: Empires is a MMOG operated by a small group of Earth: 2025 players. It is a spin-off of the now-defunct Earth: 2025 game, in which one must build a country from scratch and attempt to become the most powerful country. The game mechanics of Earth: Empires are basically the same as those of Earth: 2025, but with updated, faster code and backend processes.

As in Earth:_2025, players must build countries from scratch, and are ranked according to the net worth of their countries. They are encouraged to form alliances with other countries, and clans with other players. There are currently six game variants: Beta Express, Beta Council, Alliance, Primary, Alpha FFA, and Alpha FFA 2.

History of Earth: Empires
Earth: Empires was built mainly to keep the Earth: 2025 community together after Jolt_Online_Gaming announced they would no longer be hosting Earth: 2025, due to the game's old architecture. Empires began hosting its beta rounds on December 9, 2009, where players were allowed to run their accounts on the available servers to find and report bugs, which would quickly be fixed by the administrators.

The general plan is to get Empires running similar to Earth: 2025, then add additional capabilities later on. This is mainly for not only getting the old Earth: 2025 players comfortable, but to also attract new players to the game as well.

Introduction
Earth: Empires is a turn-based game in which players build a country from scratch. Countries are ranked according to their net worth, which is a combination of values assigned to population, resources, military, technology, land, and buildings.

Countries begin with 100 acre of empty land, and a small sum of money and bushels of food, as well as 100 troops and some civilians. Every country begins as a Monarchy, but can change governments at any time through a revolution.

As mentioned earlier, players in Earth: Empires can play either as individuals or as part of a clan. As an individual, the only way to win the game is to create the country with the highest net worth and earn a higher rank. However, clans are ranked in several ways. They can win through either the highest average net worth, the highest total net worth, or through having the most members. Clans may also organize wars against each other.

Turns
Players are awarded turns at regular time intervals, which vary with servers. Turns are also awarded for not logging into the country for 12 or 18 hours. The former gives three bonus turns, the latter six. These turns are used to carry out the majority of actions that a country can perform.

Each turn displays revenue/expense, food production/consumption, oil production, military production, and population gain/loss. Since turns cannot be acquired through any method other than waiting, they are regarded as the most valuable resource. Turns can also be stored- these are not immediately usable, but instead, they are doled out one at a time in addition to the turns a country normally would earn. A Country may store up to roughly 75% of its maximum turns.

Servers
There are five servers in Earth: 2025: Primary, Alliance, Tournament, Earth Council, and Limited. Each server has its own community, politics, and message board. In July, 2006, the Free For All Server was taken down, and the Earth Council server is being tested to replace it. This table outlines the main differences between servers:

Building a nation
Since land is required to generate a country's revenue, or means of revenue, it is extremely important. Empty acres can be gained through exploration, or through a land grab- using a Standard or Planned Strike to steal land from another player. Land grabs usually bring buildings with them as well.

There are eight different governments to choose from. By default, each nation starts as a monarchy. Revolutions transitioning from any government other than a monarchy to another will destroy up to 14% of a country's infrastructure. Each government, with the exception of the monarchy, has defined benefits and drawbacks. Excluding the monarchy, there are currently seven governments to choose from: fascist, tyranny, dictatorship, communism, theocracy, republic, and democracy.

Players can expend turns and money to build on empty land. The number of structures that can be built per turn depends on how many construction sites a country has. There are seven other buildings: enterprise zones, residences, industrial complexes, military bases, research labs, farms, and oil rigs. Each of these buildings helps to make a nation either through increasing efficiency or providing a means of revenue.

Technology is important for protecting a country and making it more efficient- it can reduce the cost of goods, improve military strength, and raise the efficiency of industry,commerce. and agriculture. There are eight types of technologies to research: military, medical, business, residential, agricultural, military strategy, warfare, weapons, industrial, spy effectiveness, and SDI. However, as the area of the nation increases, the number of technology points needed to maintain the same effect increases.

Military
Militaries allow players to invade other countries and provides defense against enemies. There are five military units: spies, troops, jets, turrets, and tanks. Turrets are entirely defensive, while jets are entirely offensive. The other three can be used in either defensive or offensive roles. Nations can also develop three kinds of missiles through warfare technology: nuclear missiles, chemical warheads, and cruise missiles.

Attacks in Earth: 2025 are based on diminishing returns- more attacks will gradually yield smaller results. Eventually, a minimum return will result. If an attack results in a return below the minimum, then the defending country has been destroyed. In addition, the returns from an initial strike are based on a comparison of two countries; a country with lots of land will take very little from a country with little land, and vice versa. With all things being equal, the initial standard strike by one country should earn a yield of about 7% of the other country's resources, with the exception of Tyrannies, which have an attack bonus. Non-spy military units have a readiness percentage. As a country's readiness falls, the chances of its attacks succeeding go down, while the chances of its defenses being breached rise. Each attack results in a lower readiness percentage. The only way to raise it is to use turns without using non-spy military. Spy units have a limit of 50 turns of operations per day.

Resource limitations
No country may have more than 2 billion (2,000,000,000 = 2*10^9) of any resource due to game mechanics (see long integer); anything in the game that exceeds 2 billion will not be added. Despite the ability of the new code to do away with this limitation, the administrators decided to keep this limitation in the game to encourage ingame interaction on the servers' public markets. This has led to players stockpiling goods as a form of in-game market liquidity.