Earth: Empires

Earth: Empires is a browser game designed and maintained by a small group of former Earth: 2025 players. It is a spin-off of the now-defunct Earth: 2025 game, in which one must attempt to build the most powerful country in a world with hundreds or thousands of other competitor countries. The game mechanics of Earth: Empires are similar to those of Earth: 2025, but contain many notable differences in features, functionality and game play.

Players create countries, manage their economy, develop their military, and expand through force or exploring. Players can band together in clans or teams to attempt to destroy other clans, or to have the higher net worth at the end of the round. There are currently five game variants: Express, Council, Team, Primary, and Free For All.

History of Earth: Empires
Earth: Empires was built mainly to keep the Earth: 2025 community together after Jolt Online 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. This beta period lasted through the end of January, when the game moved out of Beta and into the final production status.

Earth: Empires now hosts 5 public servers, with over 2000 players.

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: Empires: Express, Council, Team, Primary, and Free For All. Each server has its own community, politics, and message board. 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.

Public Market
A public market is built into the game as a place to exchange goods for money. This market functions as a buyers market, with sellers sending goods to the market for buyers to purchase. The market allows for sales of food, oil, military units and technology points and for some forms of government requires a commission between 6 and 10%.

Clan Politics
A unique structure of alliances, factions and policies exist on each of the three clan servers. These agreements help to establish order but also provoke conflict and political maneuvering. For many players, clan politics are the most interesting component to the gaming experience.

Hosting Websites
A number of websites for have been created for clans playing Earth:Empires which provide message boards, user management, and information management for these clans. Earth:Empires provides an API for clan hosting websites to access data from the game, such as country data, attack news and public market prices.

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 designers decided to keep this limitation in the game to encourage in-game interaction on the servers' public markets. This has led to players stockpiling goods as a form of in-game market liquidity.