An invitation

A game you play a few minutes a day, for months

In Conquer you are the ruler of a nation of humans, elves, dwarves or orcs. You settle land, feed and tax your people, raise armies, learn magic, trade and sign treaties with the other rulers of the world. Some of them are players like you. Others are run by the computer: rival kingdoms, pirates, nomads, savages and dragons.

Nobody has to be online at the same time. You log in when it suits you, give your orders and log out. At the turn update every order in the world is resolved at once, the season changes and a newspaper tells everyone what happened. Then you read the news, and plan again.

You need no installation and no account elsewhere. The game runs in your browser, on a computer or a phone.

History

From Usenet to your browser

1. Oct 26, 1987

   Ed Barlow posts conquest, a middle earth multi-player game to the comp.sources.games newsgroup, in five parts. Players assemble the source code from the posts and compile it on their university Unix machines.

2. Jan 1988

   Adam Bryant sends his first message about the game. He becomes its co-author and later its maintainer.

3. Jun 16, 1988

   Conquer version 3 is posted, now in eight parts.

4. 1988–1989

   Version 4, the one you play here, is released and patched up to patch level 12. Games run on shared Unix systems, often with a turn update from cron every night and players logging in from terminals.

5. 1989

   Martin Forssen writes PostScript utilities to print world maps, and Richard Caley at the University of Edinburgh writes a map drawing tool.

6. 1990s

   Conquer spreads across university networks. Newsletters and discussions continue on rec.games.empire.

7. 2006

   Juan Manuel Méndez Rey (Vejeta) starts asking the authors to release the game as free software, with the help of the Debian legal list and GNU Savannah.

8. 2011 – 2025

   Adam Bryant (2011), Ed Barlow (2016) and Martin Forssen (2025) give written permission. Conquer 4 is released under the GPL version 3 in 2025.

9. 2026

   Conquer Web brings the game to the browser: player accounts, scheduled turns, a public newspaper and scoreboard, a touch layer for phones, and turns that run early once every ruler is ready.

10. Oct 26, 2027

    Conquer turns 40. We intend to celebrate it with a championship season (see the plan).

The rhythm of the game

How a turn works

1. Read the newsYour mail and the world newspaper tell you what happened last turn.
2. Give ordersMove armies, draft troops, build, redesignate land, negotiate. Log in as often as you like.
3. Mark your orders doneWhen you quit, the menu asks whether you are finished for this turn.
4. Turn updateAt the scheduled time, or earlier once every nation is done. The season advances.

Each turn is one season. Four turns make a year. The administrator sets the schedule (daily during the closed test); the home page and the game menu always show the exact time of the next update and a countdown.

Tutorial

Your first turn, step by step

The screenshots come from a real game on this site, played by the elven nation avalon. For the game itself, key by key, follow your first turn: a recorded first turn of a new nation with every screen.

1. Get an invite code and found your nation

   Write to the game administrator (the address is under How to join on the home page) and ask for an invite code. Then:

   1. on the home page, choose Create your account, type your code and choose your player account for this site: a name and a password of at least 8 characters;
   2. press Play now and sign in with that account;
   3. the game has you found your nation with its nation builder: a nation name of up to 9 letters (for example avalon), a nation password of 2 to 7 characters, a race (human, elf, dwarf or orc), a class and an alignment. The screen explains how to spend your points; buy 2 or 3 points of treasury.
   4. from then on, Play now opens your nation directly.

   So you have two passwords: your player account opens the game on this site, and your nation password is the one the 1987 game itself asks for. A nation can be founded at any turn; one that starts after turn 5 gets extra points from the game to catch up.

2. Look at the current game

   The home page shows the turn, the season, the schedule with a countdown to the next update, how many nations have finished their orders, the scores and the latest world news.

   

   

   

3. Sign in and meet the menu

   Press Play now. Your browser asks for your player account; you can let it remember it. The game menu then shows who you are, your nation, when the last and next turn updates are and how many nations are done.

   

   

   

4. Enter your nation

   Choose 1 Play. Your nation opens directly: type your nation password and press Enter. Press any key on the title screen.

   

   

5. Read the map

   The map shows the land around your capital. The top right lists the units in the selected sector; the bottom right describes the sector under the cursor: owner, designation, vegetation, people, move cost and defences. Move the cursor with h j k l and the diagonals y u b n.

   

   Tip. The bottom line says You have Conquer Mail: press R to read messages from other rulers and from the game.

6. Check your armies, budget and the news

   

   

   

7. Give your orders

   These are the commands you use most. Press ? in the game for the full help.

   Key	What it does
   p	Select the next unit (army, leader or navy).
   m	Move the selected unit.
   D	Draft troops in a town or city.
   r	Redesignate a sector: farm, mine, town, city…
   C	Construct fortifications, roads or ships.
   S	Diplomacy: set your status towards each nation.
   W	Write a message to another ruler.
   M	Magic: the powers of your nation.
   P	Production report.
   Ctrl-L	Redraw the screen if it looks garbled.

8. Quit and mark your orders done

   Press q to save and quit. The menu asks whether your orders for this turn are done. Answer y if you have finished; you can still log in and change your orders until the update, and option 6 in the menu undoes the mark.

   

   

   Please quit when you finish. The update cannot run while someone is in the game. Players still inside are warned on screen and disconnected a few minutes before it; their orders are saved.

9. The turn update

   When the last nation marks its orders done, the turn runs at once instead of waiting for Sunday. Otherwise it runs at the scheduled time. A few moments later the menu, the scores and the newspaper show the new season.

   

   

   

10. Play from a phone

    On a phone or tablet a touch layer sits over the game: tap the map to walk there, use the command chips under it for what the current screen allows, and the d-pad to nudge a step. Press Keyboard to type names and passwords. Sound and music are optional and off until you switch them on in the options (the gear).

    

Advice

Advice for your first seasons

Welcome back

For veterans of the 80s and 90s

The game is the one you remember: Conquer 4, patch level 12, with the same map, races, classes, magic and newspaper. The engine only received fixes for crashes and oversized maps. What changed is everything around it:

• No telnet, no shell account and no .cshrc: you play in a browser tab, from anywhere.
• Turns are scheduled by the administrator and run early when every nation is done, so a fast group of players can play several turns a week.
• The scores and the newspaper are public on the home page, so friends can follow the war without playing.
• Every world is backed up before each turn.
• The code is free software (GPL v3). You can read it, fix it and host your own world.

Tournaments

Tournaments and seasons

A season is one world played from turn 1 to an agreed end. These are the formats we plan to run. Each one sets how often turns run, how long the season lasts and how a winner is decided.

Fair play, in every format

• One nation per person. Alliances are welcome, but shared or puppet nations are not.
• Diplomacy happens in the game and in the season's chat room. Treaties can be broken; that is part of the game.
• A nation whose ruler stops playing keeps running; the newspaper shows it as moved by the computer. After two missed weeks the administrator can hand it to a new player.
• Bugs and exploits go to the administrator, not into your strategy.

The plan

The road to the 40th anniversary

The seasons build towards 26 October 2027, forty years after the first Usenet post. Newcomers get a gentle entry and veterans a reason to come back.

How we will find players

For organisers

Running a season

Each installation runs one world at a time, so seasons run one after another. The turn rhythm is set in config/production.env (or config/local.env) and applied with ./rebuild.sh --quick. The schedule is a cron expression in the time zone TZ.

Set TURN_SCHEDULE_LABEL to the same rhythm in words, since players read it in the menu and on the home page. For a Weekend Rush, lower TURN_GRACE_MINUTES to 1 or 2.

Before the first turn

./generate-world.sh                             # a fresh world (maps up to 256x256)
./add-nation.sh                                 # once per player: nation + linked account
./manage-players.sh add mentor1 --admin         # mentors and co-organisers
./manage-players.sh list                        # check every account has its nation

During the season

• Open a chat room for the season and set TURN_WEBHOOK_URL so it announces every turn (Slack, Mattermost and Discord work).
• Fill in ADMIN_CONTACT so players know where to ask for a nation.
• Backups are taken before every turn in data/backups/; ./restore-world.sh brings one back if a turn goes wrong.
• At the end, run ./season-end.sh "Season name": the final scores go to the hall of fame. Keep the last backup as the season's archive.
• Hand out invite codes (./manage-players.sh invite 10) and let players build their own nations with the join account shown on the home page.

Questions

Questions