Xbattle - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

xbattle is a multi-player real time strategy game released in 1991 by Steve Lehar and Greg Lesher.

The game was originally written for unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

systems using the X Window System. Many military-type scenarios can be played out in this game. The board is very generic, consisting of repeated geometric shapes (hexagons, triangles, squares, or octagon with squares). Water obstructions can be included and randomly generated boards are often used. Each player is assigned a color. Each player gets a pre-set number of bases that generate "troops". Troops look like blobs of color, with strength indicated by the size of the blob in the location. Troops can be moved around the board to take over additional squares or opposing bases. Supply lines thin out, so the opposing force usually tries to cut off your supply lines. There are numerous options, including fog-of-war limits on visibility, dig and paratrooper

Paratrooper

Paratroopers are soldiers trained in parachuting and generally operate as part of an airborne force.Paratroopers are used for tactical advantage as they can be inserted into the battlefield from the air, thereby allowing them to be positioned in areas not accessible by land...

options. Some recent versions include a single player AI option with two quite sophisticated AI engines. There is also possible to prepare a game with AI versus AI only.

This game does not run as client server. Instead, it opens windows on all the clients using the X window system, so it is really just a single application running multi-headed. However, there is a version 6.0 which has a developer version of network client-server code, currently rather unplayable.

The X-Battle project has been orphaned several years. In year 2009 there was a try to revive the project a bit at the University of Gdansk, where a highly motivated group of five students take the code from stable AI 1.2.2 version and prepare it to further development (version 1.2.3). The code was refactorized, and there are quite a few improvements added, such as an improved client-sever code or AI's ability to dig (right now it is experimental, and digging is done randomly, but it works). If the project would not stop there should be a newer stable version with modern client-server interface, which can help to populate this awesome game across the world.

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