Umpire: Combat Quest of the Millennium

Welcome to Umpire, a military strategy game with modern sensibilities as well as a proper respect for the past.

Umpire's gameplay is inspired by the classic game Empire and its text-based user interface is heavily inspired by that of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Umpire is implemented using the Rust programming language, both as an exercise in learning Rust, and in order to gain the benefits of speed, safety, and ergonomics relative to comparable languages that Rust offers.

Installation

For now, Umpire is distributed only as source. For this reason, a working installation of Rust is prerequisite to running Umpire. Please refer to the official Rust installation guide for guidance.

For systems with Rust installed, installation is straightforward:

git clone git@github.com:joshhansen/Umpire.git && cd Umpire
cargo run --release

This should grab the source code, build it, and run the game.

Playing Umpire

Upon loading, Umpire shows a ridiculous ASCII art splash screen of a baseball umpire. It has nothing to do with military strategy.

Right now Umpire lacks an AI and can only be played as hotseat style multiplayer. The Message Log will indicate whose turn it is. When a turn begins, the player is prompted with any necessary decisions.

Players control cities which can produce units, and control units which can move, attack other units, attack and capture cities, and a few other special functions.

A player wins when all enemy cities have been captured and all enemy units have been destroyed.

Pressing 'x' engages Examine Mode which allows map tiles to be inspected. Pressing 'Enter' over a map tile can cancel a unit's orders, clear a city's production, or go-to a particular tile or empty space.

The Fog of War

A fog of war mechanic is implemented but can be disabled using the --fog off command line option.

Wrapping

Wrapping can be turned on and off in both dimensions, but at the moment turning it off provokes a few bugs.

Color support

An effort has been made to support a range of color palettes. These can be controlled using the --colors command line flag. The 16 color palette is the best tested at present.

Startup Options

The full list of startup options can be seen thus:

cargo run --release -- --help

Any options desired can be placed after the --. These include things such as whether to enable fog of war, and how many players to include in the game.

Name

Why is Umpire called Umpire? Because it's silly, and it harks back to the game that inspired it.

License

Umpire is licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3). See LICENSE for detailed license terms.