Galactic Bloodshed is one of the original update-driven multi-player 4X client-server Internet-wide text-based games. Expand your empire and exterminate your opponents as you explore the galaxy and exploit its many resources.
Galactic Bloodshed is an 'open source' space empire building game with incredible depth and complexity.
GB is unlike most games of its ilk in a number of ways. The high-level picture is the same take over planets and win but the specifics are different in almost every way you can think of.
Consider getting the game set up. First off one person has to be the referee for the game, the deity. They get to set up the game select a map and initial conditions, set up the players on their home planets, and keep the game running. The sad thing is that means the person who takes the time to set up the game can't even play it they have too much insider info.
If you're interested in the game enough to put up a server, aren't you going to want to play the game? And if you want to play the game, doesn't that mean you don't want to run it? Games shouldn't be this hostile to their biggest fans!
The basic engine is meant to be played with a telnet terminal all they had in the late 80's but it's design allowed clients to be built for it that made everything a lot easier. The major client was GBII, hardly an improvement over Telnet UI-wise, but there was also an effort to produce a Java client.
As a result of having to work from a terminal, the game ends up being increadibly modal. Many of the commands have to be "prefixed" by moving to the correct location first. For instance, you might have a bunch of planets, so in order to give orders to one particular planet the game makes you change scope to the one you were interested in. This is an important part of the UI, and the same basic system is then used to control practically everything in the game, ships, planets, even as far down as factories on the planets.
Race design is very complex, at least as complex as the system in MOO:II, although in different ways. Like MOO it uses a point system to limit the abilities of the race and attempt to create a level playing field, but this isn't always easy.
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