Decwar

Original versions The original game that led to DECWAR was WAR, a two-player version of Star Trek for the CDC 6600. In Star Trek, a single player would hunt around the galaxy looking for an invasion force of Klingon warships, and return to a number of starbases to refit and repair. In WAR, the starbases were replaced by planets that either player could capture after attacking them, turning them "friendly". The game ended when one user captured all of the planets and destroyed his opponent's ship. The 6600 supported only one operating terminal, so the players had to take turns entering their commands. During a port to the PDP-10 (also called DECsystem-10), the game was more heavily modified and became DECWAR. Commercial versions Bill Louden, who was in charge of games at CompuServe, purchased a version of DECWAR from UT Austin after having been told of its existence one night on CB Simulator by Merlyn Cousins. In 1982, Louden gave it to the programmers at Kesmai, who wrote many of CompuServe's games. They found that the copyright said nothing about commercial uses, and quickly produced a new version after replacing any potentially lawsuit-friendly references to the Star Trek universe with more generic references. The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players. Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR. The source code is hosted at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and GitHub. A clone of Decwar called decwars.com was written in Go by Harris Newman. Commands were modeled on the original game with minor variations, except the game supports unlimited players. The source is also available on GitHub. ==Description==

The basic aim of DECWAR was to take control of a "universe" consisting of a 79 × 79 "sector" grid (in v2.3, it was smaller in earlier versions) containing a number of planets, bases and black holes. One change from the original Star Trek were the planets, which could be captured and fortified to create additional bases. Players could join either the Federation or Klingon Empire, although the difference was purely cosmetic and each side had identical ships. In games where one team had too many players, new players would be forced onto the smaller team. When joining, the player was presented with a list of ships on each side that were not currently being played, and could re-enter the game in the same ship if they were killed. Each ship was equipped with warp and impulse engines, photon torpedoes, phasers, deflector shields, a computer, life support, sub-space radio, and a tractor beam. Each ship started with 5000 units of energy, 2500 units of shield strength, and 0 units of damage. If a ship receives 2500 points of damage it is destroyed, and a ship that loses all of its energy is likewise "dead". In addition to total damage for the ship as a whole, each hit would do damage to a part of the ship, which would be rendered inoperative if this reached 300 points. Another change from Star Trek was that fully charged and operative shields would deflect torpedoes completely, whereas in the original they often overwhelmed the Klingon ships with a single shot. This forces the players to first reduce the enemy's shields with phaser fire before finishing them off with a torpedo. Players could also shoot at stars with their torpedoes, causing them to go nova and destroy any nearby ship. The bases were the key strategic element of the game, allowing allied ships to be repaired and rearmed. The game ended when one team destroyed all of the opposing ships, bases, and captured their planets. Bases will fire on enemy ships within four sectors, and had massive phaser and shield power. Neutral planets were essentially small bases with a range of two sectors and less power. Bases and planets could be easily reduced by staying slightly outside their firing range; torpedoes, for instance, had a range of ten sectors. Although, like Star Trek, each user interacted through a turn-based command line, the game as a whole was essentially real-time because any user could enter commands at any time and update the global game state. This gave the advantage to players who could interpret output and enter commands faster. To improve performance, DECWAR had three different levels of "detail" in commands and output, with the tersest mode condensing commands into a code-like format. Command structure was similar to the command structure of TOPS-10, the operating system for the PDP-10; commands could be abbreviated to their most simple and unique form. DECWAR allowed the user to enter coordinates in absolute, relative or computed format (one position +/- another). Finally, commands could be stacked on a line, allowing a list of commands to be executed at once. If the user wanted, the last command line could be re-entered by simply pressing the escape key. ==See also==