Atlantis PbeM

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Atlantis is a turn-based fantasy strategy game played via email . The English-language original version of Atlantis was developed based on the game Olympia by Russel Wallace, the first game began in April 1993. Improvements were made in the versions of the following years. A German translation was done in 1995 by Alex Schröder, runs under the name German Atlantis and was further developed up to version 6.2.

Procedure and goal of the game

The game is designed for any number of players, the game world is divided into a large number of islands that are settled by the parties of the players. The parties consist of units recruited by the players who can learn various talents such as magic, combat skills and the skills required for the production of buildings, ships and weapons.

There is no official goal of the game or the end of the game; each participant is free to decide what and how he tries to achieve it. Entry is possible at any time, new players are "abandoned" in unpopulated regions.

Every move is followed by an evaluation, the 'newspaper' supplied with it enables the players to view their party in a way that is accessible to all players, in contrast to secret negotiations between individual players carried out by email.

The evaluation is text-based, but programs are freely available that convert the evaluation into graphics and support the creation of the moves.

Most current games are free, the software developed by Alex Schröder is free, but may not be used commercially.

German Atlantis

German Atlantis is based on the English original Atlantis 1.0 by Russel Wallace. It was translated by Alex Schröder in the summer of 1995 and further developed by him up to version 6.2. All of today's Atlantis versions are based on it.

Eressea

Eressea started in 1996 on the basis of German Atlantis. The game has been around for over 700 rounds. In April 2009 Eressea had almost 600 parties. Eressea had the highest player with over 2000 parties, currently the trend is slightly downward. Registrations are no longer possible since December 2008.

A client program called Magellan was developed for Eressea , which supports the players in evaluating and planning their moves and visualizes the game world on a map.

Fantasya

Fantasya is derived from German Atlantis 6.2, but was completely redeveloped in Java after a server crash in April 2008. There are different races for the game units with different bonuses and penalties. The 205th round is currently running (September 2012) with 26 players, and there is also an accelerated, parallel game round with daily evaluation in the beta version of the game engine. The Magellan client from Eressea is for the most part compatible with Fantasya. There is a separate wiki and forum with a role play area. New registrations are possible.

Web links

  • German Atlantis website , ongoing German original part and source code
  • Eressea , two running instances
  • Fantasya , modification of Eressea, accepts new players, with its own wiki help and an active forum