Assume the command of any European principality during the Viking Age and dominate your neighbors. You may choose among eleven principalities, the rest is controlled by the AI. Each one starts with 10,000 in gold, except for the vikings who start with 40,000 if controlled by the AI.
During each year, the following phases occur:
- Player Action: You can choose to
- Conquer an adversary's province. As a prerequisite, you need to own an adjacent province - also including maritime adjacency. Similarly to the C64 game Imperator, the whole adversary army will wait for you in the target province (even they are busy with other activities).
- Raid an enemy (also a remote one) for gold. You need to have more soldiers than the garrison which is half the size of the gold reserves.
- Propose a non-aggression pact that lasts several years.
- Do nothing.
- Enemy Action: The AI players do the same - except for raids that they never conduct. If large armies conduct battles, the result might also be a draw, meaning losses on each side and the attacker retreating.
- Build army: Buy soldiers for one gold each (and no maintenance, yay!). The enemies do so concurrently and invest most of their revenue. A small portion is retained to lure you into raids.
Put the repository into a mounted directory of an emulated Amiga 500 and run the script from the shell:
execute VikingAge
You can also start using the workbench (info-files provided).
The game language is German - but you only need to know some key words in order to play it.
This is the starting position. The identifieres of the principalities and provinces are also provided.
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| Principalities in 792 | Province borders |
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| Army size in 793 | Provincial revenues |
Plans for a sequel including the colonization of Greenland and North America were laid out. However, this project did never move further than the map drawing routine (found here).
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| Viking Age II was supposed to extend into North America. |
The source code has been lost in time. Only the encrypted AmigaBASIC program is available (in src-protected). A memory dump of the program once read comes close to its decrypted but tokenized version - it is found in src-tokenized.
There are some anachronisms on the map, notably:
- European principalities reflects the state around 900.
- The vikings did not start strongly because of their superior numbers but in spite of them.
- The Byzantine Empire's main foe (and distraction) is not on the map.
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| Eligible attack targets are listed. | Expect that each side's losses are always comparable. |
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| Raid the enemy for his gold |
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| Year-end report about AI activities |
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| Win by conquering all the map. | Lose by ceasing to own any province. |