I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch these days...
Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)
I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ...
[1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com
Is that the same Empire? The version I've seen has no BTUs. Just basics: random continents, cities produce military units, units require different numbers of turns for production, etc.
However, I saw a modern-ish decendent called Empire Deluxe, so maybe the original had more features?
The version I played all those years ago definitely had BTUs. I remember planning ahead of time what the most efficient use of them would be, before actually doing things between updates; not to mention setting alarms to wake me up, log on, and use up the (otherwise wasted because I was at max) ones at times in the night, if I was doing something, er… sneaky :)
LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P
PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.
Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)
I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ... [1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com