Astroea is a long-term game. It’s intended to be played over the course of many years, perhaps even decades. There’s no defined ending to this game nor are there any victory conditions. The game will last as long as there are players willing to play and the gamemaster is willing to operate the game. You can’t win Astroea, but you can achieve. You play until you quit or are eliminated. If you’re eliminated, you’re allowed to start a new species and rejoin the game.
You submit a set of orders for your position which are then processed at a defined frequency of time. For Astroea, this is bi-weekly (every two weeks), a common frequency for play-by-email games, providing plenty of time for a player to review their results and prepare their orders for next turn. While the term turn-based is used, Astroea can be classified as a play-by-email game (PBeM or PBM game, for short). The game is presently only played via email. In the future, it may be updated to support optional play via the web and mobile apps.
Each player in Astroea takes on the role of a newly spacefaring species in a shared, persistent, environment: a dwarf galaxy much smaller than our Milky Way. The game begins with your species’ home planet recently unified under a single governmental system. This is just the beginning of the space era for your people. A single satellite was successfully launched into orbit using a newly-designed rocket. Think of this as late 1950s American or Soviet technology. While your people have ambitions for colonizing the stars, it's of no immediate capability. Much progress in technology, engineering, and society must be made by your species first.
Turn-based gaming, often referred to as play-by-mail (PBM) gaming or play-by-email (PBeM) gaming, is a type of multi-player game played through the postal mail or email. While the hobby had its origins in postal mail back to the 1970s, most of the PBM games that exist today are played via email. A player sends orders for a position (a nation, kingdom, empire, or a character, usually) which is processed by computer (in some cases, by a human) and the results of the game turn are sent back to the player as an email message or an attached document.
Turns are often due every week, two weeks, or every month, depending upon the game. Play-by-mail games were a popular gaming format in the 1980s and 1990s. Although video games and the Internet resulted in a significant decline in the PBM gaming hobby over the past 30 years, many of these games have survived, moving to email (play-by-email) and a few to the web (browser games).
There are generally two types of play-by-mail games – victory conditions games and open-ended games. A victory conditions game has a set of objectives for a player to win the game, with games lasting anywhere from several months to several years in duration. Open-ended games continue on until you are eliminated, and these games will likely last for many years. Astroea is open-ended.
As play-by-mail games are multi-player, it is recommended that you have diplomatic contact with other players who may be allies or adversaries. Although, in Astroea, this make take quite awhile to run into another player. Diplomatic contact can be done through in-game orders, emails, by phone, or even postal letters.
Presently, there are around 70 known play-by-mail games in existence. You can view a list of these games at the Suspense & Decision Games Index It’s a small community with a limited number of game choices. As such, one of the goals with the launch of Astroea is to not negatively impact the viability of any existing PBM game. This is especially true with the existing space-themed games out there such as SuperNova: Rise of the Empire, Takamo, Phoenix: Beyond the Stellar Empire, Galac-Tac, Fire on the Suns, and others.
There are some excellent games that need your support. Please do not drop any of your existing PBM games to join Astroea. Some of the games out there are commercial in nature and provide the livelihood for real people.
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