To get started with Xconq, you have to select which game you want to play. The possibilities may be presented to you, or you may have to look in some sort of library to see what's available and then supply that name on a command line. If you don't do anything, then you will get a default game.
Some games require no additional setup; once loaded, you're ready to go. Others will require additional decisions, such as the size and shape of the playing area, whether exploration will be necessary, or whether the game is realtime. These choices are variants of the game. The exact set of variants is part of the game design, and the interface will (usually) tell you about them.
In addition, most games also give you a choice of which player is to
play which side in a game, as well how many players can join in. There
are two kinds of players: humans, who have displays, and artificial
intelligences or AIs for short, which are run by the computer.
Some versions of Xconq may include more than one kind of AI; each
type has a distinct name. The AI named mplayer is always
available.
An example might be a simulation of Europe ca 1900, named
"la-belle-epoque", in which the sides might be "England",
"France", "Germany", and "Austria-Hungary", and the players might
be Joe on a Sun-4 named sun-lamp, Natalie on an HP machine named
jaguar, and two of the mplayer AIs. You can set Joe to
play England, Natalie to play France, and the two AIs to play Germany
and Austria-Hungary by using this command line:
xconq -g la-belle-epoque -r Joe@sun-lamp:0.0 Natalie@jaguar:0.0 -e 2
Note that this is X11, so the :0.0 is the usual server and
screen identification, while -r says not to open a display
on the machine that is actually running the program.
Some game designs provide a way to even things up if the players are of vastly differing abilities. In these designs, each player has an advantage that affects how much he or she gets to start with. Weaker players should get a higher advantage, so for instance a game with two players, of advantages 1 and 4, might give the advantage=4 player 8 cities while the advantage=1 player gets only 2. This affects setup only; during the game all players are equal. The variability of advantage also depends on the game; some may allows differences of 10 to 1 or more, while others, especially historically accurate scenarios, will have a fixed advantage that the designer has set for each side.
Once a trial player setup has been made, Xconq runs "synthesis methods". The game design specifies the methods to use, which generate anything that was not explicitly spelled out; such as the initial location of countries, terrain features, and so forth. As a player, you don't have to concern yourself much about synthesis methods, but you may get warnings or errors if a synthesis method is having difficulties. A common case is where you ask for many players to be set up in a small world, and the set of constraints is too "tight" for an initial setup; you will get a warning that some players were given poor positions. Synthesis methods may also take a long time to run; for large worlds and lots of players, be prepared to wait.
When initialization and setup succeeds, Xconq will try to open up displays for every player that wanted one. Exactly how this happens depends on the interface and networking capabilities of the version of Xconq you're using. See the system-specific sections at the end of this chapter for more detail. Once all the players are in, Xconq will start the game for real.
You may also get a warning that "images were not found". This happens when the game design specifies the use of particular icons or patterns (collectively call images here), but they cannot be found anywhere by Xconq. This is not fatal, because Xconq will use generic default images instead, but the display may be hard to understand. There are several possible reasons for images not to be found: 1) the game designer might have specified the use of particular images, but never defined them, 2) the library of images was not updated to include the needed images, or 3) the image library is not located where Xconq is looking.
section Problems and Troubleshooting describes more of the errors and warnings that you may encounter, and what to do about them.