Those of you who frequent the Play with your Buddies subforum may recognize the name Age of Restoration. It's a turn-based empire-building game I came up with and ran a couple years ago. There have been several games following the basic pattern I came up with; the discussion thread for the most recent can be found
here. It tends to die out after a while, or sometimes after not so long a while, simply because it's a lot of work all around, especially for the moderator. One attempt never finished turn 2.
The obvious solution is to computerize it, and that's... kind of what I've been doing. The game I've been making borrows heavily from AoR, but a lot of it is changed, as well. I'm building it in Flash, and to accommodate running remotely, it's set up to save to XML strings which can be copied and pasted into the game. Currently, the administrator interface is nearly complete, and can load, save, and edit game states.
Check out the current build here! You'll need a saved game, of course; you can use
this one, which is apparently over the character limit for a post. Just copy everything there, and paste it into the window that appears when you first open the game.
What I need to do now is: 1) Set up the player interface, and have it save turn actions in a different XML format, 2) Set up the administrator interface to load turn orders, and add a "run turn" button, and 3) fill in the units, buildings, resources, etc.
Then debugging. Lots of debugging.
If anyone finds bugs, please let me know!