Welcome to Umpire, a military strategy game with modern sensibilities as well as a proper respect for the past. It supports Linux and Windows; macOS may also work.
Umpire's gameplay is inspired by the classic game Empire and its text-based user interface is influenced by that of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Umpire is implemented using the Rust programming language, both as an exercise in learning Rust, and in order to gain the benefits of speed, safety, and ergonomics relative to comparable languages that Rust offers.
Umpire can be installed from crates.io or from this repository. A working
installation of Rust is prerequisite to running Umpire. Please refer to
the official Rust installation guide
for guidance.
For systems with Rust and the Cargo package manager installed, the easiest way to install Umpire is to run this command:
cargo install umpire
This will install an umpire binary into Cargo's binary path. Running the umpire
binary will launch the game.
Cargo can also be installed from this repository:
git clone https://github.com/joshhansen/Umpire.git && cd Umpire
cargo run --release
This should grab the source code, build it, and run the game.
Upon loading, Umpire shows a ridiculous ASCII art splash screen of a baseball umpire. It has nothing to do with military strategy.
Running umpire with no arguments starts a local game including one human player and three AI players of varying difficulties.
If a hostname is provided, the client will attempt to connect to a server at the destination:
umpire example.comThe Message Log will indicate whose turn it is. When a turn begins, the player is prompted with any necessary decisions.
Players control cities which can produce units, and control units which can move, attack other units, attack and capture cities, and a few other special functions.
A player wins when all enemy cities have been captured and all enemy units have been destroyed.
Pressing 'x' engages Examine Mode which allows map tiles to be inspected. Pressing 'Enter' over a map tile can cancel a unit's orders, clear a city's production, or go-to a particular tile or empty space.
A fog of war mechanic is implemented but can be disabled using the --fog off command line option.
Wrapping can be turned on and off in both dimensions, but at the moment turning it off provokes a few bugs.
An effort has been made to support a range of color palettes. These can be controlled using the --colors command line
flag. The 16 color palette is the best tested at present.
All binaries included in Umpire respond to a wide range of command-line flags, visible when run with --help:
cargo run --release -- --help
When running with Cargo, any options desired can be placed after the --. These include things such as
whether to enable fog of war, and how many players of which type to include in the game.
The same can be done with the umpire binary:
umpire --help
A server is provided, allowing networked multiplayer using an RPC protocol. The server runs AIs and coordinates remote clients.
The server should be installed in the same path as the main binary. Run umpired --help for command-line options.
A sample SystemD service definition is included in the repository; see server/umpired.service.
The AI's were trained using reinforcement learning, specifically Q-Learning provided by rsrl.
Work has also been done on an AlphaGo Zero style self-trained model, though this is not yet included in the default slate of AIs.
The tools used to train the included AI algorithms are provided. Run umpire-ai --help for more information.
One Cargo feature is available: "pytorch".
PyTorch is used for neural network training; however, it is difficult to install in some environments, so it is disabled by default. If you wish to enable it, pass -F pytorch:
cargo build --all -F pytorchWhy is Umpire called Umpire? Because it's silly, and it harks back to the game that inspired it.
- Umpire 0.5.0---networked multiplayer; reinforcement learning AI; AI training framework; aircraft fuel limits
Umpire is licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).
See LICENSE for detailed license terms.
TODO: New release on crates.io - pytorch disabled
TODO: Double-check that cargo run runs client