Interview: the nuts and bolts of online iPhone and iPad strategy game Empire of the Eclipse, part 1

It's fair to say that no game has yet nailed strategy on iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Several have come close - Command & Conquer: Red Alert had the look of a great strategy game, but fell short on controls and depth.

Civilization Revolution also came close, though interface issues plagued an otherwise compelling game. Warfare Incorporated did a decent job, although it's not exactly tailored to iOS devices.

Lee Dotson of developer Zarksoft plans on filling this gap with Empire of the Eclipse, a new online-only strategy game crafted specifically for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

It's an ambitious project, one that carries both the challenges of delivering compelling strategy gameplay and massively multiplayer online features. Lee explains the process of crafting such a title and what to expect in the first part of our in-depth interview.

Empire of the Eclipse is an online strategy game that runs in real-time with an average game taking two months to complete. At the start of a game players join a server and when that server is full or a set amount of time passes, a universe is generated to match the number of players.

At first you only have a single home world and the universe is hidden by a fog of war, so it's a good idea to build some scout probes and send them out to find other potential solar systems for expansion and to keep an eye on what your neighbors are up to.

From there players can begin to colonize other worlds and set up friendly trade routes with their neighbors or build fleets of warships for a more direct conquest. The game ends when a player has either captured 40% of the planets in the universe, has achieved a high enough level of economic wealth, transcends to another dimension (basically the technology victory), or wins by collecting a series of alien artifacts hidden throughout the universe.

Battles are handled much in the same style as Civilization Revolution where you have stacks of units attacking one another and calculations of the battle are worked out behind the scenes while an animation plays to show that units are in combat at that location. So while you won't be seeing epic 3D space battles, you are playing head to head with other players.

All the players in a given game are in a single world and you can see every one's fleets moving across the universe, carrying cargo, fighting battles, destroying planets, etc. We have plans post-launch for how we can go about making the battles a more visceral experience but for now we're focusing on the larger overarching strategy experience.

There is no single player campaign much in the same way there's no single player campaign in EvE. We did this for a couple of reasons.

The biggest reason is to ensure a fair and competitive experience for everyone. By making a single player campaign we'd need to include a lot of the game code on the client and that would make it a lot easier for people to implement map hacks and various other methods of cheating.

Additionally making a MMO is a pretty ambitious undertaking by itself and we'd rather keep our scope more limited and do a great job of making an online strategy game than do a mediocre job of what amounts to essentially making two different games.

One of the reasons we decided to go with a 2D isometric view is because we wanted to be sure that we could support the full range of devices and are proud to say that the game is running at 40+ frames per second on second-generation iPod touch.

Since you're logging into centralized servers you can play with anyone regardless of what type of device they have and you can even play your own games from anyone else's device if they have the game installed. As we expand onto new platforms in the future this level of portability will include players on those platforms as well.

Empire of the Eclipse will be available for download in March for $1.99 a month. I'm sure some folks will raise an eyebrow at going with a subscription model, but given the competitive nature of our game we think it's the best option for keeping all of our players on equal footing while offsetting the costs associated with running a large scale multi-player game.

We have a host of additions that we're looking forward to adding to the game post-release and will also be keeping our ears open to our player base as we go live to determine how to expand upon Empire of the Eclipse in the future.