This is a sample of the introductory message that I send out to new
players in my games. Feel free to base your message upon it (adapting
the sever instructions to your server and changing e-mail @'s is needed
however).

****************
Mail that I should read should be sent to "bampton@cs.utk.edu"
Mail that should be handled by the server, should be sent to "zeus@cs.utk.edu"

Misdirected mail may be ignored, or delayed.

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The name Athena is used as an example game names. 

Substitute whichever one(s) you are in as needed.

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Note to players that have played in my games before: I have rewritten 
parts of this (again!), clarified some things, added some new policies,
and generally brought it into agreement with reality, please do reread it.

This message is a compilation of questions, answers, polices, and
other information that players need, or have asked for over the 5
years I've been GMing. ~80% of the questions I get are answered here,
or in the rules. yes, I probably should do a major rewrite of it, and
put it on the web. 

Welcome to Galaxy game Athena

Below are some general notes & instructions:

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Changing you Empire's name (via the C command), Setting Passwords

If you change your empire's name from what it was originally set to,
I should not need to change anything, unless you can talk to other
players. The code that deals with forwarding lists doesn't "notice"
renames.

If you change your name, and don't tell me. Some of the empires you
could talk to in the past may no longer be reachable under your new
name....

Setting or changing a password can have similarly unpleasant side
effects, particularly when combined with a renaming on the same turn. 
You might want to let me know ahead of time that you are using one.

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Vacations, quitting, new players:
  If you are going to be going on vacation & will be unable to submit
turns, please try to tell me in advance. You can give me (the Human,
not the server) turns ahead of time, but please mark them as such. You 
can also opt to have someone substitute for you, again, give me a few 
days notice so I can make sure their e-mail address is reachable from 
here and that they do not have some archaic mail system that chokes on
"large" mail messages (like some Micro$oft "products"). Note that mail
of this sort needs to go to bampton@cs.utk.edu, not zeus. [In other
words, if you send future orders to zeus, you won't get them used
as you intend!]

If for some reason you wish to or have to quit, please drop me a note.
If your empire is in decent shape, I'll try to find a replacement (or
you can nominate one yourself).

If you miss 2 or 3 turns in a row, I'll typically not try to get in touch 
with you to see if you are still alive. Kindly don't go this route, I have 
too little time for such games, and writing orders for players until I
can find a substitute is time consuming.

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Number of players and locations:

  There are about 30 to 35 players in Athena (this is a blind game, so I 
can not be more exact). Each player's homeworld will be one of the ones 
on your turn sheet, but it probably won't be one of the first or last 99 
ones. (i.e. they will be randomly distributed).

  The galaxy will be large enough that your nearest neighbor will be
at least 20.01 LY away (i.e. you shouldn't see anyone on turn 2 unless
you happen to both send probes to the same system). This should give
everyone time to expand for a few turns before they run into each
other. Again, the constant I'm using is secret, to make homeworld
location guess more difficult during the midgame.

  I will tweak the code to generate galaxies somewhat, so those of you
with source code won't have an unfair advantage.

++++++++++++++
Game Rules & Quirks
  I'll be using all the rules, including:
1) The K command will be allowed
2) Partial techs will be allowed.
3) Automatic password and empire name changes are "supported".

Note: The following commands are not presently supported in the blind
code:
Q (quit) - send me mail instead
@        - send a message

Options: twocol, underscores, namecase

The following commands have different meanings or are slightly
different in blind galaxy:

I (intercept) - you have to be able to see where they are going
G (upgrade) - partial upgrades of a group are impossible
F (full reports) - this is not the player @ lookup command

Reading the rules for other differences is _strongly_ encouraged. A
player who only uses Standard Galaxy commands, will be at a
substantial disadvantage.

++++++++++++++
Anyone who is interested in getting their hands on any tools that I am
using to run the game, or the source code is welcome to ask. The most
recent released version is always ftpable from 
ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/bampton/Blind

++++++++++++++
Sending email

I have a limited duty server that takes care of several game related tasks:
  1) It accepts orders, checks them, and mails you a response informing
     you how they may turn out, as well as checking errors. generally
     speaking, if no one did anything for the turn in question, this 
     report is accurate.
  2) It supports double blind message forwarding, so that you may remain
     anonymous (or not).
  3) It supports queries about to whom you can forward messages.

Mail that should be handled by the server, should be sent to "zeus@cs.utk.edu"
Mail that I should read should be sent to "bampton@cs.utk.edu"

Note: I do skim all mail that goes through zeus, and will on occasion correct
mistakes about game mechanics that are mentioned. It is possible to "spoof"
the programs and read other people's turn reports, or fake messages from them.
I have not gone to great lengths to prevent spoofing because I'd rather spend
the effort on making the game better.

Anyone caught doing this (faking email) may be ejected from the game.

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Turns:
  Turns are due Tuesday & Friday @ 8:00 AM EST (1:00PM GMT), they
  should be sent to zeus@cs.utk.edu. Any questions or comments to
  me should be sent in a separate message, to bampton@cs.utk.edu
  This time is 8AM US Eastern time.

  Note: I run turns by hand. This means that they will seldom be out
  before 8:30. If there are no problems with player's orders, I can run a
  turn in 10 minutes. If there are lots of players with bad orders,
  it may take 30...

Format:
  Please use a subject of:"Athena orders for <racename>"
  (substituting your game's name, as needed)
  you may include a turn and/or revision number in the subject as well
  (note that my server ignores anything after the racename, this is
  for human tracking purposes)
  "Athena orders for <racename> turn 5, revision 1"
  If you submit multiple sets of orders, especially within several
  minutes of each other, I strongly recommend that you use the latter
  format. Your first message may get here last (or I might file them
  in the wrong order), and be used instead if this isn't done.

  You _must_ have the words "Athena" and "orders" in your subject,
  otherwise, your orders will not be recognized, and I'll have to
  refile them manually. See "Order checking" below for why. The
  preprocessor is case sensitive on the subject line- "Athena" is not 
  "athena", "orders" is not "Orders".

  The body of the mail message should look like (Note: do not put in
  leading spaces!)
      #Galaxy Athena Iron_Empire
      <whatever you are going to do>
      #end

for example:
Subject: Athena orders for Iron_Empire (turn 5)
#Galaxy Athena Iron_Empire
M
T Strike_Eagle Eagle
P Germania CAP
P Macedonia Chariot
S 63 Balmung
S 65 Balmung 32
S 73 Rommye
#end

Note: you can use "GALAXY", "galaxy", "Galaxy", or "GaLaXy", as well 
as "end", "END", or "End", as the message body is read by a C program
(which I've ensured is case insensitive.).

+++++++++++++
Order checking

  Since I tend to be a terrible typist, I've written a few tools to
help players avoid stupid errors (typos, not attacking someone bigger
than you (:-)).

Here is how I handle your orders:
About every 2 minutes, the preprocessor checks for and handles any
mail- messages get forwarded, and orders checked. Machines getting
rebooted or large messages may take it out until I come in the 
next day though. See below for finding out about its status.

For each set of orders, a modified version of the code that I run the
game with is used (the "forecaster" binary). It checks for all errors 
in your orders. If it can not find any orders, it will complain about a 
mistake on line 0.

If the #galaxy line is found, it will use your orders and flag
get any problems, such as misspelled planets, non-existent groups, etc.
Unlike the standard Galaxy gchecker program, this code is compiled
from the same source code. If it says there is a problem, so will the
main program.

If the are no complaints, you will get back an acknowledgment telling 
you that all your orders are fine (plus a forecast, if requested). 
If there are any problems with them, you will get:

a) A Mistakes section, with the command (as seen by the
program), its command number (i.e. the nth line in your orders, after
the #galaxy line), and why it thinks that it won't work.

In general the preprocessor doesn't get confused and mess up the rest
of your orders unless something is really wrong with them. It also is
usually right (especially if I haven't changed the code recently).

b) Your original message, including your orders.

If requested, a forecast of what the next turn report will look
like (sans most information about other empires) will be in that message 
as well.

This server is MIME unaware. It expects text to be in ascii. Some
types of MIME encoding will produce strange responses to your orders.

If any of your orders are flagged as being wrong, please take the time
to correct them and resubmit your entire set of orders. While I will
make reasonable attempts to fix things, I may guess wrong or be so
pressed for time that I delete commands that don't work.

  For the curious, I process turns using a csh & sh script (which does all
the ack. creation, feeds your orders through the the galaxy program itself,
and allows me to test things manually before I run the turns).  I've
got a partial rewrite of that mess in perl which I hope to upgrade to
at some point. All the code runs on a Sun IPX running SunOS 4.1.4. At some
point interlego will be upgraded, and I'll be forced to migrate to Solaris
2.5.1 (or 2.6 box at this point). Hopefully the perl version of the server
will be done by then, because these scripts are 4-5 years old, and not
something I'm proud of having written.

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Contacting other players-
  Initially you won't know the names of the other players in the game.
While I can't & won't stop you from writing your friends to find out
if they are playing, I find that it ruins part of the game if you try
to find this information out outside of the game.

  To establish contact with a race, you have to have a ship belonging to
one player at the system of another, or 2 ships at the same system
(one of which must have mass>1.0). This must be the case at the end of
the turn. If you bombed/blew them up, well, its hard to figure out
where they came from when you only have debris to look at...

  As an alternative, if you can contact two races, you may enable them
to talk to each other.

  Except in the case of third party forwards, this should be automatic
(assuming I remember to manually run the command to update forwarding
lists). Please check your forwarding list before asking me.

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Forwarding messages

Send a message with a subject like this to zeus@cs.utk.edu:
Subject: Athena:FWD:<your_race_name>:<race to forward to>

To forward to multiple people at once:

Subject: Athena:FWD:<your_race_name>:<race to forward to> <race to forward to>..

Examples:
Subject: Athena:fwd:Myempire:GM
Subject: Athena:fwd:Myempire:GM Myempire otherempire

The forwarder will strip out any mail headers, but leave the message
body intact. Any signature your mailer adds will be kept, so keep that
in mind if you don't wish to be exposed... The sending race will be
identified in the forwarded message -
Subject: Athena forwarded message from <racename>

You will receive an acknowledgment when your message is sent
successfully.

+++++++++++++++
Forwarding lists:
  It is possible to get a list of players to which you can forward.
Send a message to zeus@cs.utk.edu with a subject:
Subject:<gamename>:forwardlist:<racename>
for example
Subject:Athena:forwardlist:Iron_Empire

You will be sent a list of the empires that you can forward mail to.


+++++++++++++

  Help! I've forgotten when my turn is due, how to send mail to the
server, etc.

  If you've got a Internet connection, you can finger zeus@cs.utk.edu
zeus's .plan has instructions on how to use the server. It's .project
is updated every few minutes to tell you if it is running.

zeus's .project typically says one of three things:
"Down, GM will fix ASAP"
"GM Disabled it temp" (I'm usually running a turn while this is the case).
"Running"

Web enabled types can browse http://www.cs.utk.edu/~bampton/ There are
no graphics (well, none of importance for this purpose), so lynx or an
ascii browser is just as good as a graphical one. There are links to the
server status, as well as the most up to date copy of the turn running
schedule that appears at the top of your report.

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  Downtimes:

The server should be up pretty much all the time except for the once
every month or two reboot of the machine or when I've disabled it. It
typically is disabled for ~30 minutes or so while I'm running turns,
and for a while at the beginning of each month when I archive the logs
and messages from the last month.

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When a empire goes inactive, and can not (or will not) be replaced
with a real player, I take over control of that empire. This has the
following effects:

Political status: I don't change them unless you shoot first (except
in rare circumstances). I also typically ignore forwarded messages.

Tech advancement: I will do some, but generally don't do it until
planet defenses are sufficient.

Economics: I will max out planets, and possibly colonize planets that
have col in orbit or en-route. Nearby uninhabited worlds may be
colonized as well.

Ship production: generally speaking, warships are pulled back to
inhabited systems. All ships are upgraded to current tech (within
reason). All systems are given some sort of defenses, time permitting.
Typically a system only has what started there, and what it can build.
I will build general defenses, not ones that are optimized against any
player(s) (unless I can do it from looking at the inactive player's
turn report).

The general attempt of the above is to create a player that is not
trivial to knock off (ala the inactive since turn 1 type), nor will it
take unfair advantage of knowledge that it doesn't have but the GM
does. I usually only spend 5 minutes or less on a player's orders.

+++++++++++++
Uniqueness of players

It is against the rules for my games to play more than one empire in a
game. Any attempts to submit orders for inactive players, or otherwise
play multiple entities in a single game I run is expressly forbidden.
I may make exceptions in certain rare cases. Such cases will be
considered on a case by case basis.

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