Barren Realms Elite

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A title screen from Barren Realms Elite

Barren Realms Elite or BRE is a multi-player strategy door game for bulletin board systems created by Mehul Patel. BRE is based on Solar Realms Elite (SRE) by Patel's brother Amit, and is considered by many to be SRE's successor.

BRE is set in a post-apocalyptic future. Nuclear destruction has spread across the planet, and now only a vast barren void exists. The player rules a barony and competes against the other players to become the strongest baron on the planet.

Gameplay

The basics of BRE's game play are similar to other empire-building door games. Each day, the player makes various leadership decisions, each of which can cause their population to increase or decrease. Players must carefully manage their empires by paying for maintenance, feeding the population, supplying the military and more. If something goes out of balance, the emperor can lose popular support or military morale.

At the same time, players expand their might militarily. All players may wage war on other players as well as form alliances, truces, and treaties. By capturing or buying new regions, their realm can grow more food, make more gold, or produce more military units. Players are also able to select from a list of espionage missions which can demoralize the enemy's forces, attack the population directly, weaken their defenses or many more. Finally, there is also a list of diplomatic treaties which players can use to create alliances or trade routes.

Inter-BBS features

In addition to the traditional local mode, BRE offers an inter-BBS mode. This allows a sysop to join a league of bulletin boards, all competing against one another. In a league, each BBS functions as its own distinct planet in a universe of planets. Messages and attacks travel from planet to planet on a regular basis as the BBS systems call each other to transmit and receive data.

Inter-BBS play changes the game dynamics. For example, in inter-BBS mode, several BBSes might choose to work together, making alliances with one another to try to gain supremacy over the entire league. Each BBS designates a "planetary coordinator" who serves as the planet's official spokesperson. By working together with different common strategies and layouts, boards can gain various bonuses that are unavailable in the local mode.

Origins and influences

Barren Realms Elite was perhaps the most popular of the games created by Mehul and Amit Patel under the "SRGames" banner. BRE is very similar to the first game in the series, Solar Realms Elite, but with a new setting and the addition of inter-BBS features that SRE lacked.

The Patels sold most of their SRGames to John Dailey Software in 1998.[1]

Legacy

In newspaper articles in the mid-1990s about BBSing, Barren Realms Elite was sometimes listed as an example of a favorite game. [2]

Several later web-based games were inspired by BRE:

The second track of the 2019 album "INIT STRING" by synthwave artist ZMODEM was titled "Barren Realms Elite."

References

  1. ↑ Elizabeth (14 May 1998). ""Bre,fe, exitilus cheats"". Newsgroup: alt.bbs.doors. Retrieved 9 March 2022. 
  2. ↑ Tom, Knapp (3 Mar 1995). "Games? Did you say computer games?". Intelligencer Journal. LNP Media Group Inc. ISSN 0889-4140. Barren (Solar) Realms Elite - become a territorial governor. Raid neighbors for fun and profit while preventing revolutions among your own people. 
  3. ↑ "Mehul Patel". Utopia Wiki. Retrieved 2017-04-18. Earth 2025 was his first web-based game, built in Borland Delphi in six weeks and hosted on his Solarianet.com site. .... [W]ithin weeks thousands were playing the online BRE clone. 
  4. ↑ Lee, Yu Tang (30 Aug 1999). "Experience a whole new cyber world". New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur). Mehul Patel, creator of BRE, a game that was designed to support multiple players through a bulletin board system, has taken his successful gaming formula and implemented it on the Internet. 
  5. ↑ "A Brief History of TEQ". 

External links

Downloads

See also

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