Frequently Asked Questions

How is Immortal Barons different from Barren Realms Elite?

• All features are enabled and free to all sysops and players. There is no "registered" or "unregistered" version.
• Several BBS nodes can play the same game at the same time, which BRE could not do. See Can several people play as a door at the same time?.
• In a league game you can buy from an allied planet's Trading Market. Your order is a bid: the gold is held when you send it, and when it arrives the other planet only sells to you if the goods are still there at the same price and you are still allies. If not, your gold comes back. BRE has no market between planets — it lets you send goods to a realm on another planet as a gift, which Immortal Barons does too, but there is no way to buy from one.
• It also plays in a local terminal, without a BBS, so you can try it on your own computer.
• It does not run under DOS. It is a modern native program that runs as a door under BBS software on any platform Go supports.
• A new player can end their own new-realm protection early, from the System menu, to start fighting sooner. BRE does not offer this.
• A realm under new-realm protection is listed as a target with its letter in square brackets, [C] where other realms show (C), so you can see who cannot be attacked yet. BRE gives no sign.
• When a sysop starts a fresh game, they can keep their old settings. Those settings are stored in a config.json file. Running immortal-barons -reset-from-config clears the world but reuses that file, so you do not have to choose the settings again each time you reset.
• River regions pay gold and food every turn. In BRE, a river does only one of the two each turn, and you do not know which one until the turn's report appears. Over many turns a river earns the same total either way, so this removes the surprise, not the value. The reason is planning: a player with many rivers could see millions of gold appear one turn and vanish the next, and a food supply that only arrives about one turn in three is hard to count on when people are hungry.
• View Treaties shows the treaty offers you have sent and nobody has answered yet. In BRE you cannot see them at all: a realm you asked for a pact looks the same as a realm you never wrote to, so it is easy to send the same request twice, or to wait for a reply to a request you never sent. This tells you only about your own offers, so it does not show you anything about other players.
• Send Message can write to all your allies at once — every realm on your board that you hold a treaty with, of any kind.
• In a league, the letters used to pick who on another planet reads your message are counted down that planet's scores as your board received them. BRE uses the letter the realm has at home, which leaves gaps where realms have died. The letters here can move when a realm on that planet dies or a new one starts, so read the roster before you pick.
• In a league, packets that arrive between two runs are applied in a new random order each run. The order matters only when two boards ask for the same thing at once, such as a bid for the same goods on a Trading Market. BRE applied packets in the order the disk happened to list the files. Immortal Barons would otherwise read them in name order, and a packet's name starts with the number of the board that sent it, so the same board would always be served first.
• Gold you earn above the two billion you can hold is still lost, but the game tells you when it happens, and a full bank pays its interest into your gold in hand rather than losing it.
• Each bulletin is its own file in a bull folder, so a sysop can put up ANSI artwork. BRE keeps every bulletin in one bulletin.lst text file. In a league the Coordinator's bulletins are sent to every board and shown to all players under a "Galactic" heading.
• A reset option turns the pirates off. BRE always has them.
• Some game values — such as attack rewards and several economy rates — may not match BRE exactly. The ones read out of BRE's own program do match: region income, unit prices, industrial output, and the crown tax. The rest are being tuned as more of the original is worked out, and a few mechanics are still being built.

Is winsock supported?

• Yes, on Windows. The game attaches to the caller's socket handle that the BBS passes on line 2 of DOOR32.SYS.
• A sysop has run the Windows socket path with a live caller and reports that it works. More reports are still welcome.
• See How the game talks to the caller in the Door Setup guide for the socket and stdio details.

The characters look wrong. What can I do?

Try -ascii, which sends plain 7-bit ASCII that no terminal can mis-decode. See the Character Set guide for what each setting does.

The screen is full of things like [94m. What can I do?

That is a terminal printing the game's colour codes instead of acting on them. The door sends plain text on its own when your BBS reports that a caller has no ANSI support, so first check that the caller has graphics turned on in their BBS profile. To see the plain version yourself, run with -no-ansi. Lists that normally use a moving highlight are numbered in that mode, so they stay usable.

How do I add AI barons (computer opponents)?

• Set the number of AI barons before you start a game. A fresh game has none by default.
• Open the Configuration Editor (run immortal-barons -reset, or the Coordinator menu in game) and set the AI empires field.
• The AI barons are created when you reset the game. To add more to a game that is already running — without resetting — run immortal-barons -add-ai N (it adds N new AI barons and exits). Lowering the count still needs a reset.
• Once in the game, the AI barons take their turns on their own during daily maintenance. See Daily maintenance for when that runs.
• A board in a league game has no AI barons, and none can be added. League play is between the boards' own players.

A player changed their name on my BBS. How do I move their realm?

• Run immortal-barons -players, pick the realm by its Id letter, and press P for the player name. The game finds a realm by the player's BBS account name. Until you change it, the game does not know the player at their next login, and offers them a new realm.
• The same command renames a realm (R) and deletes one (D). Deleting asks first and cannot be undone; the player may build a fresh realm at their next login.
• You can run it while the board is up. Each edit takes the same lock a caller's turn takes.

What may a realm be called?

Up to 30 characters, of which at least three must be letters or digits. That is the original's own ceiling — it holds the realm name as a String[30].

Decoration is welcome and does not count toward the three: a name may be framed in CP437 block and box glyphs, or any other printable character, and they are kept exactly as typed. What the rule stops is a name made of nothing but decoration — one that reads as a row of blocks in every list it appears in, so nobody can tell which realm it is. It also travels: in a league your name is shown on other boards, and the same bytes that draw a neat box in CP437 come out as mojibake on a board running UTF-8.

(You rarely type another realm's name — the attack, message and diplomacy screens all pick by Id letter. The rule is about reading, not typing.)

Control characters are refused outright: an escape sequence in a realm name would move the cursor or recolour the row on every screen that lists it.

Letters of any alphabet count, so a Cyrillic or German name qualifies on its own letters. The limit is counted in characters rather than bytes, so a name in one alphabet is not shorter than the same name in another.

What happens when my empire is destroyed?

• If your realm is wiped out — its people or land reach zero, from an attack or a weapon — your empire is gone, and you cannot keep playing it.
• You build a new realm the next day: log in again on a later day and you are prompted to name a new realm (it need not match your old one), starting fresh under the same handle.

Can several people play as a door at the same time?

• Yes. Several BBS nodes can play the same game at once. Each node's changes — new scores, mail, attacks — become visible to the others between actions.
• Each action reads and writes the shared game file under a brief lock, so nodes wait for each other only for the instant of a change, not for a whole session.
• All the nodes must run on the same computer, and the data directory must be on a local disk. The lock works inside one computer only. On a network share, or with nodes running on two computers, two of them can save over each other. You would see no error; a turn would just be gone.
• If your empire is attacked while you are at the menus, a notice appears the next time you press a key. Orders you already typed are adjusted to what you still hold, and the game tells you when that happens.

How do I find out when my league stops exchanging packets?

• The planetary run exits non-zero the first time it meets a fault — a packet refused, quarantined, or held — so whatever runs it on a timer raises the alarm for you: cron mails a failing job, systemd marks the unit failed, Windows Task Scheduler records the result.
• A fault that persists keeps being reported in the run's output and in planetary.log, but only its first run exits non-zero. A board unreachable for a week must not fail its timer every fifteen minutes.
• For a push the scheduler cannot send, put one command in bbs.cfg: OnFault ntfy publish mybbs "$IB_FAULTS". It runs after such a run with the faults in $IB_FAULTS and your board's name in $IB_BOARD, and it is your own shell line — mail, a chat webhook, wall, anything.
• The inter-BBS guide has the details, under "Being told when the league stops moving".