1.9 KiB
Hammurabi
In this game you direct the administrator of Sumeria, Hammurabi, how to manage the city. The city initially has 1,000 acres, 100 people and 3,000 bushels of grain in storage.
You may buy and sell land with your neighboring city-states for bushels of grain — the price will vary between 17 and 26 bushels per acre. You also must use grain to feed your people and as seed to plant the next year’s crop.
You will quickly find that a certain number of people can only tend a certain amount of land and that people starve if they are not fed enough. You also have the unexpected to contend with such as a plague, rats destroying stored grain, and variable harvests.
You will also find that managing just the few resources in this game is not a trivial job over a period of say ten years. The crisis of population density rears its head very rapidly.
This program was originally written in Focal at DEC; author unknown. David Ahl converted it to BASIC and added the 10-year performance assessment. If you wish to change any of the factors, the extensive remarks in the program should make modification fairly straightforward.
Note for trivia buffs: somewhere along the line an m was dropped out of the spelling of Hammurabi in hte Ahl version of the computer program. This error has spread far and wide until a generation of students now think that Hammurabi is the incorrect spelling.
As published in Basic Computer Games (1978):
Downloaded from Vintage Basic at http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html
Porting Notes
- Though the file name and README both spell "Hammurabi" with two M's, the program itself consistently uses only one M.