Imperial Dominion Online

A turn-based empire building and conquest game for WordPress.

The old empire is broken. Its provinces lie open, its granaries are unguarded, and every ruler with a banner and a few hundred acres believes the purple is theirs. Claim land, raise an empire, feed it, arm it, and take what your neighbours cannot hold.

Imperial Dominion Online is played entirely in the browser through ordinary WordPress pages. Players sign in to your WordPress site and rule.

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Inspiration and attribution

Imperial Dominion Online is inspired by Barren Realms Elite, the BBS door game that, from the early 1990s, had players dialling in to spend a handful of turns a day building an empire, trading on a player-driven market and raiding their rivals.

It is a completely new game and not specific to the old BRE.

• Original setting, lore, names, buildings, troops, titles and rules.
• Its own economy, combat maths, covert system and round structure.
• A web-based way of playing built for WordPress, with pages, forms and a terminal-styled interface drawn in CSS rather than ANSI.

It contains no code, text or artwork from Barren Realms Elite and is not affiliated with or endorsed by its creators or rights holders.

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Requirements

• WordPress 7.0 or newer
• PHP 8.0 or newer
• MySQL or MariaDB (InnoDB recommended)

Installing

1. Copy this folder into wp-content/plugins/ and activate Imperial Dominion Online. Activation creates the tables, writes the default settings and opens Round 1.
2. Go to Imperial Dominion → Dashboard and press Create any missing game pages. That creates the nine pages below, each holding a single shortcode. Every title carries an ID - prefix so the game's pages sort together and cannot be confused with the rest of the site.
3. Adjust the game under Imperial Dominion → Settings. If you want a link in the site's own menu, set Assign menu to theme location there: it creates a one-item menu pointing at the game's front page. The other eight pages are kept out of menus a theme builds automatically from the page list, since the game carries its own navigation on every screen.
4. On a quiet site, set up a real cron (see Maintenance below). WP-Cron only fires when somebody visits, which is no good for a game where turns arrive at midnight.

The pages

Page	Shortcode	What it is
ID - Empire	[ido_empire]	The state of the empire, and what one turn currently yields
ID - Lands	[ido_lands]	Settle wilderness, raise buildings, build siege weapons
ID - Army	[ido_military]	Train and disband troops
ID - War Room	[ido_war]	Pick a target, commit a force, read the dispatches
ID - Spy Court	[ido_covert]	Hire an agent and send them out
ID - Market	[ido_market]	Post lots, buy what other rulers have posted
ID - Gazette	[ido_gazette]	Public news of the round
ID - Rankings	[ido_rankings]	Standings and the Hall of Fame

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How a round is played

Each ruler gets one empire per round, tied to their WordPress account.

Turns are the currency. You are granted 10 turns a day (configurable), stored up to 30, and a new empire is founded with 15. Every order costs turns, and every turn spent pays out your income at that instant. Turns sitting unspent earn nothing at all, which is what keeps the game moving.

Land and buildings. Send settlers to claim wilderness, then raise buildings on it. The bigger your empire, the fewer acres a scouting party finds and the more each one costs, until taking land from a neighbour is cheaper than settling it. Building orders finish on the daily tick.

Building	What it does
Homesteads	House 30 peasants each, and peasants pay the taxes
Farmsteads	85 grain a turn
Mints	60 gold a turn
Foundries	25 iron a turn
Barracks	Trim up to 35% from the gold price of training
Fortifications	Up to +50% defence

The army. Peasants become soldiers, so every regiment costs you tax revenue as well as gold and iron. Offence counts only when you march and defence only when you are marched upon, so an army built for one job is nearly useless at the other.

Troops	Offence	Defence	Notes
Pawns	0	3	Cheap conscripts
Legionnaires	1	9	The backbone of any empire expecting to be hit
Centurions	9	1	Officers who lead from the front, worthless at home
Ballistae Legions	18	4	The only reliable answer to fortifications

Siege weapons. Catapults are built in the siege yards on the Lands page, not mustered with the army. They are neither a building nor a troop: they stand on no acre and take no peasant out of the fields, they cost what a fortification costs, and they finish on the same daily tick a building does. What they cost instead is troops and risk.

Weapon	Offence	Defence	Crew	Notes
Catapults	5	3	5 legionnaires	Fight on attack and defence, and change hands when a battle is lost

A catapult is not an army. It goes nowhere and does nothing until legionnaires haul it and work it, five to a catapult, and the rule bites both ways: a catapult nobody is manning adds nothing to your walls, and a siege train sent without its crews in the same force is refused. This is the one thing that makes a legionnaire worth taking on an attack, since on its own it carries an offence of 1.

A catapult is also the only part of your strength a beaten enemy can take from you rather than merely destroy. Every weapon you haul out is in the wager: weapons left at home are never at stake when you attack, and every weapon you have men for is at stake when you are attacked. Whichever side loses, the winner drags home 30% of the loser's stake and a further 10% is smashed on the field, so a defeat costs 40% of what was in the fight. Both shares are settings.

War. A march costs 2 turns and resolves the moment you commit, against whatever the defender has standing at that instant. Both sides get a written report. You may only attack empires worth between 40% and 250% of your own net worth, at most three times each a day. New empires hold a 72-hour crown truce, which ends the moment they attack somebody.

• Conquest takes acres, and the buildings standing on them.
• Raid strips gold, grain and iron.
• Siege throws down buildings, fortifications first.

Whatever kind of attack it is, the catapults at stake change hands on the result.

The spy court. An agent is the most expensive thing an empire can own, costing 500,000 gold, and no ruler may keep more than one. Missions can fail, and a failed mission often ends with the agent on a rope: replacing them means paying the full price again. Reconnaissance tells you what a rival is actually holding; the other missions burn granaries, wreck forges or set peasants against their lord.

The market. Rulers post grain, iron and troops at their own prices. Goods leave your stores the moment you post them and return if the lot expires or you withdraw it. The crown takes 5% of every sale.

The round ends after 45 days. The standings are carved into the Hall of Fame, every empire is retired, and the next round opens automatically, so a player who joins late is never permanently behind.

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Maintenance

Two scheduled ticks keep the world turning:

• Daily grants turns, finishes building work, clears old gazette items and winds up a finished round.
• Hourly returns expired market lots and catches a round whose time ran out between daily runs.

Running WP-Cron and a real cron together is safe. Each tick takes a named database lock before doing anything, so only one run of a kind happens at a time whatever started it, and a second run arriving mid-way stands down instead of repeating the work. Each also refuses to run twice in the same period, and the work underneath is idempotent. You do not need to disable WP-Cron, which many shared hosts will not allow anyway.

The simplest cron is one line that fetches WordPress's own cron entry point. It runs every scheduled task that is due, the game's included, so it covers the rest of the site too:

*/15 * * * * curl -s https://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

That route needs Use wp cron left at 1, since it runs the events that are scheduled, and 0 schedules none. It also needs the site reachable over HTTP from wherever the cron runs.

Behind HTTP authentication, or with WP-Cron scheduling off, call the plugin's own scripts instead:

0 * * * * php /path/to/wp-content/plugins/imperial-dominion-online/maintenance/hourly_maintenance.php
5 0 * * * php /path/to/wp-content/plugins/imperial-dominion-online/maintenance/daily_maintenance.php

The admin Maintenance screen shows when each tick last ran and can run either on demand.

Deleting the plugin

Deleting Imperial Dominion Online keeps every game table by default: empires, rounds, battles, the Hall of Fame and your settings all survive, so reinstalling resumes the game mid-round. Deactivating never touches the data either.

To have the data removed on delete, tick Delete every game table when this plugin is deleted under Settings first. That is irreversible and there is no export, so it is off unless you say otherwise.

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Security notes

• Every front-end order is a POST carrying a nonce, verified in IDO_Actions::handle() before anything happens. Orders redirect afterwards, so a reload cannot repeat them.
• Every admin screen checks manage_options, and every admin form checks its own nonce through check_admin_referer().
• All database access goes through $wpdb->prepare(), $wpdb->insert() or $wpdb->update(). Table and column names are never taken from request data: building and troop keys are validated against the data classes before they reach a query.
• Spending is atomic. IDO_Kingdom::pay() writes one guarded UPDATE ... WHERE gold >= cost and checks the affected row count, so two requests from the same ruler cannot spend the same gold twice. Battles and market purchases additionally take a named lock.
• Everything rendered is escaped at the point of output, including player-supplied empire and ruler names, which are validated on the way in as well.

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Roadmap

Phase 1 (this release) is a complete game on a single WordPress site.

Phase 2 is inter-site war: letting the empires of one WordPress site combine their forces against a game hosted on another. See docs/CROSS-SITE.md for the design questions that have to be answered first, above all how a war packet is signed, verified and replayed exactly once.

Licence

GPLv2 or later. See LICENSE.