About
Emperor of the Fading Suns is a turn-based 4X strategy game developed by Holistic Design and released for Windows in January 1997. Phoenix is a Java clone, remake and patch of Emperor of the Fading Suns. It is meant as a less buggy, more complete replacement for the original EFS.EXE with extra modern wargame features. It reads its data from an installed copy of EFS 1.4 and aims to support every mod that works with the original. Many systems are only partly implemented, and development has halted.
How it differs from the original
It adds play-by-email with mandatory passwords and datafile integrity checks, including a password revocation feature. Diplomacy, the House window, faction relations and Agora trade are only partly implemented so far. To stay legally safe, the distribution includes none of the original's copyrighted data files.
Getting started
You need EFS 1.4 installed and Java 8 or newer. Unzip a release package into the EFS directory and launch it with the included batch file (Windows) or shell script (Linux/BSD/macOS). These scripts raise Java's stack size, which is needed to avoid crashes when loading and saving large games. Separate launchers give a 640x480 or 1280x1024 window.
History
The author wrote code for reading the game's graphics formats in spring 2010. By April 2015 the project had taken about 2.5 years of real time, and that month the author opened it to contributions on predefined tasks. Version 0.50.0 was released on 20 October 2015.
Known limitations
- compatibility: Hyperion 1.4g has a bug in UNITSPOT.DAT line 67 that prevents Phoenix from loading; the line must be corrected before use.
- memory: Large save files (10MB) with default stack size can cause stack overflow during loading and saving; -Xss32m or higher is required.
Additional notes
- Mod compatibility
- The Hyperion 1.4g mod has a malformed line in UNITSPOT.DAT that stops Phoenix from loading it until the line is fixed.