Rule one of up to eight empires on a 3D map of the Known World. Raise armies, build castles, send heroes on quests, and fight battles where every soldier is on the field.
Seven minutes on what changed since 1993: the 3D map, mass battles and sieges, the two rulesets, and playing with friends.
Fantasy Empires was SSI's Dungeons & Dragons strategy game, made by Silicon Knights. Known World Empires plays it again with new art, music, voices and 3D battles. Every game starts from one of two rule presets.
The original rules, read straight from your copy of the game. One ruler at a time, quests sent off and hoped for, and the same numbers the 1993 game used.
Our take on the same game. Everyone gives orders at once, quests are a card game, diplomacy happens at a deal table, and you can win by more than conquest.
Known World Empires is free. It contains none of the original game's files, so you need your own copy of Fantasy Empires. It costs about $10 on GOG or Steam.
Buy Fantasy Empires on GOG or Steam and install it.
Get Known World Empires from itch.io and unzip it anywhere.
Run ImportYourCopy.exe. It finds your copy and builds the game's data. A few minutes, once.
Run KnownWorldEmpires.exe.
The whole project will be public: the Unreal Engine 5 game, the battle code, the importer and the tools. The link goes here when the repository opens.
Community: GOG forum · Steam discussions
A team would cost about $2.3 million to rebuild this game, and a free fan remake can never pay one. AI is how it got made at all. Here's the math, in six slides.
See the numbers
I'm M.D. Scur. I grew up on the original Fantasy Empires and built this remake for fun. I also write science fiction.