Warpath places you in the distant future of a galaxy not unlike our own. In this galaxy, empires have evolved, spread out and discovered they were not alone. After an adolescent conflict stage, the empires settled down to a long period of quasi-peace.

Four empires have ascended to pre-eminence and divided the galaxy between them into quadrants, each ruled by a different house. The peace between houses is maintained by an artificial energy barrier which separates the quadrants. This barrier was designed to destroy any ship which attempted to leave its home quadrant. The barrier itself is left over from an ancient civilization which intended to keep the empires apart until they were mature enough to deal with each other.

Progress is sometimes the enemy of peace. The Simpson's Chaos theory of AD 4923 led to the development of the chaos-deflecting shield layer. For the first time, it was possible to add shield layers together for a cumulative effect. As a result, it became possible at last to cross the barriers, but with no guarantee that you will survive.

Into this universe, you were born. Your youth on the home planet of your quadrant was uneventful. However, recently a major change has come to the galaxy.. the Path.

Although knowledge of the Path was suppressed for millennia by the philosophers of the galaxy, a popular television show released its details to the masses. It is now known that all philosophical and economic pursuits can be divided into two Paths: The Path of Peace (symbolized by the green aura) and the Path of War (symbolized by the red aura).

As news of the Path spread throughout the galaxy, each of the galactic houses were quick to align with one Path or the other. The other planets, slow to adopt to new trends, have remained uncommitted (as symbolized by the yellow aura of indecision).

Your job is to embrace the Path of your empire, and to influence the uncommitted planets into following your Path. Of course, you may have a fundamental disagreement with the Path of your empire and may choose to create a Path of your own.

Warpath is a game for four players, humans or bots. You can treat the game as a galactic simulation and play it forever without firing a shot. Or you can play it as a Real Time Strategy game battling for resources and love.

The game is feature-rich, but you are free to play without understanding, learning new details as they naturally express themselves.

A typical session consists of:

• Your goal is to colonize uninhabited planets for your empire, while convincing the planets of other empires to follow your Path. Meanwhile, your opponent does the same. Each planet you bring to your Path is one less to succor your enemy.
  
• When you encounter a planet which follows the opposing Path, it will launch robotic warships to attack you. Your only choice is to avoid the planet, or to blast it back to an uninhabited status. Such an act of war, however, will further damage your relationship with that planet's home empire and may push other planets into following the opposing path.
  
• You win the heart of planets and empires by the simple expediency of buying their love. Your Investments enhance the development level of the planet. This, in turn, will allow that planet to stock its stores with the weapons and ship extensions you need.
  
• You may borrow money to buy weapons, but so long as you have any loans outstanding at the bank, you will be unable to make investments.
  
• To ensure an adequate supply of credit for investment, you must carry out an active mining program to collect dwindling resources from the remaining uninhabited planets and then journey to inhabited planets to sell them.
  
• Your mission is to capture the hearts of all the planets in the galaxy, or at least not run out of ships in the pursuit of that goal. We know you can do it, or you would not have been issued this training program.

You have been issued a controller which acts as both the command center for your fleet of ships, as well as providing detailed information about the galaxy and your opponents.

Along the left side are four Panel Selectors which control the content of the rest of the screen. Just tap a selector button at any time and the appropriate panel will appear.

From top to bottom these are:

COMM

The Comm panel maintains a list of galactic communications which you have received.

GALAXY

The Galaxy panel offers information about the galaxy. A map, it's history, the status of your competitors, and an electronic guidebook to simplify long distance navigation.

ORBIT

The Orbit Panel is useful only when you are orbiting a planet and allows you to interact with that planet. You may mine ore, sell cargo, borrow money, make investments, shop, and equip your ship while in orbit.

TACTICAL

You will spend most of your time on this panel as it controls your current ship's navigation and weapons as it crosses the galaxy.

The thing to remember about the tactical panel is that it is in one of two modes: NAV or WPN.

NAV Mode

While in NAV mode, a tap in the screen will cause your ship to head off in that direction. If you tap on a planet, then your ship will enter orbit when you reach the it. You see only a small portion of the galaxy while on the Tactical Panel.

To change your speed, tap the speed + and - buttons. Your top speed will increase as you equip your ship with extra Energy Pods.

Watch out for the red energy barriers. Trying to cross them without shields will most likely destroy your ship, causing you to be teleported back to your home planet and a replacement ship from your dwindling fleet.

You may return to NAV mode at any time by tapping the speed controls in the lower left of the Tactical Panel.

WPN Mode

While in WPN mode, a tap on the screen will fire your current weapon to explode at the spot you touched.

To change your current weapon, press and hold the weapon selector in the lower right until the Wheel appears. The wheel will then rotate and you should lift your finger when the desired weapon is in place.

Your ship may be equipped with up to six kinds of weapons at a time (but you must return to Space Dock if you wish to change which six weapons from your complete inventory are equipped).

To enter WPN mode, just tap the weapon selector in the lower right.

And yes, you WILL forget which mode you are in, and accidentally shoot things you meant to travel to. It's good for your brain, if not for your path.

NEW IN V23... you can now navigate while in WPN mode, by 'flicking' the spot you want to travel to ('tapping' will fire weapon, but a quick touch-drag-release 'flick' will act like a NAV mode tap).

Planets which have declared for one of the paths will show a red or green aura on the Tactical Panel. Inhabited planets which have not yet declared will show a yellow aura.

Uninhabited planets will have no aura at all. You should mine them for their ore (which you sell to inhabited planets, who will pay a higher price if their own planet it low on ore).

You may also colonize an uninhabited planet (via the Orbital Panel while orbiting it).

Once you enter orbit around a planet, the Orbital Panel will offer you four modes of operation:

SCAN

Scan mode displays particulars about the planet you are orbiting, and the opportunity to mine the planet, sell your cargo to the planet, and colonize (an uninhabited planet).

SHOP

Shopping mode allows you to review what is available for sale on the planet. Each inhabited planet has factories busily churning out goods as fast as its development level and resources allow. This is where you will purchase shields, pods, and weapons.

INVEST

Investment Mode allows you to make investments in six categories: Education, Agriculture, Mining, Industry, Space Dock, and Defense.

Any investment will make the planet love you a little more, but strategic investments will enable to planet to provide more services to you.

DOCK

Space Dock Mode gives you the ability to assign your weapons inventory to the six available weapon slots on your ship's Weapons Wheel.

Your ship comes with some basic storage for:

• Energy. Your ship explodes if it runs out of energy. Energy is lost when you take on damage. Energy recharges slowly on its own (if you stop your ship) but can be refueled by a planet's Space Dock (as soon as you orbit the planet). A high investment in Space Dock will allow better refueling. Your ship comes with one Energy Pod and you can buy up to four more.
  
• Charge. Charge is used to power some ship activities, like Stealth Invisibility Shields (you become visible if you run out of charge). A small amount of charge is also needed to launch weapons. Your ship comes with one Charge pod and you can buy up to four more.
  
• Cargo. When you mine ore from an uninhabited planet, you have to store it somewhere. You store it in a cargo pod until you can sell it to some inhabited planet.
  
• Shields. When a weapon comes in contact with your shield, a shield absorbs half the damage (your ship absorbs the other half). Your ship comes with one shield, but you can buy up to four more. Each additional shield layer cuts the damage by an another factor of two. The outermost shield, however, will heat up and if it is not given enough time to cool down it will pop, leaving you with one less shield than you had before.
  
• Weapons. Your ship comes with six possible weapon slots on its Weapons Wheel. (Think of it as a six shooter with a different kind of weapon in each bullet slot). Your Phaser (energy beam) weapon is permanently equipped in slot 0, but you can dynamically associate any combination of weapons in the other five slots (using a Space Dock).

In battle you use the WPN Selector in the lower right of the Tactical Panel to select your current weapon (hold it down until the weapon you want rotates into place)

The Galaxy Panel also offers four modes of operation:

MAP

This map shows the entire galaxy. Clicking in the map will set a course in that direction. But be careful to not inadvertently cross the Galactic Energy Barriers without proper shielding.

HISTORY

The history of the Galaxy is shown as a collection of graphs showing aura counts, populations and Tek levels.

PLAYERS

This screen recaps the status of you and your competitors. Clicking on a player's tile will put you back on the Tactical Panel but with the point of view of that player. (Unless they are stealthed). Attempting any ship controls will return your point of view to your own ship.

GUIDE

Later in the game, you will be able to buy a Galactic Guidebook which remembers information about all the planets you have orbited, including how much they are currently paying for cargo, and their current development level and population.

It also provides an easy way to lay course to the planet of your choice.

Planets will eventually start issuing distress calls to you and expect you to come help them as soon as possible, or they will begin to lose their love for you.

As the total population of your Path rises, it will unlock higher 'tek' levels. (Up to Tek_9)

Planetary factories can only manufacture items within their Path's Tek Level, and within the planet's Development Level.

You raise an individual Development Level by fully investing in all investment categories on that planet (at which point it reaches 100% development).

Your Path's tek level also affects the power of equipped weapons.

After showing the amazing WarPath title screen, the game asks you to pick a save slot (known as "Captain's Logs"). The game will automatically save the galaxy state in the selected slot when you shut down the game.

You get multiple save slots because you might want to maintain a small stable of Enlistment characters (Say "Ensign Kl'arg of the Klepton Empire, fighting for the Path of War.")

Now say that ten times, quickly.

Anyway, each time you start the game you have the choice to resume from one of the save slots, or to start a new game in one of them.

When starting a new game you will be able to pick your character's name, empire, path, and ship design. Just tap in the window to change your selections.

The game is for two to four players of any mix of paths and empires (so long as each path is represented at least once, since the game will end if all ships of a path are destroyed).

Once you start the game, it will contact a master server and accumulate other players, filling in bots as needed for the empty quadrants.

Once you and the other players have been assigned your starting quadrants the game will launch simultaneously on all player's screens, so get busy!

Note that even in 'solo' mode (you playing with 3 bots), these same actions take place, so you are not completely aware of whether you are playing in solo mode or not.

It remains to be seen if the android platform will lend itself to true multiplayer mode, so that's a fingers-crossed expectation at this point.

To keep gameplay animated, true multiplayer games may start with the Galaxy already in an advanced state (in case players want to focus on shooting each other with advanced weaponry)

The SCAN button, while orbiting a planet, provides information about that planet. If it is an uninhabited planet, pressing the MINE ORE button will use special mining beams to collect surface ore and store it in your ships cargo pods.

An inhabited planet will make you an offer for your cargo and the SELL CARGO button will accept that offer. This is your primary means of earning money early in the game. Money you need to shop for equipment, or invest in planets to make them love you.

As you orbit inhabited planets, your ship picks up colonists (people who are unhappy with where they are). When orbiting an uninhabited planet, the COLONIZE button will drop loads of colonists (100 at a time, up to 500 max) from your ship to the sterile, bleak, landscape below. They probably immediately regret their decision to travel with you.

While orbiting an inhabited planet, the SHOP button on the Orbital Planel will show you what its factories have for sale. Just tap and drag the iteml list to find what you're looking for, then press BUY to purchase some number of that item.

Note that your ship has limits as to how many of each item it can carry. Plus you have to be able to afford it, of course.

And the factory may not have manufactured enough of the item yet for you to purchase any (you can speed that up by investing heavily in manufacturing, and making sure the planet has lots of ore)

While orbiting an inhabited planet, the INVEST button on the Orbital Panel will show the investment screen. Each planet must be invested in individually, and this is the primary means of buying a planet's love.

Just click on one of the six investment categories and then press INVEST 10K to make a 10,000 credit investment in that category. The 'stack of coins' meter will indicate when you have maxxed out that investment category. The chart to the left of that will show your investment taking effect (takes awhile for your money to bear fruit, as it were).

This screen also allows you to borrow credits (and repay debt). This is only for emergencies, and you will be blocked from making any additional investments until after you have re-paid all your debt.

The amount you can borrow is set by your current Credit Limit (which increases the more you invest).

Once you have equipped your ship with shields, radar, stealth, and other items which can be turned on and off, you might be wondering "how do I turn them on and off?"

The answer to that is the 'Ship Status' screen, which you open by pressing the Tactical Panel selector a second time while already viewing the Tactical Panel.

While the Ship Status screen is displayed, you may turn on and off these ship extensions. To close the screen, just tap the Tactical Panel selector again, or click anywhere in the status panel (outside of a button).

This screen also gives a more informative view of your ship's energy, charge, shield, and cargo pods.

There are options available by pressing the android 'menu' button and then selecting 'Settings'

• Sound: Off, quiet, and normal
• Solo Mode Difficulty: Easy (you and two friendly bots against a third), Normal (you and one friendly bot against two others), Hard (you against three bots).
• Bot brain control (sluggish-dumb to agile-wicked)
• Enable/Disable popup 'hints'
• Enable/Disable bot 'chatter'
• [someday] Game Over criteria: last player standing, last planet standing, highest score after N minutes, etc.

If the game is successful, development will continue (well right now it is ongoing since the game isn't even released yet, though most of the above documentation reflects what actually works in the game today).

Warpath for Android is a work in progress. I am porting my original game "Warpath" (for Windows PCs) to the android platform.

For more information about Synthetic-Reality.com, please check out our web site.

The game will be fundamentally the same, but re-factored to work in a reduced screen size and with only a single clicking device (no right mouse button!)

• You have a name, rank, path, empire, and ship
• The Galaxy has 4 quadrants of 16 sectors each
• You start with a bunch of unaligned planets
• You encourage planets to follow your path, by inspiring/hitting/investing/bribing them
• You fight human and robot opponents in the process
• You Invest/Mine/Shop/Equip/Colonize
• Whoever has the most planets/population/money/love after some period of time, is the winner.

"Hammurabi meets Trek"

Unlike Classic WarPath, there is no 'right mouse button' so first you select your weapon (click on phasers), then you select your target (click on the point in space you want to shoot).

If your target passes through that point at the same time as your weapon, you score some damage.

There are lots of subscreens to navigate between, which I hope will feel a bit like mini-games.

Navigation requires you to select 'NAV' as your current weapon, then click on the screen where you want to go. Your ship then heads in that direction until you change it.

If you click on a planet (while in NAV), then your ship will enter orbit when it gets there.

While in orbit, you interact with the planet (mine, colonize, shop, spacedock, etc.)

• Define your own empire, using the phone's camera to take your picture as an alien
• Hooking into your social network
• Having an alert to notify you when others would like to play
• Scheduling play dates
• Record your own sound effects (unless you swear, then no!)
• Design your own ships
• Etc.

None of those are promises, and most depend on the possibility of direct peer to peer transfer of data (my phone makes TCP connections to the other player's phones) which might ultimately not be possible in the android environment.

• PNG files of arbitrary size!
• alpha!
• OGG!
• MP3!
• threads!
• web!

Next I thought I would re-use my MIX server (where individuals host game servers on their PCs), but that requires volunteer effort in an environment where I hope to make at least a teensy amount of money, so it didn't feel right depending on player largesse in that context. Plus, firewalls have pretty much ruined volunteer servers (and account for massive customer support)

So, that left me with running all the servers myself, which could be expensive, if not done properly. Luckily, here in the 21st century, real servers with lots of bandwidth are no longer all that expensive (albeit not free). I suspect there will be a price increase for the game sometime...

That being said, I have the servers set up with multiple domains, so I can target then both by game (I have other games!) and user-experience-selection (you can pick a ruleset for your multiplayer experience: number of players, starting money, presence of bots, etc)

The server is written in Python, using the Twisted package, (Thanks for the suggestion, Jon!) and handles both rendevous (getting together with similarly-minded players), and the game sessions themselves.

At this point, I have a working server and have played some brief 2 player games with myself. My original SOLO implementation was pretty close to what I needed (this is my nth time down this road :-) but of course not perfect. The server ended up being a lot smarter than I thought it would, hence the client could actually be a bit dumber than I made it.

Note that this is still a player-to-player game and the server doesn't really know anything about WarPath in particular (it's generic and will work with any of my games)

I will probably eventually have SOME amount of server-side database support, so people can make some sort of global claims.

I expect the MULTIPLAYER to be pretty rocky for the next couple of releases, and each new release will probably be incompatible with the previous, for awhile. So you will need to have the current version of the game, if you want to play multiplayer.

I have pencilled in Achievements and Unlockables to come in later released. Maybe release 26 ish. I was going to sneak the infrastructure in on r25, but the multiplayer stuff is probably destabilizing enough for one release.

Fingers crossed, I will release r25 this weekend.

But instead of that, I added the Space Dock and Galactic Guide screens, so that fills in the remaining UI holes :-) I still need to polish both of those screens, but I think they meet the needs of the game.

I noticed it wasn't just my imagination that the hints kept turning themselves back on. It turns out any time you opened the Settings Panel, it would also reset the hint counters. That's fixed in V23

I added the random bot chatter from the original game. It doesn't seem quite so hilarious to me as it did a decade ago. To mitigate that I added a new option spinner for "Bot Chatter" which lets you turn on/off two separate sorts: "Chatter" (the random taunts and threats) and "Thotz" (the insight into the bot brain thinking). I also limited Thotz to only list for the bot whose PointOfView you are tracking on the Galaxy/Players panel.

I added 'flick' support so I can detect either a 'tap' or a 'flick' (a flick is a rapid touch, drag, lift). And in WPN mode, a 'flick' will set your course. It's an experiment. You can still go to NAV mode, but maybe you don't need to (other than to disable weapons so you don't accidentally shoot your friends).

I fixed a little performance issue that cropped up after my resolution of the previous performance issue. I really have no idea what performance is like on any phone but my own. On my Droid, I pretty much get the design goal 20 fps all the time.

This release introduces the "Ship Status" panel, which is needed both as documentation of what the little meters in the top right are all about, and as a place to stick some more buttons. You can now toggle you shields, radar, and stealth.

So stealth now works, but note your shields are down while you are in stealth. You will drop out of stealth if you fire a weapon, or run out of charge (stealth consumes charge pretty rapidly while it is on)

The Radar is Yet Another Thing to make playing on a small screen tolerable. You can toggle it on and off via the (new) Ship Status panel. It draws a little ring of lines around your ship. The closest planets are then indicated by some stubby lines (colored to match aura) and any close ships are indicated by little V 'arrows', so if you steer in the direction indicated, you will eventually fine a planet/ship. You have to purchase RADAR from the store before you can use it, but it is not lost when your ship explodes (neither is stealth)

Can you figure out how to turn on the Ship Status panel? OK, by tapping the Tactical Button a second time. :-) I was pleased with that.

V23 also imposes weapon range limits. (about one sector, the same for all weapons at the moment)

And you'll see that in addition to radar, you can now purchase a Galactic Guide for your ship. Doesn't DO anything yet, but you can at least purchase it. I think that completes the official shopping list (though I still have to turn off the hack that lets all factories build everything, right away -- i.e. add in the tek level requirements)

This makes your ship a little dinky thing (which is sort of charming in of itself) but more importantly makes it possible to have a little dogfight without your opponent constantly running off screen. I think I like it.

After 10 seconds of 'no danger', it clears and returns you to normal zoom with big fast ships and planets.

This release also celebrates my discovery of 'freesound.org' which is a terrific organization and I am sad to only discover it now. I've added about ten more sound effects, leaving only about six to do (not counting the custom weapon sounds I will eventually get around to.)

The damage economy is improved in V22, and you get about 5x more shots out of each charge pod, so phaser-buffs won't run out constantly.

Basically, Phasers are good against the planetary drones (not in the game yet) and unshielded newbie ships. Once your opponent has some shields and energy pods, you really need to move up to torpedoes or big torpedoes. The goal is for tek levels to enable the strong weapons "right about when you need them" (and for players to feel fairly safe in the early minutes of the game)

Still dragging my feet on the Space Dock, trying to polish the existing stuff. You have probably noticed that in each release I *try* to add new stuff *and* polish some old stuff. I like Rik's suggestion of gambling somewhere. Though it's probably silly to load up the game with mini-games that should probably be standalone android games (for 99 cents of their own!) The place that will need a hardcore minigame is the player rendevous screen (when waiting for other players to join your instance, I mean)

Oh right, the big news! V22 finally has working save slots ("Captain's Logs"). Also, when you pick 'resume' it drops immediately into the game, skipping the Enlistment screens (which made no sense, given you were resuming). If you DO have a saved log from a multiplayer game (someday), then resuming it will turn the opponents into bots, but otherwise resume where the game left off.

This (save games) was exactly the huge boring hassle I expected it to be to implement, so I was right to put it off as long as I did :-)

But now, of course, I can't live without it.

Coming up are a few things.. Not sure if I will hold V22 for these or not. Probably not, I need to get the save/restore stuff out asap to hear about any issues.

So, the NAV/WPN modality still bugs me, but I am thinking now I could maybe resolve that by accepting a 'drag to nav'. So you would stay in WPN mode all the time (if you wanted) and a tap would fire your current weapon. To navigate you would tap your destination but not lift your finger, instead you would drag towards your ship ('pulling your destination towards your ship' as it were). This would be consistent with the touch screen metaphor and might feel fairly natural. If your drag-touch started on a planet, then it would be like having tapped on that planet (so you would orbit it when you got close)

Oh, if you haven't already noticed, I am very pleased with something else I snuck in in V21. If you open the Orbital Panel *before* you are in orbit (but after clicking on your target planet), you get a pleasing animation of the approach to the planet, which I like to think is similar to Classic Star Trek's planetary arrival. Well, I like it. Feels kinda 3D.

V22 solves a weird performance issue that was driving me crazy when starting a new game (or when resuming an old one, which is why I fixed it). It turned out I was reloading all the planet graphics each time, and that was burning a couple seconds. Fixing that I might have created a different performance issue on the Tactical Panel.. Haven't run it on a real phone yet, so I'm not sure. If I did, I know how to fix it, so reduced frame rates will be fixed by V23.

Speaking of which, that is a fps *frames per second* meter in the lower left. Target is 20 fps, but normally you will see something like 19.7 because of averaging math. If you're seeing considerably less than that on the Tactical Panel, I am probably interested.

In case you're wondering, those 'plus signs' that appear when you tap on the screen are my way of debugging tap accuracy issues. (I tend to tap just below what I am aiming at). One plus sign stays on the screen pixel you tapped, and the other stays on the position in space that represented (so the space one slides off screen as you move your ship)

I'm working on a simple 'radar' which will be similar to what I did in my game 'synSpace' (for Arcadia for the PC). With lines radiating from your ship, pointing to interesting things 'just off screen' to make it easier to get back to planets, avoid enemies, etc.

There WILL be weapon range limits, I promise, and a simple range indicator for the current weapon (some form of circle around your ship)

And I have a list of WarPath features to do for Empire Enjoyment (those crazy things the bots would say, for example). And I think I will let you chat with the governor of the planet you are orbiting, and maybe the hapless colonists you just dumped on a planet with no Mall to go to.

One problem with Stealth at the moment is I need a control panel to turn it on and off. I am thinking of making the top right 'pod meter' area turn into a clickable... not sure if it would be a tap or a long tap.. But it would pop up a translucent control panel with lager version of the pod meters (with actualy labels so you knew which was which!) and a row of toggle buttons for things that need it, like Stealth, and normal Shields (did you know you can go faster with your shields off? Since you can't turn them off, you can't know that!)

Speaking of other things you can't know. Your ship's max speed is set by the number of energy pods you have. But you can actually go FASTER than that, but if you DO, then you consume energy (so it's for emergencies only!) I won't let you suicide from it though, so I will slow you down before you run out of energy completely.

To be clear about how the hint system works: Each hint will be shown NO MORE THAN ONCE in a game session. In addition to that, I count the total number of times I have shown each hint, and will show NO HINT MORE THAN THREE TIMES, no matter how many times you play the game.

Until, that is, that you reset the hint system in the game settings. That clears all the counters and all the hints come back.

The problem is that, of course, you run into most of the hints early in the game (first time you orbit, first time you fire weapons, etc.) so it's easy to feel a little desperate like "omg, please shut up!" and that encourages you to turn the hints off, which I prefer you didn't since I think they really do communicate important stuff on occasion. So long as I edit them down to their bare essence, which usually takes me a few tries since I tend to verbosity :-)

I plan to add filters to the COMM panel so you can, for example, turn the Bot Thot on and off. I find it useful, of course, when tweaking the AI, to know what the bot is thinking. I enjoy watching the bots do their thing, though. I almost feel like adding the bot thots as chat bubbles when you are following a bot PointOfView.

An alternative is to give you manual control over your zoom level, which is obvious, but there is game value in not letting you see too much at once.

I've done some initial experiments with android being willing to connect to such a server (I am constantly afraid I will run into some 'security feature' that prevents this from working)

V21 adds a Terms of Service you must agree to before playing on line. Nothing mysterious, you just have to promise to not be a total misfit when playing with other real human beings (you can be as big of a jerk as you like with the bots).

While the servers will try to have the ability to 'ban' truly evil people, I will mostly be depending on you to just flag people as "I don't ever want to play with this person again" and then the server will never match you up with them, though they would still be free to play with people they had not yet offended.

And my server design is intended to work with any future android games I may write. Potentially I could productize the server, but my main focus is on making it work well for my needs. Maybe when WarPath has a million active players (ha!), I can revisit that decision :-)