"trillum", the latter of which serves as fuel for the game's interstellar ships. Chemicals, metals, and supplies may be produced ad infinitum, but each world comes with trillum deposits of a fixed value which, once depleted, cannot be restored. For this reason, the control and distribution of trillum resources becomes of essential importance, especially late in the game. The game also includes a resource called "ambrosia", a performance-enhancing drug used to both boost planetary production and produce higher quality soldiers. A variety of space megastructures can be built, ranging from minefields and simple space stations to star gates and artificial planets. Development Released in 1987/1988, the game was later with version 1.3 released as freeware. It is written in Written in Turbo Pascal. The source code was released for the MS-DOS version. Reception Jerry Pournelle of BYTE stated in January 1989 that Anacreon "is filled with excellent ideas, mostly well implemented, and then spoiled by inattention to some vital detail". While admitting that he had "just spent the last 2 days (and nights) playing" the game—"really a darned good implementation of the Stellar Conquest idea"—Pournelle cited the "annoyingly buggy [and] incomplete" user interface, inability to easily select a planet, need to micromanage units unlike Empire: Wargame of the Century, and other issues that he stated showed a lack of proper playtesting and were common to products from small startup companies. He nonetheless named Anacreon as his game of the month, concluding that "despite its problems, it's playable and the flavor is good, much like Beam Piper's old Space Viking series. Also, the author is busily fixing bugs even as I write this". Legacy In 2004, George Moromisato released an update to the game making it run natively in a Windows 9x environment. Some of the changes were largely functional, e.g. the ability to use the mouse, bug fixes, graphical updates, etc. But one change radically altered the gameplay, namely the ability to store more than 9999 of a given ship or resource type in a single fleet or planet, something not allowed by the mechanics of the original 1987 release and its patches. This corrected a major problem with resource distribution, as no single planet could produce more than 9999 of anything in a single turn, creating critical resource bottlenecks. It also significantly affected strategy and tactics, as it makes it possible to assemble enough cheaper, weaker ships in a