2001-04-02 - 11:59 p.m.

Planetarion: Fury Rules At Ragnarok

Ahem. Yesterday's lame April Fools joke was probably not so funny considering it was a week late. Sigh. Actually it may simply not be funny at all. Maybe I should appoint Wendyloo as my official joke tester.

Anyway, in case you didn't notice it the universe ended today.

What? It escaped your notice?

Well, of course I'm talking about the Planetarion universe. And let me tell you, as someone who had a front row seat, the end of the universe is WAY over rated.

This round of Planetarion went on much longer than anyone thought it would, much longer than anyone wanted it to. Finally the creators announced that at 1800 Central European time, the game would stop. They would freeze the top 100 players and galaxies and the winners would be announced.

The reason that everyone was glad to see the round ending was that for the last several weeks the game has been kind of stagnant. The two big alliances, Legion and Fury, ruled the game without question. The list of the top galaxys read: Legion, Fury, Legion, Legion, Legion, Fury, Legion/Fury, Legion, Fury... well, you get the idea.

While it's nice to dominate the game, even domination can get a little dull.

There was some talk of a "friendly" war between Fury and Legion just to revive interest in the game. Then there began to be a series of server problems that made it almost impossible for anyone to attack anyone. Planetarion is still having money/hosting problems.

Then, just a few days before the end of the round the balance of power shifted violently. A large wing of Legion, calling its self The Wolfpack broke off and declared itself an independent entity. Then Legion and Wolfpack began attacking each other.

In a stroke of Realpolitik that would have made Bismarck proud, the head of Fury, a player known as Synthetic Sid, realized that Fury could win all the marbles if they just picked a winner in the Legion/Wolfpack war. On a flimsy pretext he broke all ties with Legion and declared war on them. This was no "friendly" war, it was the real thing.

Meanwhile, things had not been going so well in my galaxy. While I was slowly working my way up the top 100, a series of disasters struck my galaxy mates. Well... "disasters" is kind of an impersonal way of putting it. Basically, they lost a pile of ships by being lazy and/or incompetent, so our galaxy score dropped. We fell from eighth to twelfth with little hope of going higher.

Early yesterday Fury and Legion had a big battle over a player named Kadehir. Most expected the battle to be a narrow victory for Fury, but the result was instead a big win for Fury and Wolfpack. Since Kadehir was in the #10 galaxy, his fall moved us up into eleventh place.

Last night came the climactic battle of this round - Legion and their allies launched a full scale assault on Synthetic Sid, the fourth biggest planet in the entire game. There were hundreds of players and millions of ships on either side of the battle. It was the biggest battle in the history of Planetarion, it was so huge that the creators thought it would fry the server. At the height of the battle nearly 50 million ships were involved on both sides.

But when the smoke lifted, Fury was the clear winner of this round's biggest battle. Thanks to the millions of ships lost, Fury had not only the top galaxy, but the top player as well. They were also the largest alliance, just ahead of Legion and Wolfpack. The other alliances, and there are hundreds of them, trailed the big three distantly.

Thanks to the big shake up, our galaxy finished 9th. I finished as player number 61 and I got to take part in the two biggest battles, on the winning side both times.

So, what happens now? Even though the round is effectively over, it is still continuing until the reset on April 17. However, the creators have added a little spice to make the post-season a little more chaotic. They've given a large donation of resources to each and every player in the game.

To a large player like me, this donation is about what I would earn in two days. However, to the smaller, newer players this is a king's ransom, more than they could expect to see in the whole game. We'll see what they do with this sudden windfall in the next few days.