2001-04-26 - 11:59 p.m.

Planetarion: All Generals No Soldiers

Hi ho, Planetarion has started again.

This round is still in its infancy, in fact it has been going less than a week. It's still unclear how this round is going to play, but the creators have tried their level best to not have one or two big alliances dominate the game. Let's see how that turns out. It may be a huge snore.

The sign-up for Planetarion was different than previous rounds. You basically had three options:

1) Start your own galaxy with you as Galactic Commander and then give the password to your friends

2) Sign up for a friend's galaxy and they give you the password, as stated above

3) Sign up and just get put in a random galaxy

This seems like a perfectly reasonable way to keep galaxy mates together, so this was probably a nice thing for more experienced players like me. We were pretty much able to keep our old galaxy together.

However, what the Planetarion creators didn’t count on was that most of the less experienced players, if given the option, would OF COURSE want to be a Galactic Commander in their own galaxy. Why be a peon when you can crown yourself king?

At the end of last round there were about 240 clusters consisting of 25 galaxies of 25 players each. That's 625 planets per cluster which is about 150,000 planets in all. That's pretty impressive.

This round there are over 720 (!!!) clusters. That's almost TRIPLE the number of galaxies last round. However the vast majority of these galaxies only have one or two planets in them because everyone wants to be a general but nobody wants to be a soldier. These tiny galaxies are going to be easy pickings once attacking starts. There's a rumor that the creators are going to find a way to compact the universe. We'll see about that.

But in spite of this little faux pas Planetarion is hugely popular and growing daily. The last I heard was that there were over 165,000 accounts and more are being added every hour.

Now, even though there are 165,000 accounts, nobody knows how many players there really are. It's well known that many players have multiple accounts, which is absolutely illegal. If you are discovered to be playing more than one planet, all your accounts get deleted.

Still there are an enormous number of people playing. The creators reported that they get over 11 million page hits a day. This makes Planetarion the biggest Internet site in the entire United Kingdom.

It's more of a European phenomenon than an American one, but there are more U.S. players signing up every day.

So in this spirit of internationalism I offer some educational content to you, my readers. It's the only three words I know in Norwegian, and I learned them while playing Planetarion.

Dette spillet suger!

Translation: This game sucks!