2001-06-02 - 3:31 p.m.

Planetarion: The Uncivil War

Well, it's been a while since I've talk about the online space-strategy game Planetarion and I bet all of you have missed it a whole lot.

Or not. Heh.

This round is now about a month and a half old and it has taken a much different shape than the previous three rounds.

Yes, the creators compacted the universe as I mentioned before. Now instead of over 720 clusters, there are exactly 315. 315 x 25 galaxies in a cluster x 25 players in a galaxy = 196,275 players. That's a LOT of people wasting a lot of time. I bet Planetarion is having a direct negative effect on worker productivity in Norway and the U.K.

There have been two big changes this round compared to the last.

First, the creators greatly changed the focus of the game by making PARALLELS not CLUSTERS important. They did this by tampering with the time element.

Let me clarify what I am talking about. Last round my co-ordinates were 6:9:11, which meant that my galaxy was 6:9 - cluster 6, parallel 9.

Last round, it took you 5 hours to send a fighting ship to another planet in your galaxy, but 6 hours to send it to another planet in your cluster and 8 hours to another planet outside your cluster.

Since there were only 25 galaxies in a cluster, there was not that much attacking in cluster. Either because there were agreements among the few galaxies in cluster, or because clusters quickly became raided to nothing by strong galaxies in the cluster.

This round it is impossible to have an alliance among a whole parallel - there are 315 galaxies, which means 7,875 players. You just can't have a workable agreement with that many galaxies and that many players.

This is making alliances of galaxies in parallel more important than many of the big alliances that ruled last round. That may change soon - some parallels are getting played out too.

The second big way that the creators changed the spirit of the game is by slanting the game strongly toward weaker players and defenders. They did this in several ways. They increased the armor value of the ships, making them harder to destroy. They changed the capture formula so there is little profit in attacking someone less than a quarter your size. And finally they added a new feature called SALVAGE which allowed defenders to get 40% of the value of all ships destroyed at their planet, enemy and friendly. This is absurd: is a totaled car worth 40% of a new car?

Anyway, this creates the ridiculous situation where you can attack and attack someone and they can wind up with more resources than they started with.

Of course, the big players hate this with a passion, and the new, weak players like it. Because there are more of the latter than the former, these rules are probably going to stay in place, much to the consternation of the Planetarion elite.

I'm sure that this explanation of the rules of a game almost none of you are playing must be dull as hell. Well, in order to talk about what has just happened, I have to explain one more thing.

The basic political unit in Planetarion is the galaxy. Like I said before, it consists of 25 players. They are banded together by the fact that the shortest ship travel times are between planets in the same galaxy. They can also trade resources among each other, and each galaxy has its own discussion board.

It can be compared to an extended family. Some players have been in the same galaxy together for the last three rounds. Others are in the same alliance, others are friends or even closer.

Politically, each galaxy is a democratic monarchy. The ruler is the Galactic Commander, who is elected by a simple majority of 13 votes. The GC in turn appoints the three Galactic Ministers: the Minister of Development (who controls the galactic treasury), the Minister of Communication (who is in charge of the message boards and in-galaxy communications) and the Minister of War, who plans galactic attacks. All of these are paid positions: the GC gets an extra 10% resources an hour, while the other three each get an extra 5%.

Okay, now we move from the general to the specific.

I've been in a galaxy with many of the same players for the last three rounds. At first I was a very feeble and timid player, but I eventually got my feet under me, and finished just under the top 200 players. Last round, I finished in the top 70 and the galaxy finished in the top 10.

Last round, I was appointed Minister of Communications and for much of the round I was virtually running the galaxy for our semi-absent GC.

This round, for some reason that I haven't quite put my finger on, things have changed. The people in the galaxy haven't been getting along like they used to. Various petty disputes had arisen over what I considered trivial matters, and I'd been involved with a couple of them. We also hadn't been doing as well. Instead of bouncing around the top 30 like we were used to, we were barely able to keep in the top 100.

Still, I didn't feel that any of this was serious, until today.

This morning I woke up, and before I fixed myself some breakfast I checked my planet. I then went to the galaxy message board to tidy it up. For some reason my screen looked funny. Since it was early in the morning it took a couple of minutes to figure out what the problem was: I didn't have executive privileges anymore. I then went to the officer's screen.

With no warning whatsoever, I had been removed as Minister of Communication. Someone else had the job now.

I'll go into the hows and why of this, and what came after, next entry.