Official News - page 6

THE LOW-RANKING PLANET-OWNER AND THE SPACE POLICE

It's been a week for embarrassing mistakes by planet-owners! First, we had Caesar accidentally building a police station in space. Now, I admit that nowhere in the Idiot's Guide does it actually say "you must have your feet on your actual planet in order to do a build", but all of the other planet-owner commands have to be carried out when ground-bound so it should have been pretty obvious. And it does say it on the commands page at http://www.ibgames.net/fed2/commands/b/build.html. However, since Caesar is one of those players who very openly boasts about never bothering to read the manual, I guess it wouldn't have made any difference anyway.

Suffice to say that doing builds when in space actually adds them to your system space, instead of to your planet, where they have no effect whatsoever. A space police force doesn't even help with pirates! What a waste of 10 meg.

Then we had the case of the Manufacturer who became a planet-owner. Nolepaul failed to read the section of the manual which said you should not submit your planet files to be linked into the game until you are a Financier. We failed to check his rank before linking his new planet to the game, because it never occurred to us we needed to, so when reset came around he became a PO Manufacturer.

This is possible because owning a planet in Fed2 is not actually linked to any particular rank. Technically, a GroundHog could be a PO. However, he wouldn't be able to do anything with the planet because most of the commands require you to actually fly to the new system which is impossible for a GroundHog.

When a Financier sends in a planet to be added to the game, they do not automatically become a Founder: instead, one of us management-types flips a switch at some point after the reset to manually promote them. But that only works if the player -is- a Financier! When we realized what had happened, we told Nolepaul to promote himself to Financier pronto, and then we turned him into a Founder. And in future, we will make sure to check the rank of anybody submitting a new planet!

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page