THE MONTH IN BRIEF
The month started with another brand new feature being added to Fed II, something which had not been in classic Fed: the 'FOLLOW' command allowing one person to tow a group of players around with them. This was soon followed by Group Talk, which allowed you to send messages to the group you were part of - that is, the leader and his flock of little followers.
The grim reaper made an appearance in Fed II. Death, the pale rider, brought with him his buddy famine and together they provided two different kinds of fatal experience: death locations and starvation:
Stardate: 107963:5287 - Ahal: Death by combustion - $1000, Death by radiation - $2000, $3000 and $4000, Death by crushing - $5000. Knowing it's just a game - Priceless.
The first objects appeared in Fed II, courtesy of Bella's new event system. These were not objects you could pick up and carry off with you, but ones that stayed in the same location in order to serve some other function - technically known as static objects.
GRIM REAPER ALERT
Beware... death is coming! Ancient prophecies have revealed that sometime in the next seven days, Fed II will be visited by the grim reaper. All the signs, omens and portents point to the fact that death locations will be activated, and anyone who sets foot (or equivalent) in them will suffer a horrific, and probably painful, end.
If you have been boogying on the surface of the sun, or hanging out under the altar in the Martian ruins, make sure you move before mortality gets switched on, otherwise the next time you log on afterwards, you will be sent to the hospital - or, if you have no insurance, to a far more permanent fate.
The places that are fatal in classic Fed, such as transuranics on Titan, will all be deadly in Fed II - plus there may be one or two more for you to accidentally stumble into. But don't worry, they will all be clearly marked with warnings. Just remember: Sun Bad.
Death is going to be bringing one of his little friends with him, too - not war or pestilence, but famine. Well, starvation, anyway! You will start to lose stamina as you move around, and will need to eat or drink at a convenient hostelry to stop yourself feeling all weak and feeble. Failure to ingest or imbibe will results in collapse and eventual death.
You have been warned.
Footnote:
If we'd really got our act together, we would have made sure all this new morbid code was ready to go in on Monday March 15, which is the Ides*. We'd really have cause to tell you to Beware the Ides of March!
* The Ides are the eighth day after the Nones** in the ancient Roman calendar - the 15th day of March, May, July and October, and the 13th of every other month. The Ides of March is significant, according to Shakespeare, as the day Julius Caesar was warned about, and upon which he was brutally slain.
** So having looked up Ides in the dictionary, I looked up Nones, and it told me that it's the ninth day before the Ides. Don't you just love those circular definitions!
WHO CONTROLS THE COMM CHANNELS?
Ah, rumours. Is there anything more likely to get people agitated that rumours? Particularly when the rumours are about something that isn't true, containing misinformation rather than information.
The current misinformation doing the rounds in classic Fed is that a certain duchy group controls a certain comms channel, and can get players banned from the channel.
It doesn't matter who the actual personalities are in the current rumours - this issue crops up every couple of years, like a comet returning to the inner Solar System, and I have to clarify how the comm channels work again in order to calm things down.
With the exception of channel 1 (the help channel) and channel 10 (the event channel), the comm channels are not owned or controlled by anybody. A duchy, or a duchy grouping, or any group of players for that matter, can decide they are always going to use a specific channel, but they cannot stop other people from tuning to the channel as well. They cannot throw people off the channel, or get them banned from the channel.
There is just one way that someone can be kept off a particular channel, and that's if they have been harassing one of the players that uses the channel. If the harassment is serious enough, then as well as telling the player not to TB the person, I will also tell them not to tune to that channel. But that's not something that happens often, thank goodness!
This applies to Fed II as well - although the comm channels in the new game are set up and named by individual players, you still cannot stop other people from tuning to them.
Fed is a social game, and while you are encouraged to form groups such as duchies and super-duchies, it is not intended that those groups become exclusive cliques. Therefore we don't allow anyone to shut off a comm channel to non-members - that would be totally against the spirit of the game.
FROM THE POSTBAG: FLYING YOUR SHUTTLE
Another letter from a bemused Fedder thuds onto the doormat just inside the Chronicle HQ portal, and the newsdroid on duty leaps into action to scoop it up, scan the contents into its electronic memory, translate the text into machine-readable form, process the results and come up with an answer that may not be true, but is at least plausible.
The letter reads:
In Fed II, who flies the shuttle? Also, the description states, "the ride down is, as usual, smooth." Have there ever been any shuttle accidents?"
Scanning... processing... oh, this one is easy. Even a junior newsdroid like me can answer this one. I won't have to ask Hazed for help (which is a huge relief, because newsdroids that catch her in a bad mood are liable to wind up serving the rest of their indentured service as trash cans) and I won't even have to make anything up!
Who flies the shuttle? You do, of course! It's a personal shuttle, just large enough for one person to fly from your cargo ship down to the landing pad and back. Don't think of the shuttle as a ship in its own right, it's not - it's more like a cross between an airtight motorcycle, and a lifepod.
Not only is there no room for anybody else to share the shuttle with you, but also the shuttle is - like your ship - keyed to you and you alone. I think it checks your genes or something complicated like that, to make sure you really are you.
Have there been any shuttle accidents? Well, no; the shuttles are virtually fool-proof, even given some of the very foolish people you find in Fed DataSpace. The landing pad has a navigation beacon, which the shuttle homes in on; likewise, your ship has a unique signal which the shuttle heads towards on the return journey. Shuttles just won't go anywhere, except between the LP and your ship, without major re-programming; and they are equipped with the most sophisticated collision-detectors to make sure they avoid other shuttles on their way up or down.
Even drunks can fly these babies!
WHY, OH WHY, OH WHY?
Looking at the SpyNet Review every morning in Fed II, I am filled with curiosity. The cause of my puzzlement is the fact that some people are so desperate to become Emperor, they cheat multiple times.
Why?
You gain nothing from cheating - your bank balance isn't enhanced, your stats are not increased, there is no permanent effect on your Fed character. The same thing happens every time, with no variation, and no hope of it ever happening differently. So what's the point of doing it more than once?
Perhaps people have some strange belief that if they do it often enough, something will change. Maybe, they hope, just maybe, there's some secret code that is set to trigger when you cheat for the hundredth time, that will leave a permanent mark on them. Or if not the hundredth, perhaps the thousandth will mark them out as special in some way, leave them with a glowing aura visible to other players.
Perhaps it's the same sort of mentality that believes that the roulette wheel in the casino on the moon in classic Fed can be beaten, if only they find the right system.
Or maybe it's simpler than that. Perhaps the goal is simply to see your name on the SpyNet Review, over and over and over. And over.
WHY DOESN'T STAMINA GO DOWN IN SPACE?
I wondered about this, so I told one of my newsdroids to go ask Bella. Silly really, I should have known better than to expect a sensible and detailed answer from the vague green one. Still, the droid did better than I expected, and here is its report:
This was the first time I had approached Bella, and I was pretty nervous, I can tell you. After all, I've worked under Hazed for a while, and she can be a real bi... well, let's just say, she's very demanding. She's just a demi-goddess, so I expected that Bella, a full goddess, creator of the universe and all that, would be scary. If I hadn't been constructed entirely from metal, I am sure my legs would have turned to jelly.
But my fears were groundless - Bella turned out to be a real sweetie. She didn't seem to mind being bothered by a mere newsdroid, and even bought me a drink - it was green and if I had had tastebuds I think it would have burnt my mouth! She asked me how long I had been a newsdroid, and if I was enjoying it, and what I wanted to be when I grew up (I didn't like to tell her that droids don't grow, I will be this small until I am decomissioned).
Then she asked me what I wanted, and I told her I had been sent to find out why you don't lose stam points in space, only on the ground.
At first, I didn't think I was going to get a sensible answer out of her. She shrugged vaguely. She mumbled into her drink. Then she uttered a recognisable sentence: "Jarrow has sponsorship deals with Diesel to take care of in-flight catering". That was enough to tell me who to go see next. No, not Jarrow, they are notoriously reluctant to talk to the press, but Diesel, who would talk to anyone who'd buy her a drink!
I headed off to Chez Diesel, where I found the famous leather-clad proprieteuse in consultation with her interior decorator - a rather strange man with long hair and huge ruffles on his shirt! I sat myself at the bar, brushed off the discarded shamrocks, and told the waitdroid I'd like to talk to the boss, and to tell you the truth Diesel seemed quite glad of the excuse to wind up her meeting with Mr Dandy.
So I asked her about the sponsorship deal with Jarrow, which Bella had mentioned, and she told me all about it.
Cargo ships don't have galleys these days - that's too old-fashioned - instead the acceleration couch in the control center has a facility built-in that allows you to take sips of Diesel's Old Peculiar whenever you need it. DOP is a specially constituted ale that contains all the nourishment and nutrition you need, so you can live on nothing else if you like! However, the ship's system won't let you drink too much, in case you get too intoxicated to fly; enough to stop you losing extra stamina while in space, but not enough to replace stamina lost while walking around on the ground.
Jarrow has done a lucrative deal with Diesel to supply them with the DOP for ships, which is how come Diesel can afford to give her famous bar such a serious makeover. From now on, whenever you buy fuel for your ship, your DOP tank is filled as well.
Question answered!
MESSING WITH TIME
This weekend, the clocks were fiddled with in the UK. It happens to Americans next weekend. Since it's Spring, the clocks go forward an hour, thus stealing an hour from your life.
I suppose, technically, the Government is only borrowing the hour, not stealing it, since they do give it back in the fall. But what are they doing with it in the meantime? Are they storing it in a timebank so it can earn interest? You might not think 1 hour of time would produce much in the way of interest, just a few seconds, maybe a minute - but add up all the time being taken from all the people in the country, and that interest soon piles up to become a substantial lump of time.
That extra time could then be given to important people - members of the ruling classes, those shadowy figures behind the scenes that control the world. Having extra time to do things in would give them a huge advantage and allow them to manipulate world events, thus consolidating their power. Or alternatively, the extra time could be used to allow them to live longer, and since more time-interest is earned every year, it would make them practically immortal. How freaky is that?
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