Fed II Star - January 8, 2006

FROM THE POSTBAG: ARTIFICIAL DUCHIES

Actually this is a question that I have been asked several times in the game by various players, as well as getting emails about, so it's clearly something that a lot of people are curious about. The question is:

Will we be putting in artificial duchies run by members of staff, like we did on web Fed and AOL Fed?

The short answer is:

No.

The long answer is an explanation of why we can't do that. What you need to remember is that when Fed opened up on AOL, and later when it moved to the web, the code already existed for all the ranks right up to Duke. In both cases, the game code had to be ported to make it work on the particular operating system of its servers at the time, but that's all. Duchies had worked on GEnie Fed so they worked right away on AOL, once the code had been tweaked to conform to AOL's networking stuff. So the only reason not to have Dukes and duchies on AOL Fed was the lack of players at that rank - it was therefore easy to artificially create a few fake Dukes with their duchies, so planets had somewhere to go. The same happened when web Fed opened up.

But now, it's a whole new ball-game - quite literally. Fed II has been rewritten from the groundhog up, and none of the code from classic Fed has been used. That means nothing appears in the Fed II universe until Bella writes the code for it. She is only just working on planets themselves, and hasn't got anywhere near to coding in duchies. So we can't make any artificial duchies; all star systems will have to remain independent entities for now.