Ugwart reined in his mount and gazed across the steppes at
 the expanding blight on the world. His cousins from the overlands
 and even the reclusive mountain folk had seen the same horrors.
 These hivelike swarms of man creatures seemed to appear from nowhere
 in once fertile wilderness and began their systematic destruction.
 Cries to POGO had gone unheard. No one dared to invoke Hanuman or
worse
 Plundaria for aid, for that was the path to certain ruin. Some of the
 younger, more brash warriors had ridden to fight the invaders, some
of
 them had met with success and claimed many trophies, most where never
 heard from again. Soon though, he knew, the tide would turn. As his
 fathers fathers had learned in the past, never cross the Mach-Ene.
 The unfathomable Mach-Ene creatures refused parlay as always, but
they
 kept to their own lands - as long as you didn't delve into the
 forbidden arts or cross into their lands. As his fathers fathers
 learned, that path brought the rolling thunders, the fire-mushrooms,
 and the invisible death that drove them from their homes long ago,
 that forced them into the nomadic lifestyle. These man things were
 starting the forbidden rituals, so soon these man things would
 be gone, then Ugwart would hunt the wilderness again. Then all would
be
 right once more.

                -- Plunderbot Hive Mind Sorosub cultural memory rip
archive
                        hvy core world 2 circa cycle 3

Hvy Metal II has seen three updates so far.  Players have encountered
small bands of Nomads, hardy Montagnards, and Plunderbot, a strange
artificial intelligence stubbornly resisting incursions into its land.
Rumors of Plunderbot atrocities against captured civilians have not
been substantiated so far.

The power chart, as of right before the third update, is still led by
Plunderbot.

      - = [   Empire Power Report   ] = -
       as of Fri May  9 14:02:05 2008

         sects  eff civ  mil  shell gun pet  iron dust oil  pln ship
unit money
Plunderbo 575    2%   8  4.9K 1.0K 120    0    0    0    0    0    0
60  240K
DonQuixot 215   15%  12K 300    0    0    0  1.1K 2.8K  50    0
0    0   20K
   Xymaca 190   10%  12K 100    0    0    0  1.1K 2.9K 150    0
0    0   25K
  Lowland 215   12%  12K  50    0    0    0  1.1K 1.6K   0    0
0    0   20K
1EyedMons 215   11%  12K 100    0    0    0  2.5K 1.9K 100    0
0    0   25K
   Aridon 205    9%  12K 150    0    0    0  2.7K 2.6K  16    0
0    0   25K
Metallica 215   12%  12K 300    0    0    0  3.2K 1.9K  50    0
0    0   20K
 Baldoria 205   15%  12K 150    0    0    0  950  2.0K 100    0
0    0   25K
 Dethklok 215   10%  12K 100    0    0    0  2.1K 1.7K 600    0
0    0   20K
TheDiplom 200   10%  12K 150    0    0    0  1.4K 2.4K 100    0
0    0   25K
HeavyBarr 215    8%  12K 150    0    0    0  1.9K 1.8K 200    0
0    0   25K
     beep 215   17%  12K 200    0    0    0  3.0K 600    0    0
0    0   20K
Dentrassi 210   10%  12K 100    0    0    0  2.4K 1.6K 200    0
0    0   25K
  Loc-Nar 210   18%  12K 150    0    0    0  1.3K 850   20    0
0    0   20K
Fighting_ 140   20%  12K 150    0    0    0  2.2K 1.3K 1.1K   0
0    0   25K
  Beehive 210    9%  12K 100    0    0    0  3.6K 1.0K   0    0
0    0   25K
    Wales 215    8%  12K 150    0    0    0  3.7K 1.3K 200    0
0    0   25K
  RimFire 180   11%  12K 100    0    0    0  3.2K 1.1K 200    0
0    0   25K
BlackComp 215   14%  12K 400    0    0    0  1.6K 1.1K  50    0
0    0   20K
  Council 135   17%  12K  23    0    0    0  400  850    0    0
0    0   25K
               ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
---- ----
worldwide 4.4K  11% 225K 7.9K 1.0K 120    0   40K  31K 3.2K   0    0
60  675K

========================================================
Announcements since Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969

In case you brought your early game cookie cutter, take good care of
it, you may need it in your next game.

In case you played the blitz, be warned that we changed a few details
based on player feedback and our own trials.

If you played Hvy Metal I, many things will be familiar.  But don't be
sad, we got a few surprises for you as well.

Read info Hvy-Metal.  Then read it again, slowly.  Then read these
hints, slowly.  If you don't understand something, ask the deities.
We're not going to play the game for you, but we're happy to explain
its rules.

You start with quite a few people.  You want to put all your people to
work on something immediately useful.  Your mobility should suffice to
do that, if you use it wisely.  It takes an efficient sector 40 mob to
move 1000c to an adjacent 0% sector, and another 2-3 to move their
food.  An inefficient sector (<60%) takes ten times as much mobility
for moving civilians.  It's quite easy to get a big pile of people
stuck in an awkward place.

Think about the merits of just-in-time production, and how to apply it
to Empire.

Because tech yield is highly non-linear in investment, you really want
to make it steadily, starting as early as possible.  Figure out what
you need for that, and how to produce it.

Non-renewable resources (gold, oil, uran) are not nearly as scarce as
you might think.  Each point of gold represents five times as much
dust as usual.  Same for uran/rad.  2.5 times for ocontents/oil.

Your start island is good for a bit less than 5000o.  Keep that in
mind when gearing up your economy.  You might find more oil out there,
and you'll eventually perfect biofuel technology (if you live that
long).

Letting your people starve makes you everybody's favourite target.
Use the starvation command.

Watch your food supply!  You start with a substantial reserve, but
once that's gone, you will need more than just one agribusiness.  100
people need approximately 3f per update.  A farmer in a 100% fertility
aggie or plains can feed five people including himself initially, more
as technology improves.

There is some free land for you to explore right away, but soon enough
you'll run into the natives or the competition.  Git thar fust with
the most men.

Having military costs you a fortune.  Not having military costs you a
kingdom.  Adapt expense to the threat.  Military reserves are your
friend.  Military payroll savings recoup demobilization expense in
just one update.

If your enemy brings fireworks to the party, and you don't, you die.

Watch the power report.  If everybody except you got something, think
about why that might be so, and whether it's a good thing.

and how many decided it was worth a try?

Contact is of the first blood type, not diplomatic.
Although some diplomats are more into full contact diplomacy
rather than the chatty type, or so I hear.

A specific resource is badly programmed in the present
form of the code, we are implementing.

"So prior to the first update we will grant free BTU's
to those that need them."

Due to this programming error, all must pray to the gods
for personal dispensations, at our whim.

"After the first update, things should be back to normal.
And the deities will no longer be kind."

Later on, we will remind you that our benevolence but
never again will it be so.

Damn gods,  just like 3000 years ago. Messing around with
the mere mortals.

Bzzz.

Now we know.

all praise POGO, the one true god!!

You forgot an important part of those answers.

MUAHAHAHAHAHAA!

There that's better.

Versions earlier then 2.5.48 will have problems loading some of the
data from xdump.  These are server upgrades that have been
incorporated
into 2.5.48.

Also HeavyMetal has some special options which the Heavy Metal theme
game deals with.  There are more changes in 2.5.48 and 2.5.50 to deal
with the some of the new changes for Heavy Metal II.

Ron K.

1. Ships and land units do NOT use fuel.

2. Whether oil is scarce is for you to find out.  To estimate known
   reserves in the ground, total ocontent (column oil in output of
   resource) and multiply by 25.  Expect to get a bit less due to
   rounding.  Your start area is good for almost 5000o.

3. The biofuel plant comes into play after tech 150.  Production
   efficiency is zero at tech 150, and improves to 0.5 at tech 230.
   It's up to you to figure out how much oil you can burn per turn,
   and whether and when you need biofuel.

A player asked whether the number of operational railways connected to
a sector (selector track; see info Railroad) makes a difference for
trains marching across the sector.  The answer is no.  One is just as
good as many.

First Plunderbot blood!!!

And now that you are asking, I'll have a cheeseburger.

change coun Sangria

Or, is that whine?

We did not award the whole pool, however.

We did award 5 bars for various prompt and
discrete bug reports.

On to the winners:

Two winners in the humor catagories
The translation announcement from Beehive.

And

beep

Each winner needs to contact the awarding deity and advise where
they want their award.

Bars are still available for this turn. Prance to entertain the
deities and gain material rewards!

The code is also in my public Git repository on branch hvy-metal-2:
http://git.pond.sub.org/?p=empserver;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/hvy-metal-2

Enjoy!

The latter is the better link.

his wife is trying to get him to give up meat to help with his
heart condition. when asked what the hardest part of a vegetable
was to eat, he replied "the wheelchair".

I have laughed at his email muchly and will award him the
DUM-MASS award at the end of the game.

However since it is a client-interaction issue and very early
in the game I feel it is not a serious balance issue to grant
them back a small percentage of the btus burned by strength
(as fetched from a quick scan of the server journal)

Further in interest of fairness, I will grant back BTU's this
update to anyone affected by this. Total btus to grant are
76.

Mercifulness. I'm not used to this. Leaves a bad taste.
Unclean.

If anyone feels this is unfair, please state that fact in
announcements/telegrams/emails I will entertain differing
points of view. I'm trying to host a fun game for everyone.

You can tell if the Strength command refresh is enabled or not.

The right most Column of the Sector form (Upper Right area) which
starts with Un: is black the Strength Command refresh is enabled
which uses BTUs.  If it is blue then Strength Command refresh is
disabled, no BTUs.

When WinACE needs to update the sector information in its local
database, it does a xdump and a strength command unless it is
suppressed.  Strength command uses BTUs, but xdump does not.

Ron K.

"starve" is not a legal command

"piss-off" is not a legal command
sheezz...
bzzzz....

(rimshot)

hokie-doke smart person, how did you do that?

stupid citizen leader brain hurt. fire bad! fire bad!

"Mr President," He said.

The President snapped his head up with a start and
looked blearily over at TheDeathAngel, not yet
noticing the gun in hand. "You!" He exlaimed. "We
Sent you in exile with Mirkwood."

TheDeathAngel shrug and took another step, "Ten Years
since I last stepped onto this ground. Ten Years."
He paused and raised the gun for effect. "And the
person I trusted to keep my people safe."

He moved next to the President who tried to step back
only to find himself at the edge of the Dias.

TheDeathangel put his hand out, "You're asleep
at the wheel."

BANG *thud* One Civilian shot dead in sector 0,0

TheDeathAngel mutters to himself as he tries to figure
out just how much rust he has.

"Map? Check"
"cen? Check"
"Move? check"

TheDeathAngel paused, "Units? what are units? Back in
my day we had mil and we were happy. Let me tell you..."

An Aide taps TheDeathAngel on his shoulder and whispers
fiercely.

"Oh, right, Now damnit I know we can change the country
name, how how in the bloody blazes do I do it?"

He shouts after the retreating aide, "And somebody
get Afrika Corps on the line, we need the Terminator
Script!"

what? you're saying that's just me thinking that??

frack you, asshole

If you made this mistake, you can beg the deities to bestow up to 76
BTUs on you, depending on what we find in our logs.

The hopeful leader of Sangolia had to excuse himself.  The country was
taken over by new leadership in an orderly fashion, and now styles
itself Dentrassi.

The worthless leader of Tunisia didn't bother to show up.  The country
was set up for the first update by the deities.  It is now ruled by
TheDeathAngel of Metallica.

... is not legal command

I will investigate this evening once I get home from work.

Ron K.

bzzz.....

get your fricking factoids straight.

"probe 16,0"

sheez..
bz...

All hexagons are holy to Beehive,  Beehive is Supreme,
blessings on our Queen.

Due to the holy nature of the hexagon.  Beehive religious leaders
have declared all charts that naturally contain the hexagon must
therefore
be deemed: Land destined for all honor to Our Blessed Queen. (OBQ)
Blessings on our Q (BooQ)

Beehive military drones have determined large swatches of land
naturall
configured tot he hexagon shape and hence operations are commencing
for the proper aquiring of these land for OBQ, BooQ.

Beehive Airwaves, AM 1320  (BAAM)
BooQ

Life is good.

quotes_around(starve)
quotes_around(starve)  (yes second one)
quotes_around(piss-off)
Leading(?) quotes_around(starve)
Leading(?) quotes_around(piss-off) second

bzz...

have no idea how they still keep getting process
cuz i don't see them in beeps anno. either.
bzzzzz....

still, *shutter*

does anyone else use the good ole empclient
with no extras?

TheDeathAngel

telnet alien.stdio.com 6777

;)

Re: "Sangoria was taken over in an orderly fashion"
And the leader was turned into a stew, yes.

Re: Plundaria's survey for his class
Answer: Do you *really* want Empire players polluting your data?

And regarding the pane in Dethlok's lower-right:
Well, at least it's not all the diodes on your left side. Stop
whining!

Meanwhile, back at Metallica Central, the not-so-focused
leader asks the rock star he's interviewing when his next
update will be.

:)))

^^^^^^^^^^^
[...]

What the hell is that?

Ok, maybe there's more to this porn thing than I thought...
<shudder>

i told the doctor that something was wrong... i couldn't feel
my legs. he responded, "yes, we've had to amputate both your
arms."

why am I here again? :)

Definition of a Kentucky Geek VIRGIN:
  "A geek that can't catch up to a cylon"

stupid cylon, must be an early model centurion instead of one of the
skin jobs.

The "is not a legal  command" text is not
security issue.  The text pattern is searched
for in  the server ouptut in order to redirect
that information to the telegram/flash output window.

If the text happens to be in telegram or an announcement
the line containing the text will be redirected to the
telegram/flash output window.

There is no issue with double quotes.

Ron K.

WinACE parses for the some strings to ensure they do not get
buried in the other parsing routines.

In this particular case, "is not a legal  command" is not printed
in the command area (lower left) when you issue an invalid command.
WinACE compensates for this by looking for this output and printing
it on the right side so you do not miss it.

Ron K.

the citizen leader feels hurt, and might
cry real tears. i hope you're proud of
yourself.

in one of his last games, Soxland claimed he had
improved his a.i. to the point where it had actually
managed to conquer another country.

1- Either the players need to stop suckling on the teat of mommy and
learn to play the game and use their clients, or the game needs to
send a "spawn paper-clip-assisto-icon" command so that their clients
can tell the users that the client is wasting their BTUs after exces-
sive stupid commands for no good reason.  But it should not be the
server's responsibility to fix a dumb user/client.

2- Or either Winace needs to be fixed to not be in "shaft the n00bs"
mode and not have these DUM-MASS so called "features" enabled by
default.
No other clients do this!  Why should Winace (which is supposed to be
easy to use)?  Or at least have a menu item that only auto-issues the
strength command when BTUs are above some configurable level, maybe
500 (by default)?

Back in my day, we didn't have these fodders on crutches whining about
their inability to play due to their clients sending too many commands
and they ran out of BTUs.  We killed them before that.  Hell, you were
_lucky_ to even *CONNECT* for hours at a time.  "Oh, my connection to
the server latency is too high, it takes 2 seconds to update my
bmap..."
Try doing a "bmap *" over a 1200 baud!  Ever wonder why there are 50
realms?

Take the land, that must be taken.
Devour worlds, smite forsaken.

bzzz....

although I agree with a passive default mode.

1EyedMonster receives five bars of gold for making a long, hard effort
at milking any and all opportunities to score, uh, wordplays.

Metallica receives five bars of gold for entering the game in
classical style.

5 Bars more for someone to take when I get blitzed
:D

TheDeathAngel

so what's up with these '~' thingies
and what's this light infantry unit?

that's an odd plane name?

Now me must unsheath our sword, for vermin
like mountain men are up to no good.

For honor and right

Defender of all that is good.
Quixote of LaMancha

BoQ

Log Entry 06:54:25  saturday, may 10 2008 version: 2.5.50
VB Error: 13 - Type mismatch
Routine: IncomingTelegramLine

One paragraph in particular is worth repeating another time:

    Watch your food supply!  You start with a substantial reserve, but
    once that's gone, you will need more than just one agribusiness.
    100 people need approximately 3f per update.  A farmer in a 100%
    fertility aggie or plains can feed five people including himself
    initially, more as technology improves.

Also at http://stdio.com/~rhyatt/empire/hvy_metalII/Hints

Dentrassi is pretty upset by this, so he climbs the fence and walks
over to beep.

He taps him on the shoulder and says, "You know mate, back home, we
shear those!"

beep looks around and says, "I'm not bloody SHEARING this with no
one!"

Protector of sheep (not Bungy)
Quixote of LaMancha

 ~ ~ # # ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
# # # ^ # # # # ^ # # ~
 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ # # ~ ~

1.      A new form of impressionist ASCII art.
2.      A bridge to nowhere.
3.      A bridge to long.
4.      A bridge not quite long enough yet.

it be slow
it beed slow
it has beed slow
it will have beeded slow

Production depends on sector efficiency, resource contents (some
products), available work, a technology or education level production
efficiency (some products), a sector type production efficiency, and
availability of the product's raw materials.

The fine print is all in show sect c, but it's a bit cryptic:

                                                 --- level
---          reso
  sector type             product use1 use2 use3 level min lag eff% $$
$ dep c
a agribusiness            food                   tech  -10  10   50
0   0 f
~ plains                  food                   tech  -10  10  100
0   0 f

Let's read this slowly.  Both agribusiness and plains make a product
called "food" (column product), which is really food (the "f" in the
last column).

Columns use1 to use3 are empty, which tells us that we don't use any
raw materials.
The level columns tell us that level production efficiency is
(tech+10)/(tech+20).  It's 0.5 at tech 0, and grows quickly as tech
increases, reaching 0.75 at tech 20.

The eff% column is the sector type production efficiency.  Plains are
better than agribusinesses.

The $$$ column tells us that making food costs no money.

The reso dep column tells us that farming does not deplete fertility.

Now let's put this together with an example.  Consider an agribusiness
and two plains, all fully populated and efficient, one plains with 40
fertility, the other two sectors with 100 fertility.  Tech level is
zero.

PRODUCTION SIMULATION
   sect  des eff avail  make p.e. cost   use1 use2 use3  max1 max2
max3   max
   2,0    a 100%   600  150f 0.25
$0                                      150
  -3,43   ~ 100%    60   30f 0.50
$0                                       30
 -14,2    ~  40%    60   12f 0.50
$0                                       12
Column eff shows sector efficiency and fertility combined.  100%
efficiency with 100 fertility make 100%, and 40% with 40 fertility.

Column p.e. shows tech level production efficiency and sector type
production efficiency combined.  The former is 0.5, the latter is 50%
for aggie and 100% for plains, yielding 0.25 and 0.50.

Since the agribusiness holds ten times as many people as plains, it
makes ten times as much work: 600 vs. 60, in column avail.

Production is avail * eff * p.e.  The aggie makes 600 * 100% * 0.25 =
150.  The fertile plains makes 60 * 100% * 0.50 = 30.  The less
fertile plains makes 60 * 40% * 0.50 = 12.

At tech level 20, level p.e. is 0.75 instead of 0.50, so you harvest
50% more food.

Bzzzz...

Ard

I had a question about displaying rail in the WinACE.

The rail value shows number of the sectors reachable
from this sector including itself.

Simple interpretation
rail = 0 - not reachable by Rail
rail > 0 - reachable by Rail

When you look at the map there will be some sectors you
expect to have a rail value but don't.  IIRC, the sector
must be at least 60% before the rail can be used.

Markus, step in if I made any mistakes.

Ron K.

Your highway, freeway and bridge span sectors form your railway
network.  Such a sector needs 5% efficiency for its track to be
operational, and it then also extends track into adjacent own sectors
with at least 60% efficiency.

Selector track simply counts the number of operational railways within
range 1.  Trains can run when that value is not zero.

Example: Right after break, your 0,0 had track 6.  It wasnt a railway
itself, but it was >=60% efficient, and all six neighbors were
railways (highways >=5%).

Example: Your -2,0 had track 3.  It was a railway (highway >=5%), and
had two neighbors that were railways (-1,-1 and -1,1).

Example: Your -4,0 had track 0.  It was a highway, but not efficient
enough to be a railway, let alone to get track from your railway -2,0.

If the rail value is not showing in your WinACE,
it is possible that you do not have theme game set
to Heavy Metal.  As a turns out the rail value
displayed in WinACE is actually computed in WinACE
when Theme Game option is set to HeavyMetal.

Ron K.

==========================================================