Round 10
| http://users.evtek.fi/~jussiava/pa/wiki/PA_10_evolving.jpg |
Overview
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Now in its tenth season and fresh from a recode and redevelopment, Planetarion X Genesis is an online space-based game of strategy, politics and epic war. Planet against planet, Alliance against alliance, you can either survive or die. As a ruler of just one planet in the darkness of the universe, it is your task to construct your fleets, build up your planet and mine the much coveted asteroids that encircle your planet. Choose your race and rule your planet as the ultimate warmonger. Develop your technologies and harvest resources, whilst fighting off those who would steal your wealth. --preround portal hype
With the introduction of bug-ridden new Planetarion code and bubblegum-statistics PaX became a round long fight between several alliances that didn't see a victor until the very end.
Bugs
One of the more amusing bugs in PaX was found by Gerbie. During the round, Gerbie had kept to his 3 first roids, and instead researched covert operations and waves, working as a scanner for his alliance, Vengeance.
The most popular covop was resource transfer, which basicly stole resources from target and gave them to the covopper. Now, Gerbie stole from the big and gave to the small (himself) and then donated all the resources to the galaxy fund (which he had control over, as the MoD). But as might be expected, the big didn't like this. As they could not hit him (as he was too small), they decided to hit his galaxy instead. Gerbie, the nice fellow he is, sent all his 3 ships, normally used for JGP scans, to defend a galaxymate. There, they actually shot down a few hostile fighters, giving Gerbie XP. However, the formula dictated that if you killed the ships of a bigger planet, then you would gain more XP than if you killed the ships of a smaller planet. Problem was, there was set no limit to this extra XP, and as the planet whose fighters got killed was 117 times bigger than Gerbie (in score) it resulted in a massive score-gain for Gerbie, effectivly putting him in 1st, where he remained for almost a day. Then the bug was fixed, and he was lowered somewhat, allthough still in the top 100.
But Gerbie didn't lose spirit of this. On several occasions during the round he regained #1 for a tick, by donating all the resources he had saved up in the galaxy fund to himself. The ultimate goal was to win the round, as a covopper. The problem was, this tactic offered little challange for Gerbie, and around mid-round he grew bored of the whole thing and stopped. No one knows what would have happened if he had kept on all round - perhaps he would have emerged the winner?
Another bug which caused a stir during the round was the ability to recall fleets whilst in transit. By leaving the planetarion window open, a player could click back multiple times until they reached the page before ever launching their fleet, doing this would cause the fleet to return home immediately. This bug was not discovered until Walken, a top 10 planet at the time, abused it while being fleetcaught. Instead of losing his fleet, he opted to abuse the bug and thus exposing it to the admins. The result of this was his planet being closed and the faulty code being fixed.
Some bugs that were reported by Caution: The bug of giving fleets orders after they had launched was also discovered and reported on IRC immediatly.
He also discovered it was possible to start production orders without the needed research/cons completed by using a command such as http://jpaweb01.planetarion.com/production.pl?ship_12=100, which was also reported. He also suspected that one would be able to use the same flaw to change the Message from the Commander and the Commanders, gal pic etc. He reported that also without checking if that bug actually existed.
A less important glitch that occasionally happened during the round was the ability to buy more ships than you could afford. This bug was seemingly caused by accidentally double clicking the buy button very quickly, resulting in a double order, and negative resources.
Final Rankings
Top Galaxy
x:y
Top Planet
bleen (x:y:z)
Top Alliance
