August 2, 2002
This is my first session - the day I create my new nation - Park Rangers.
The following image is a copy of my first logon, and shows me creating the park Rangers.
You'll notice above that the first thing I do after creating the Park Rangers, is to take a VISUAL of my home island. It's a pretty nice island. My sanctuary appears as an "S" on the visual. The sanctuary is safe from attack by other nations for 200 time units, or until I move out of the sanctuary.
The visual shows all the land on island 103. The "^" represent mountain sectors, the "-" are rural land sectors, and blanks are water. Individual sectors are referenced by their X,Y coordinates - thus, my sanctuary is located at 30,1. You'll need to get familiar with this X,Y coordinate system if you want to move people and items from sector to sector.
The main prompt "[ISLAND 103 : 0/0]:" contains valuable information. First, the "ISLAND 103" is the name of this island. It is the default name assigned by the system. We'll change it in a minute.
The next item in the prompt is two numbers separated by a slash "0/0". This is how much time we have on this island. Time is very important. Time enables us to grow more people, build mines and factories, produce products (like ships and planes), and move stuff from place to place. You also need time to attack. Time units accumulate with the passage of wall time. In this game, you get 100 time units every week. The number on the left is movement time, while the number on the right is update time. New time accumulates on the left, and then when you move items it shifts to the right. When you update - it is removed from the right until the right is zero, and then is removed from the left - so it is best to first move, and then update.
Time is stored in your capitol (for now, my capitol is a sanctuary). You can only have one capitol on an island. If your capitol is captured, your time (both movement and update) go to zero, and you stop accumulating time until you designate a new capitol. This is important to understand - because you must protect your capitol from your enemies, and when attacking your should always seek to sack your opponents capitol. If your enemy has no time, they cannot attack.
I now want to rename my island.
After I changed my island name to National Park, I used the NATIONS command to see how many other nations there are, and what their names are. Next I do a quick USERS command to see if anyone is online, and what I find is that I'm the only one here. Not surprising since no one has accumulated enough time to do anything interesting.
I'll return in a week or so when I have enough time to leave my sanctuary.
