Civilisations (Nations) and more...

Sorry it has been a while since my last post. Part of the reason for that though is the seeming lack of engagement on this platform.

When I started posting here the hope was that it would bring the #Galactic-Milieu to the attention of avid #play-to-earn #crypto enthusiasts and also hopefully bring the A-R-Crypto project to the attention of HIVE users in the #Annapolis-Royal area.

Now though I am starting to think that maybe this venue is more of another long term documentation storage medium than much of a way to raise awareness.

Since the #Devtome wiki became read-only there has been a need for a place to post documentation, hopefully this time a place that will continue to be postable to not merely read-only, so if this venue does turn out to be more of a place to send already-interested people to for documentation that will be great and useful; but a sense of urgency I had felt when thinking maybe I would be reaching a new audience, bringing new players into the game, maybe making contact with interested people in the Annapolis Royal area and so on has faded. So now it seems more a place to occasionally add a piece of documentation to than a place to keep posting regularly to keep a growing group of readers engaged.

Part of the reason I have finally stirred my stumps to make this post, in fact, is that I gained a follower! So hey, maybe this could yet evolve into more than just a dusty old collection of documents that existing players will occasionally peruse over the coming decades.

Since I am still hoping that possibly there could yet turn out to be someone here who might be interested enough to actually create a character and explore, I remind you that the only "free as in beer" access point into actually playing (rather than merely trading its coins and tokens) the #Galactic-Milieu is by use of a #Crossfire-RPG client, and that often the #Crossfire-RPG "metaserver" that lists servers does not show you either of the currently only two such servers that are part of the #Galactic-Milieu, those being the "PTE Server" at server1.knotwork.net and the "CrossCiv" server at CrossCiv.knotwork.com, the latter of which is where the Galactic Diplomacy Planet is located.

Now, back to what I have been up to, and learned, on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet...

I just this moment reached "level twelve" general level with my ARCadian character, as I just logged in, waking up in my savebed in the schoolhouse in the Planetary Capitol and read the book collection there again, gaining literacy experience. I will complete the find and disarm traps training too before heading out of the schoolhouse, where I will continue to work on my combat abilities by fighting my way into the Fleshdancers' compound (the one west of Westside) to practice my missile weapons skill in the barracks near the south gate inside that compound. Really though I want to somehow arrange to get a longbow, which I am told does more damage than the hunter's bow I am currently using; with my current missile weapons level of six and a hunter's bow I cannot really hope to make much progress against the aggressive fighters, and their officers, that reside upstairs in the south-east tower of that compound. I want to be able to do well against them because they are worth much more "experience" than the lesser warriors I practice my archery on in the barracks along the inside of the south wall.

For food I could be stocking up at the "magic" food altar in the schoolhouse but instead I have been raiding the pantry downstairs in the south-east tower of the Fleshdancer compound as that not only gives me find-and-disarm practice but also gives me a chance to work on my lock picking skill as I managed to afford a set of lockpicks recently.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I met up with the Italians, Medici Luigi and Francesca and learned a lot from them. Specifically, they told me a lot about the #FreeCiv scale of play, where "civilisations" are played on a planetary scale using #FreeCiv free open source civilisation-game client and the "Galactic" ruleset. That ruleset has not been changed since back when Ubuntu 18.04, "Bionic" was current, so requires the version of #FreeCiv that came with that version of Ubuntu. However, #FreeCiv by default does not include username+password access to servers, so you need a client specifically compiled to support being able to log in to a restricted server using a username+password pair. That along makes running a civilisation something a lot of casual players might find daunting, but that of course also helps to make it something only a minority of players are likely to attempt directly by themselves, which in turn helps encourage forming actual populations of citizens among whom only a minority, or perhaps even just one "Minister of State" or "Secretary of State" or somesuch will actually log into the #FreeCiv server to issue the civilisation's orders to its cities and units.

This of course can also lead to issues of trust, as in whom will a given group of players interested in forming a civilisation trust to actually run that civilisation.

It can also of course lead to a reverse causality, in which rather than a group of players deciding to form a civilisation a single player somehow comes up with what it takes to get a civilisation started then offers "citizenship" of some kind to players.

Land controlled on #FreeCiv planets by civilisations is not bought and sold, rather it is the cities and units controlled by a civilisation that determine which tiles of the planet-scaled #FreeCiv map a given civilisation controls, and it is assumed that the various potential political parties, wannabe-dictators and so on who seek control of a civilisation incur costs in gaining and exerting that control. In the #Galactic-Milieu, that cost is charged monthly in "planet known as Earth" months, that is, actual real-time months not game-time months, and is based on the number of "square miles" #FreeCiv reports the civilisation as controlling.

The monthly fee is charged to a credit account with interest compounded hourly in real-time (not game-time) hours, so of course it is necessary that there be "collateral" on hand that can be used to pay the account in the event that a civilisation defaults on that credit.

Thus there exists a "Corp" (a Corporation kind of thing) known in-game as General Holding Corp and out of game as General Hosting Corp, in either case its ticker is GHC; civilisations must hold at least one "share" of it and only civilisations can hold any shares of it. Those held shares serve as collateral for the credit accounts to which the monthly per square mile controlled fee is charged.

In game those fees represent the fact that regardless of what type of government controls a civilisation some kind of expense is involved to gain and maintain that control. Out of game they are basically hosting fees, however they are scaled by the "square mile" rather than much less expensively by the cost of hosting a #FeeeCiv server because in the long term the goal is to be able to provide full-immersion 3-D representations of the planets in addition to the already-existing 2-D #Crossfire-RPG and text-mode #CoffeeMUD representations already existing of various parts of various planets. Thus GHC accumulates much more in fees than it currently needs to pay out for its actual current hosting needs, resulting in a growing "treasury" from which a growing "intrinsic value per share" can be calculated in the same way that the "treasury-based" #Galactic-Milieu currencies computed value per coin can be calculated.

This setup means that provided you own a number of GHC shares proportional to the proportion of the game's total square miles controlled by civilisations almost all of what you pay in fees accrues to the value of the shares, resulting in almost no "effective" cost, since the cost to GHC of hosting the #FreeCiv, #Crossfire-RPG and #CoffeeMUD servers is trivial compared to the total it rakes in for "square miles controlled by civilisations".

Because shares of GHC can only be owned by civilisations, they are not traded on the various platforms, such as #HORIZON and #STELLAR, on which the other various assets are traded. However their computed value, based on GHC's treasury, is included in the Latest Rates include-file, which at time of writing showed them as sGHCrate=353095.95321532 DeVCoins, at a time when BiTCoin was shown as BTCrate=44815031.73726112 DeVCoins.

It is fairly simple to write a little shell-script to pick any item from the Latest Rates include-file and display its value in terms of each of the other items, so here is a list of what one share of GHC should at time of writing go for in terms of each of the other assets in the file:

sBCErate=2.30650070
sBCIrate=25.62093192
sBMCrate=18.05798491
sBRFrate=23.20802386
BTCrate=.00787896
CDNrate=33.35934844
CLCrate=3250.59310532
sCMCrate=6.25116014
sCRFrate=.76506879
CZBrate=4252.79191291
DVCrate=353095.95321532
sDVCrate=.27319508
FBXrate=2616.47502039
sGDCrate=.25796782
sGFCrate=.07013080
sGFFrate=2048.30695631
sGHCrate=1.00000000
GMCrate=47.32577715
sGMCFrate=1.25249873
GPLrate=23.48908065
GPL2rate=33.88442470
sGRCrate=.23123962
GRFrate=20.57025617
sGRFFrate=.20711249
GRPrate=1800.26866824
sGRPrate=3.04085232
I0Crate=515.95350221
IXCrate=557.23292898
LTCrate=2.51775334
MBCrate=11.26503676
NKLrate=692.30150390
NMCrate=151.04965450
NRDrate=1572.88525911
QBTrate=113761.62445150
SPICErate=24.19602661
TBXrate=2963.41144884
UFCrate=4346.32496309
UKBrate=33.72451934
sUNFrate=1.55946612
UNSrate=25.54613986
USFrate=8025.88909190
XGGrate=8689.52951584

Of course it might not be easy to find sellers willing to accept any arbitrary one of those assets, but at least the above list should give you some idea how much of various #Galactic-Milieu assets it should cost you, at time of writing, to acquire one share of GHC and thus be eligible to be, and indeed be required to be, a civilisation.

Do bear in mind though that there still exist players, or possibly just non-players who dabble in the various assets without actually playing the game, who still "dump" various of the assets without apparent regard for the computed values based on the treasuries. Thus you might well be able to obtain some of the assets far far cheaper than the computed value might lead one to expect.

To balance that though, also bear in mind that the more massive a discount one can get on the trading platforms for a given asset the more likely it is that potential sellers would tend to avoid selling anything for such a discounted asset, preferring to sell for some asset whose actual current price on the "spot markets" is closer to its actual calculated value.

Well that is enough for now, hopefully I will see some apparent results from this post, thus encouraging me to all the sooner get around to posting again. :)