By Espark on Sun 14 Mar, 2021.

Ai-Mo Times

March 14, 2021

“The only literate tribe deserves the best in information and entertainment”

After a two week hiatus, the newspaper is back! Big thanks to Artemis for the new website and to our team of reporters, Druid, Dust, tntmasta, Tintin, and Espark, for their writing.

Polytopia News

PolyMail

A modmail bot called Polymail joined the server on March 12.

Paxu made the announcement , ”Hello all! Some of you may have noticed we have a new bot! @PolyMail is an anonymous mod mail bot that you can DM your server related feedback/concerns to and it will relay your message to the mod team, completely anonymously!"

Remember we still have #server-feedback and are always available to contact by ping, as well.

This bot is NOT for Polytopia game related feedback, just this server. Users who abuse this bot may be blocked from using it (whilst remaining anonymous).”

Zoy on Diplomacy On March 10, Zoy hosted a voice chat session. He mainly talked about the next update that will come to the game, being the diplomacy tech.

Diplomacy will be a tier 3 tech that you can unlock after shields, filling in the last hole in the tech tree. You will get the option to ally with other tribes. The alliance will last 5 turns and will let your units ignore the other players zone of control. Attacking your opponent’s units will not be possible and it will not be possible to break it when it is started. It can be renewed, although we don’t know if this is before or after it has ended.

Mod Applications have also been opened in main. If you think you have what it takes come check out the google form at https://forms.gle/qGKP5u7M7Jrx8xXQ9

Ai-Mo News

By Druid

Hello Ai-Mo! These last weeks there were several new developments. From the reopening of #the-safari to the most obvious with the relocation of the newspaper.

First, I would like to cover the sort of conversations that have graced our halls. Many of the conversations we have seen have been deeper than anything we have seen in many months. For example, there have been discussions of what people think about the state of staffing of main. We have also seen several mods from main, but mostly Kahuna, discussing that with us. The other sorts of discussions have graced the darker side, with us touching on many philosophical discussions from the wisdom of pessimism to the nobility of being a romantic. You might want to go read up on that in the serenity-square if you are so interested.

Second, the Safari has been reopened to a fantasy project currently called ‘Project Purity’ (That name is subject to change.) In this project we are creating life in our own image, While it has nearly no connection to true science we’re following a similar path as to what we have seen in our own evolution so if you’re interested come check us out in Ai-Moya.

Next, and perhaps the largest notable change and the reason for the Ai-Mo Times haitus, is ArticFox’s most recent departure. This time he left us with the message, “I decided to leave discord permanently a while ago, and today is the day I’m leaving. I didn’t want to leave without a notice like last time so I’m writing this message. I really enjoyed being a part of Ai-Mo, working on the newspaper and all the time I spent here, and I’m very proud about what Ai-Mo has become. I wish the best for Ai-Mo and all of you [Blush emoji].” We are saddened that he left taking the old Ai-Mo times website with him but wish him well in his choice.

Finally, a change in the newspaper that has arisen in the last weeks is that we have invited three new full time reporters - tntmasta, TinTin and s3b1527. We welcome them with open arms. We hope you enjoy their additions to the paper.

A Word on The Ai-Mo Times We reporters take hours of our time each week to search for and write entertaining and informative segments for our readers. However, we could do so much more and we could use your help. If you want us to include a puzzle or an article that you have made you can either DM Espark or Druid with it or send it in #article-suggestion [In Ai-Moya]. There’s a good chance you will see it published in the next article. Even if you can’t write an entire piece, we love to get hot tips on what's happening in the Polytopia community. We always need help tracking down mutes and bans and we can’t catch every little change that occurs. If you think we missed something, please send a message about it in #article-suggestions.

We all thank you for your continued support and you enjoy the new content we should be making in the future.

Interview

The following is an excerpt from the Polytopian Interviewer, a weekly podcast with occasional bonus content. You can read the full transcript or listen to the podcast through the RSS feed.

Tntmasta: Welcome to the Polytopian Interviewer, where I interview people on their experiences and views on the Polytopia Discord Community. I have Poisondog with me today. How are you?

Poisondog: I’m doing well . Tntmasta: Could you start with how you first got into Polytopia?

Poisondog: It was a couple years ago. One of my friends showed me the game when it was relatively small, and I just took a liking to it, and I started playing it a lot more. Now I feel like I've gotten fairly good at it, and I recommended it to quite a few people because it's a really good and fun game to play.

Tntmasta: Is there a specific reason why you're not in Polychamps?

Poisondog: I've just never gotten around to it, I guess. I've wanted to join. I just never took that step to join it.

Tntmasta: Okay. You're pretty active on some other servers, and doing your own stuff like your YouTube channel, though.

Poisondog: Yeah.

Tntmasta: How did you first start your YouTube channel?

Poisondog: It was like, four or five years ago. I just started doing Geometry Dash recordings from every play, and I would just put a couple of them up every now and then. And then slowly I started branching out, once I got a decent screen recorder and I started doing some Polytopia challenges. I did like six of them. And then I just kind of stopped for a while, but I picked back up doing more regular Polytopia stuff.

Tntmasta: Okay. I take it you look up to GullYY a lot, then?

Poisondog: Yes, I do. He's one of my Polytuber role models.

Tntmasta: He's like the biggest Polytopian YouTuber out there right now.

Poisondog: Yeah, he is.

Tntmasta: You've only been a part of the Polytopia community for not very long. How would you say your experience is so far?

Poisondog: I'd say the experience is pretty good. All the people there are pretty nice. I chat with them sometimes. It's a very welcoming and supportive community, and I've learned a lot of good strategies from some of them.

Tntmasta: Definitely. In my experience, the best strategies I learned was when I joined a Polychamps team, though I understand it's not for everybody.

Poisondog: Yeah, should look into that.

Tntmasta: You also have a Discord server, I heard. How’s it doing?

Poisondog: It's not a whole lot. We sometimes do some political theory related events, but not very often. We just do a couple events with various games. We're hosting a Minecraft server that's going to start up in March. We're doing a spawn build design contest. We have a Polytopia tournament game that's been going on since November, because I'm really bad at keeping up to date with my turn. Yeah, it's just got like forty or fifty people. So everyone there knows each other pretty well. It's just like a nice small community.

Tntmasta: Do you have a favorite tribe?

Poisondog: Yes, my favorite tribe is Kickoo.

Tntmasta: Customs houses?

Poisondog: Yeah. I know I'm part of Hoodrick on the Polytopia server, but they were kind of low on numbers, so I kind of felt bad. So I just joined them.

Tntmasta: Gasp You betrayed them.

Poisondog: Yeah, but I mean, Kickoo already has like 100-200 members or something. So I think they've got a good enough community.

Tntmasta: Okay. Least favorite tribe?

Poisondog: My least favorite would have to be Quetzali. They're pretty much the punching bag that's there to get you three stars on every tribe. At least that's my experience with them.

Tntmasta: Hmm, interesting. When I got three stars in domination, Quetzali wasn't even out yet. And when it was, I didn't buy it yet. So I kind of find it funny that I was one of the older people that played without Quetzali. Yeah, now you can just go against Quetzali in a one v one, walk into their capital, they hit you with their shield and do almost no damage and you take their city. It's kind of funny.

Poisondog: You got three stars legitimately?

Tntmasta: I mean, yeah. It was still easy enough with enough luck.

Poisondog: Yeah.

Tntmasta: Yeah. So I take it your favorite unit is not defender?

Poisondog: I mean, I like defenders, but I personally like the catapult out of all the units. It's an interesting choice, but I was forced to play, I guess not forced. I had people vote and they voted that was like “Okay, I'll do it.” I've played with catapults only for fifty minutes on a game, and I kind ofdeveloped a better liking for them, because I saw what they could do when you're playing against some really stupid bots that don't decide to get any knights.

Tntmasta: Yeah. Bots it's not that big of a deal. If you’re going against humans, though…

Poisondog: Right yeah, that might be a different story.

Tntmasta: Have you heard about the new diplomacy tech being developed?

Poisondog: I've heard that it exists in the development stage, but I haven't heard anything about it or what it's supposed to do.

Tntmasta: So, to my current knowledge, it will let you make peace with other tribes or something along the lines of that. So people in team games are really excited about that, because if you're allied with another tribe, you won't be blocking each other's units when you're trying to move around on the map. So you can't be blocking your teammate. But of course, that's speculative, even though it's going to be something like that.

Poisondog: I'm excited for it, ‘cause I'm excited that the bots won't just backstab me when I'm busy attacking someone else. Say, “Okay, yeah we're friends.” And then 15 turns later, they're like, “Actually, we're not friends anymore. I'm just gonna take half your cities.”

Tntmasta: Well, don't leave them open right next to them.

Poisondog: I guess yeah. I should probably just start taking the “Yeah, yeah, we're peaceful,” the halo thing and start taking that with a little bit of a grain of salt, because I've just had so many bad experiences with that.

Tntmasta: Yeah, lots of people on Reddit are like, “This bot just bought right into my city.” Yes. It doesn't care if it has the halo. It will backstab you.

Poisondog: Yeah. One thing I found funny with the peace thing is, there was a bot that had one city. It was at the beginning of the game, and they left their capital city open. And they had the halo and I'm like, “Oh, I'm just gonna walk right in because there's only one unit there and it's not gonna be able to kill me.” And they didn't attack me. And even though I was sieging their city, they still had the halo on after the turn had ended.

Tntmasta: Hmm, maybe sometimes requires turn cooldown to change? I don't know, I'm guessing.

Poisondog: Sounds right. Thanks for interviewing me.

Tntmasta: I'll include a link to your channel in the description if you want. Poisondog: Thank you.

Tntmasta: Alright, that's all I have. Thank you very much.

Poisondog: All right. Bye

Tntmasta: Bye.

Read or listen to the rest of the interview with Poisondog on the Friendly Polytopia server.

Who’s muted this week?

This week, the duration of public mutes increased significantly. Also, three first time offenders, तततत (aka Marburro), Smol, and Jesus Christ got very long mutes: 28 hours, 30 hours, and 12 hours respectively. See the complete list below.

Disclaimer: Many mute and ban commands are executed on admin only channels. Some fields below will show ‘unavailable’ because the commands were not performed in public channels. Some reports come from the perpetrators themselves. In some cases, the data can be inferred from context and will be placed in parenthesis.

Credits

Thanks to all our contributors (old and new) - Druid, Espark, Dust, Tintin, THomez, Hoodwick, s3b1527, and tntmasta. A big thanks to Artemis for setting up a new website for the newspaper. Also, thanks to our faithful readers for encouraging the paper to continue.

Keep up Ai-Mo!