The Friend interface is a fairly traditional daily gift trading activity that encourages players to connect with other players. Your Friend list is separate from your Corps and separate from your Messages. You can be Friends with any player in AMS, no matter what field they belong to, no matter what corps they belong to.
In late 2020 AMS added the Boot Camp system, and the entrance to it is in the Friend screen.
Here is the text from the Instructions:
- Each commander Lv.30 or below can have up to 50 friends; each commander Lv.31 or above can have up to 100 friends.
- Each commander Lv.30 or below can send Friendship Points to up to 50 friends per day; each commander Lv.31 or above can send Friendship Points to up to 100 friends per day.
- Each commander Lv.30 or below can receive Friendship Points from up to 50 friends per day; each commander Lv.31 or above can receive Friendship Points from up to 100 friends per day.
- Friendship Points can be used to redeem items from the Friendship Shop.
- Players on your block list can't chat with you or send friend requests to you.
- Friend Requests are only kept for 1 days. Process them before they're automatically deleted.
You can add friends by going to their Commander Info page and clicking the Add button. If no Add button is present on their Commander Info page they are either already your friend, or you have blocked them (or they have blocked you).
When you send a Friend request to a player, they receive a notification in their Friend Interface:
Once they accept your Friend request both of you will see each other in your Friend List.
The very good thing about this friend daily gift giving process is that you don't have to individually select each friend and manually give them a Friend Point. AMS thankfully gave us the "Send/Receive All" button, which sends all of your friends their daily Friend Points, and collects all of the Friend Points your friends have sent you so far that day.
Your collected Friend Points can be used in the Friendship Store.
Fortunately the rewards you can purchase, essentially for free, are pretty valuable:
| Item | Qty/day | Cost (FP) |
|---|---|---|
| 25x 1,000 Plasticizer | 2 | 25 |
| 25x 1,000 Spray | 2 | 25 |
| 25x 5-Hour Building Speedup | 2 | 50 |
| 25x 5-Hour Research Speedup | 2 | 50 |
| 25x 5-Hour Training Speedup | 2 | 50 |
| 25x 5-Star Medal | 2 | 50 |
| 25x 5,000 Administrative Tech Points | 2 | 50 |
| 10x 5,000 Electricity | 5 | 10 |
| 25x 5,000 Military Tech Points | 2 | 50 |
| 25x 5,000 Tactical Points | 2 | 50 |
| 10x 50,000 Paint | 5 | 10 |
| 10x 50,000 Plastic | 5 | 10 |
| 10x 6,250 Metal | 5 | 10 |
| 50x Advanced Blueprint | 2 | 50 |
| 180x Air Force Coin | 2 | 25 |
| 300x Enhancement Alloy | 2 | 25 |
| 25x Lv. 5 Training Dummy | 2 | 50 |
| 50x New Energy | 2 | 25 |
| 50x Officer: Roger (Fragment) | 1 | 100 |
| 50x Spade | 2 | 30 |
I especially like the Spades, Advanced Blueprints, and New Energy. This makes many items that were previously available only for purchase now available for F2P players. You have to grind for them, and you have to maintain a steady, reliable group of friends, but that has seemed easy enough to do for me.
Some tips and strategy:
- To find active friends, check out the World Chat. This seems now be used almost exclusively used for soliciting Friends for Friend Points. Almost all of the Friends I've gained there have been reliable to send Friend Points (also known as Hearts) daily.
- If you don't send your Friend Points daily, expect to be kicked from many peoples' Friend lists. Because the rewards are impressive, people tend to have a quick trigger finger on this.
- To Unfriend a current friend, tap on their name in your Friend list and tap Unfriend.
- You can see when your friends are online, and they can see when you're online. This has implications in that it may allow for players from other corps to see when you are online when they normally wouldn't be able to.