**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 91.11.03 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> LOADSA NEW STUFF Things are really moving in Our Illustrious Leader's dark and dingy office, as she slaves over a lukewarm keyboard and brings you lots of exciting new goodies. JPs and over who offer jobs to Poor People can now specify whether the goods are sold on the exchange or delivered to the warehouse on the destination planet. Yes, the horrendously difficult syntax has now got even more convoluted! If you put the word "warehouse" after the destination planet, the goods will be stored in the warehouse... provided you have a warehouse on the planet, and provided there is room in it, otherwise the goods will be sold on the exchange as usual. So the syntax is now (take a deep breath) . What could be simpler? Planet owners can at last get their greedy paws on all those groats that have been piling up in their treasuries. They can also add money to the planet's account - although why they should want to do so is a mystery. The commands are and where, as usual, x is the amount of money involved. There's no tax on this and the limit per transaction is 5 meg. In addition, they cannot transfer money to their personal bank balances if it will take their accounts over 60 meg. Look at this figure. 60385928959IG. How many meg is it? Give up? So do lots of planet owners, and that's the kind of amount they have to deal with when managing their planets. So to make things easier, planetary displays will now show the balance in nice round megs. Surprisingly enough, the Galactic Administration is not skimming off the extra groats and stashing them away in a slush fund... it does keep track of the exact amount, down to the merest fraction of a demi-groat. For some time, Bella has been pondering the idea of removing companies and factories from planet owners - since running a planet is just like running one enormous, multi-commodity factory. The one thing that stopped her is that governors need factories to shore up the gaps in their planet's production. She's now come up with an idea to cope with that need - production points. Based on an idea by Krell, production points can be allocated at will to various commodities and will increase the native production. Each planet will be given 15 points, plus 5 times the level of the planet - ie, agricultural planets will have 20 points, mining 25 and so on. These points can be spread around on up to five different commodities. You don't have to use them all, and you can put them all on one commodity if you choose. They can be moved around as and when you wish, and they will remain allocated over a reset. There are three new commands for dealing with this. shows you how you are using your points. puts the specified number of points onto the specified commodity. removes all points from the named commodity. There are no charges involved in using production points, and they are automatically granted when you first become a planet owner, and the extras given when your planet is upgraded. A production point increases the native production of a commodity by 1 ton per exchange cycle. Planet owners will be given a week or so to sell their factories and liquidate their companies, before they cease being CEOs. In future, as soon as a player's planet is put into the game, they will lose any remaining factories or companies, so must be sure to liquidate before asking for their planet to be added. **>> COMING SOON Having made some pretty major changes in the last week, Bella is not resting on her laurels. No, that would be very uncomfortable, she prefers a nice comfy cushion. Some time over the next week, you can expect a whole host of new goodies! Company owners will be able to "pipeline" goods directly from one factory to another, including another player's factory. The transfer of goods will be charged for at base price (just as if the goods were going into a warehouse). Once you've set it up, the factory will just send the goods across to another factory everytime it has something to send. Once one of the factories comes out of the game, or there is a reset, the deal is cancelled and will have to be set up again. You will only be able to do this with a commodity that the destination factory actually uses as an input... so you can't sabotage someone by diverting a load of anti-matter into their soya plant! As discussed in previous news bulletins, planet owners will be able to generate their own milk-run jobs, but we don't have any details about how this will work yet. After many years of extorting tax from anyone who gives money away, the Galactic Administration's Revenue Department is about to make a dramatic change by reversing the tax rules! In future, the tax will be payable by the receiver of the money, not the giver. If Trader Rosencrantz gives Adventurer Gildenstern 1 meg, then 1 meg will be deducted from Rosencrantz's bank balance - but Gildenstern will receive substantially less than 1 meg! As mentioned last week, the number of trader points required for Trader will be increased to 1800. At the same time, the requirement for Adventurer will be reduced to 400. This will increase the pool of haulers available to visit player planets. Monetary and other requirements for the two ranks will remain unchanged. Bella has also fixed the requirements needed for planets to advance a level. To upgrade to mining, the planet must have 2.5 billion groats in the treasury and 25K player-minutes on the clock. When both these requirements are reached, the amounts will be deducted from both the treasury and the accumulated time and the planet will advance. The next stage, to advance to industrial level, costs 3 billion groats and 30K minutes. Since these promotions will now happen automatically, it is up to the planet owner to carefully monitor their progress and take money out of the treasury until they are ready to advance, otherwise there will be a lot of very disgruntled factory owners around! Some time in the next month, Bella will have finished the code to charge a tax for all transactions taking place on a planet, the tax payment going into the planetary balance, and trading exchanges profits and losses will also be linked to the treasury. **>> NEW PLANETS A number of new planets were opened up for business in the last week, including Otooles' Brewski, Elex's Elwyn, Niun's Ocean and Krell's Gotham. Apologies if we have failed to mention a planet, but there are now so many that it is getting difficult to keep track of them all! Early next week, Sheffield's new world, Quarto will go in. Of the new crop of planets, the only one we have so far explored is Krell's world Gotham. And what a miserable dump it is! We recommend that you all visit the planet, just to make you feel happy about where you actually live. Krell says that Gotham is "more fun than Snark" and we have to agree, if your definition of fun is being gassed by chemical waste, sent to oblivion, tripping over garbage, and buried by rusting automobiles! One of the problems about the rotation of planets means that if a player vanishes for a month or so, their planet won't make an appearance. This makes it very difficult for people who own factories on the missing planets! One such planet is Jinx, owned by Oxcart, who is unlikely to make an appearance for a month or so. Our Illustrious Leader is going to make special arrangements so that Jinx appears tomorrow. This will give you all a chance to get at the factories and warehouses, and sell them if you wish. The planet will then be put on ice until Oxcart's return. Bella is looking into the possibility of letting you sell factories even if their place of residence is not in the game. It won't be easy for her to code this, but she is looking at it. **>> PROBLEMS, TWEAKS AND FIXES There were big problems yesterday when Oddball was promoted to Industrialist - his exchange threw a wobbly when it tried to convert to an industrial economy. As a result, Oddball, Krell and Davidge found their factories on Inversity were completely wrecked, and they had to sell all their factories and liquidate their companies. Bella has now fixed the problem, so things are stable again, and in future exchanges will regenerate themselves without problems when their owners get promoted. Because of the strangeness, Bella had to put the persona file back an hour. Nobody really lost very much because of this... except for Rezrov! He'd been trying to pull a fast one - draining his planetary treasury of money and artifically inflating his personal bank account so he would appear on the conclave. He even found a way around the 60 meg limit! Unfortunately, his timing meant that he lost several billion groats. He will be reimbursed - if Bella can stop laughing for long enough - but he probably won't get a chance to try this scam again! A rather amusing little buggette a week ago left some people very, very poor and others very, very rich. Bella made some changes to the structure of jobs, but due to an oversight anyone who logged on just after the change was made found they had a job to do - with a payment in the millions! Those who stupidly voided the job were fined the usual percentage of the payment... which left them with large negative balances. The more astute quietly did the job and pocketed the proceeds. An obscure bug in the way the custom's men operate when you try to take objects out of their home system was discovered recently, and has now been fixed. When the items were confiscated, their weight was not deducted from the value that specifies how much a player was carrying. If anyone made a habit of being roughed over by the customs men, eventually they would have found they couldn't pick anything up! If you leave the game while on a player-planet, then return to the game to find the planet not there, you'll be deposited neatly in the Starship Cantina on Earth. Fair enough. Except that if you log off in space in a player- system... you'll be put in the Cantina. And so will your ship! This little gem was discovered by Ringo and is being fixed at this very moment! **>> THE SUBTLE ART OF INTERPLANETARY WARFARE Forget guns, forget blockades, proton cannons, sanctions... planet owners are finding much more subtle ways of waging war against their neighbours! Since whether a planet is loaded into the game or not depends on how many players have used it, some governors have initiated a disinformation campaign about how dangerous the other planets are. In particular, Oddball is telling everyone not to go near Occy's planet Zippy! Krell's planet has just gone in, and the space mobile is a bit of a wimp, so the other planet owners have been queueing up to kill it. Rewards for mobile kills now come out of the treasury, so they have been trying to break the bank! Clearly most planet owners have opened the doors of their Psychological Warfare Schools! This follows in the footsteps of the old Pegasus School of Assassinations, which invented many ways to kill people without actually using weapons. Planet owners have always been keen on promoting the joys of trading on their planets. Oddball, in particular, has bored everyone rigid by exhorting them to visit Inversity every time he takes a breath, and now Occy has started greeting everyone who enters Fed Data Space with a canned announcement. A group of concerned players are getting together a petition to ask the Galactic Administration to ban advertising over the comm units. **>> ELEX'S MEGA QUEST Whoops! Elex's planet, which went in during the last week, has a quest which culminates in giving a certain object to a certain mobile. He wanted to make it worthwhile for players to take the trouble to solve the puzzle, so he put quite a substantial reward on the object. Trouble is, he didn't realise quite how substantial... once all the multipliers had been taken into account, it resulted in Spiff gaining 37 meg! Elex has now reduced the amount to around 2 meg. By contrast, Oddball has been crowing about the "astronomical" rewards to be gained by those who solve the puzzle of his labyrinth. He would never actually say what "astronomical" meant, though! Maxis found out when he became one of the very few to crack the problem... and boy, was he disappointed! He sent us this letter: The reward did NOT cover the insurance. The reward is cheap! Really cheap! "Astronomical" Oddball said. I'd call it "astronomically small!" I've done the puzzle five times. Twice I got 210K, and the other three times somewhere around 155K. I died FIVE TIMES solving the puzzle. It's not worth it. I'm gonna do whenever I can though. Drain Odd's treasury slowly but surely. On a sidenote.. Odd says the reward can go as high as 500K (for a Thane. Pah). Perhaps Oddball should be a little more generous in future? **>> SPOTLIGHT ON INVERSITY At last, the long-awaited tour of Oddball's planet. We started our tour at the Interstellar Link, where we were met by Oddball himself - we were privileged to have the owner of the planet acting as our tour-guide. Oddball told us that the space in his system was similar to Hilbert space, and had much the same characteristics as a mobius strip, being uni-dimensional. He was able to offer no explanation as to the cause of this wierd phenomenon, or to throw any light on the question of how we, as three-dimensional creatures, can survive there. We hadn't been at the link long when we were joined by the Elliptica (Elly to its friends). A fairly old but still servicable space cruiser, it is Elly's task to protect the system of Inversity. From what, we asked? Oddball just shrugged. Apparently, Elly is so powerful that only two people have ever managed to kill it, and one of those is Oddball himself! The other, of course, is the Vile Cryptosporidium, against whom nothing can prevail. Navigating through Inversity space is not easy. In order to reach the planet, one has to fly through the centre of the sun! By some miracle of modern technology, this journey is not fatal, although it does burn up a few braincells. Oddball tells us that too many people were dying so he turned down the heat generators. Why hasn't this left the planet itself too cold to support life? He shrugged again. Moving out of the bowels of the star, we arrived at Inversity Orbit - a pleasant-looking planet, green, hospitable and friendly. Exiting the ship, we were informed by Oddball that we had landed in the centre of the planet! Not, as we initially thought, the actual centre of the sphere, molten lava, flowing rock, intense heat, that kind of thing... but in the centre of the main commercial district of Inversity. From here, one can easily reach all the useful locations, and obtain all the little necessities of life. But as we were shown around the various shops, we began to become a little suspicious about the honesty of the inhabitants... the comms shop contained valuable equipment that seemed to belong to another player, Otoole. Oddball said that everytime he landed on the planet his "lads" would steal Otoole's spybeam and then sell them at a discount. Otoole obviously hasn't realised what is happening. The weapon shop is stocked with goods stolen from Samantha, and other shops seem filled with blackmarket goods. Thankfully, the cafe near the landing pad did not seem to be selling pizzas stolen from Chez Diesel! However, we did notice another unusual aspect of the planet. Many of the services are run by Odd's relatives! The cafe is run by his mother, the General Store by his father. Whether this is due to Nepotic Odd rewarding his parents with excellent positions... or exploiting them as slave labour for no wages, we weren't able to ascertain. A country road leads to the ship repair yards. It seems a little strange not to have the repair shop directly accessible from the landing pad - after all, who wants to drag a crippled ship along a narrow country road? The exchange is also within easy reach of the ships - so much so, that we were able to see a groove worn into the path by the pounding feet of macro-driven traders. Moving out of the commercial district, we found ourselves at the gates of Odd's private estate. At this point, we should perhaps clarify that Odd and Oddball seem to be two different people, both claiming to own and run the planet! We were surprised by this, and surmise that one of them is a robot with no will of its own. Although we have a pretty good idea which is the boring, mechanical robot and which the vibrant, live, interesting person, we won't speculate for fear of inviting libel actions. Odd's Inner Sanctum is furnished with... you guessed it, stolen furniture and equipment, this time from assorted warehouses on Earth and Mars. If you ever notice shortages in your stores, you now know where to look for the missing articles! One of our party made the big mistake of carrying a weapon when we walked into Odd's office. Not sensible. But the hospital is a very nice place, and the insurance office is conveniently situated close by. The culmination of our tour, and the part we had been eagerly looking forward to, was a visit to the Odalisque - a place where money can buy any kind of pleasure. Decency and good taste means that we cannot report much of what happened there - although one member of our party managed to get locked into a room because the warning signs were very ambiguous, and had to suicide to escape. They were not pleased! Our tour concluded with a brief stop at the several panoramic views, designed especially for photographers. Quite breathtaking! We were also shown the entrance to the labyrinth, but were advised not to venture in there unless we had a lot of time on our hands. Oddball said that it was worth trying to solve the secrets of the labyrinth, because the reward for completing the quest was "astronomical". (See previous article) Truthfully, we cannot really recommend that tourists spend much time on Inversity. Although the Odalisque is quite mind-blowing, catering as it does to all types of perversion, there are many dangers with no adequate warnings. You're liable to find yourself dead, or trapped, even if you think you are being very careful. For traders, however, Inversity has a lot to offer. **>> STUFF The next in the series of weekly Fed RTCs will be on Tuesday as usual. This week it is being hosted by Piemur, and the theme is Current Events. Remember the saga of Occy, Russ and the artifacts factory? Well Helio decided he wanted to piss Merkin off so built an arts factory on his planet. Why did he want to piss Merkin off? Helio says he just rubbed him up the wrong way. Was Merkin pissed off? He most certainly was! He demanded that Helio demolish the factory at once. Helio eventually removed the factory, but now feels he is being ignored by the planet owners, and none of them will talk to him, hence his mood "Shunned and maligned". Two questions remain: Did the planet-owners talk to him before? And does he want them to talk to him? Occy's planet, Zippy, is in a bad way. First the Ocpac - the space mobile - flipped and started shooting everyone who went near it. Occy has calmed it down a little, and hopefully it is slightly less homicidal now. But the natives on Zippy are becoming very worried because a huge volcano is rumbling away and they think it's going to erupt and destroy the whole planet! No, we don't know why one little volcano would blow up the entire planet, but this is what Occy told us. **>> FROM THE PEN OF DEEP THROAT The following report comes from the battered and shamefully beaten Slew himself at CD's on Saturday afternoon, Deep Throat was there. Friday night, the lights dim, Aackverdi walks proudly into CD's. People mingling around their drinks couldn't be the least affected until Aackverdi let loose one riotous belch. The patrons were disgusted, shocked... they hadn't seen such tasteless manners except for the one time Kazilumb had entered the bar. And now... with their memories refreshed, all had begin to notice a striking resemblance with Kazilumb and Aackverdi. Everyone had heard tales of the Aackverdi's long lost twin brother, only to be banished by his parents for... well... lets just say... unmanly acts against the animal world. Slew, sitting by himself in the corner, still distressed by the rejection he faced from Galauriel of evenings past, was confronted by Aack, "Hi there big guy... can I buy you a drink?". Aackverdi soon invited Slew into space for some tactical lessons on how to defeat Monty. Slew's and Aackverdi's spaceships blasted away from the Mars landing pad. Aackverdi began with some simple lessons, how to engage the targeting system... "Watch me Slew... TARGET WORLORD" he entered into his battle computer. All heard an evil laugh from the control center of Aack's ship. SWITCH SHIELDS and MANUAL soon followed. Slew sat back in open space, eagerly watching, until, a tight beam came over his radio... an unidentified voice... SLEW... THIS IS... GOD... LAND AT ONCE. Slew, never having been contacted by a God before, immediately spun his ship around and landed. What Slew didn't see were the large, thunderous twin laser blasts rip past his ship. The next day Slew returned to Fed dataspace, complete ignorant (I could end the sentence there) of Aack's deception. Aackverdi met Slew at CD's again where he begin to scream and curse... yelling that it was Hazed who had warned him and he was lucky to be alive. Slew began to tire of Aack's babbling (as many other people have felt), but Aack continued... saying "Everyone will soon fall to Kazilumb's... err", he paused, "Aackverdi's wrath!". Slew kicked Aackverdi in his SpyBeam and ran to his ship... blasted off and went immediately to the Interstellar Link. Aackverdi was waiting there for him however, "You Chicken Sh*t" he blasted over the radio, but Slew never heard it. Hugh, monstrous blasts of Aackverdi's laser ripped into Slew's hull, his ship spun uncontrolled. A second blast smashed Slew's engines. The ship flipped countless times but out of some amazing chance, the Chicken Ship... err Slew managed to FLEE from the battle. Aackverdi pursued naturally, finding Slew lame ship above Earth. An then, the fatal volley of laser blasts splintered Slew's Command Center. Slew's last commands were to move his ship out of Earth orbit, to save the lives of the countless people below who probably wouldn't want to wake to debris landing on their heads. Slew awoke in the Hospital Ward, with scattered memory, saying the entire ordeal was too painful to remember. (Of course with a few undercover Groat payments his memory became much clearer). Be aware fellow Feders... it's getting dangerous out there. **>> GOSSIP, SCANDAL AND LIES As if we haven't already had enough news about Slew, an informant (who, naturally enough, wishes to remain anonymous) has reported the appearance of Fed's first gigolo! Slew has been offering his... erm... favours for 10 meg a time to all the females in Fed. Krell was one of the people who was made a offer she could refuse. She refused. But we're told that Tal actually took Slew up on the offer, after beating him down to a lower price. Or maybe the beating was part of the favours... Maxis today released the following statement: "My love for the beautiful Cryptosporidium is perfectly sane". Yes. Keep taking the tablets, Max! **>> PROMOTIONS NEWS Congratulations to Vlad who made Trader, just sneaking under the wire before the requirements are increased. Glenfiddich was promoted to Adventurer, and would like to thank all who helped him. There's been oodles of new Squires... Krell, Otoole, Elex, Niun etc etc etc, and Oddball is now Fed's first Industrialist. Many Commanders are daunted by the size of the ship loan they have to pay off, and when told that traders need a networth of a meg, they go very pale and weak and the knees. If you think that's bad, the requirements for promotion to Industrialist include having a planetary treasury of 3 billion groats! **>>CONTACTS The following information will appear at the end of every News Bulletin, so you don't have to read it if you already know it. In the event of a problem or question, you can: * talk to Hazed, Bella or Clem in the game * leave a message in the game log * send mail with the Federation Feedback option from the main menu You can order a copy of the unexpurgated printed Idiot's Guide to Federation by typing ORDER at any GEnie menu. Cost - a mere $12.95. Federation has several category in the new MPGames RT. To get there, type M1045,1 from any menu prompt and SET category 13 (for information, instructions, questions and answers) or 14 (for general chat and discussions). The Federation Leader in the bulletin board is Occy (Mail ID: OCPAC). The MPGames RT also has a Federation library in the files area, Library 5. Library 18 holds the Federation News Archives. **>> BULLETIN ENDS