**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 92.10.11 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> ARTISTS - WIN A FREE WEEKEND IN FED! If you're handy with a painting package, you could win yourself a free weekend's play in Fed. Bella is currently developing a front end program for Fed, called FedTerm. It is being written for the PC (with EGA and higher graphics) and is in pre-alpha test. We hope it will be finished and available to you well before Christmas. The screen display will be split into different areas, for different kinds of text, and for different pictures. There will also be a separate area for trading information, which will contain a small icon of the trading commodity being displayed. That's where you can help. We need someone to design an icon for each of the trading commodities (all 52 of them) so we are holding a competition, with a prize of a FREE weekend in Fed for the person who designs the best icons. The free weekend will run from 6.00pm Friday to 8.00am Monday - you get to choose which weekend you have free. The techie details: each icon should be 80 pixels wide by 60 pixels deep. We need a separate GIF file for each of the commodities. You must use the standard EGA or VGA palette of 16 colours; do not change to another palette. We welcome collaborations between players. If you want to submit a few icons to check that the size and palette is correct before you do them all, please do. Mail the GIF files of your icons to Bella (FEDERATIONII) using the attached file option in GEnie mail. Obviously, some of the trading commodity names were a product of Bella's fevered brain, so you can let your imagination run riot as you try to picture what a katydidic really looks like! If you have any queries about this competition, send a message to Hazed in the game, or mail her using the Feedback to Federation option on the main Fed page. **>> MY OLD DUCHY When a Baron solves the devilish Duke puzzle and gets promoted, he becomes the owner of a duchy. Planet owners can choose to sign a treaty of alliance with a duchy or can remain independent. The command to form an alliance with a duchy is . Currently there is a choice of two duchies - Inversity, owned by Oddball (the only real Duke) and Scratchwood, owned by Hazed. (Scratchwood will remain a duchy to provide Oddball with some competition, and to allow Hazed to write the documentation. She'll lose the duchy as soon as some more players have been promoted.) The command to join a duchy is . The planet will remain allied to the duchy until the owner joins another duchy, or reverts to independence using the command. A planet will also go back to being independent if the duchy it is allied to disappears from the game, either because the Duke gets promoted to Senator, or gets killed dead-dead. All the "fake" duchies that planet-owners were experimenting with last week have been removed using the same mechanism. gives the Duke a list of the planets in his domain, with their value. Value is calculated by the amount in their treasury plus the amount spent on promoting the planet. These values added together give the networth of the Duke - his personal bank balance or property is no longer taken into account. The hyperspace links connecting the galaxy are now restricted. From Sol, any planet can be reached, but outside Sol you can only jump directly to planets in the same duchy. To move to another duchy or to an independent planet requires a jump back to sol first. You also need to jump via Sol if moving from one independent planet to another. The command will tell you which planets you can jump to directly from the planet you are on. It works anywhere, and will be particularly useful if you are in a trading exchange wondering what to buy. **>> SMUGGLING One of the things Dukes will have to decide is the customs rate for their duchy (they'll be able to set the entire duchy to the same rate, or set the individual planets to different rates). This duty will be payable on all commodities being imported to a planet in their duchy; it will be a percentage of the value of the goods. Dukes will also be able to put an embargo on certain planets (or whole duchies), preventing goods being imported from those worlds. The tools to be able to set customs rates and embargo certain planets will go in shortly, but they won't actually have any effect straight away. This gives rise to a major new feature that will affect players at all levels - smuggling. When you use the command to move to a planet, you will have to pay duty on the goods you are carrying. The duty in Sol will be set to 10%. If you are carrying embargoed goods, you will be turned back at the planet's border and won't be able to make the jump. In this case, you can try to smuggle the goods in. You can also smuggle if you have no embargoed goods, but wish to avoid paying the duty. The command will be . The chances of you succeeding at smuggling depend on a number of factors: - The higher your smuggling ability (explained in last week's news) the more chance you have of succeeding. - Smaller ships have a greater chance than large ones, since they can slip through smaller holes in the border. - The more efficient the customs service (which depends on how much money the Duke has spent on manpower and equipment to guard the borders) the less likely you are to succeed. If you succeed at smuggling, you'll be able to sell your goods on the planet. Allowable goods will be sold as normal; with the added benefit that you will have escaped paying the duty. Embargoed goods, on the other hand, will be sold on the black market (since there will be an enormous demand for them) and will fetch anything between two and four times the standard price. If you are caught attempting to smuggle, you have a number of choices: - You can surrender. You will pay double the normal duty on allowable goods, and embargoed goods will be confiscated. - You can try to bluff your way out (Bella hasn't decided exactly what this will involve). If you fail, all your goods are confiscated. - You can attempt to bribe the customs officials (presumably with groats, although offering them your body might work). This will have more effect if the planet owner doesn't pay them very much! If you fail, all your goods are confiscated, and you go directly to jail (do not pass go, do not collect 200 groats). - You can run. You'll have a better chance of crashing the border if your ship has extra engines installed. If you lose, the cargo is confiscated - and so is the ship, leaving you with the added humiliation of having to buy a new ship from the planet that just nicked your old one. - You can fight. The better your armour and weaponry, the better your chance. If you lose, you will lose the ship and the cargo, and you may be killed. If you succeed, you may take damage to your ship as you make your getaway. If you escape with no damage, it assumes you have blown up a customs ship, so you get a price on your head! You can only choose one of these options: if you choose to bluff, and fail, you cannot then try and run or fight. All confiscated goods are added to the planet's stockpiles. **>> PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS Whenever a major new features goes into the game, there are inevitably problems. That's why the game crashed a few times late last week, and why the planetary balance got lost from the planet display. Teething troubles of this nature are an inescapable consequence of the game evolving. Whenever Bella implements a major new feature, such as the new duchy stuff and smuggling, she always puts in the new code a bit at a time. Problems are easier to track down than if the whole thing went in at once. This means that for the next few weeks new features will be put into the game most days. Bella will post information about changes and new things as she makes them, both to the electronic bar boards, and to the MPGames BBS. Happily, the problem that was locking people out of the game if they dropped the carrier on the way in or out of Fed has been solved, as have many of the minor irritants from last week like having your mood stripped off if you kissed someone! An amusing little bug cropped up recently - it was reversing people's sex when it reported on them in the SpyNet Review, thus Bart was shown as having been promoted to Journeywoman! Now if it had been Mojo we would not have been surprised... **>> TREATIES Over half of the planet owners have joined one of the two duchies, although many seem to prefer to keep their independence for the moment. Here is the current state of the Treaties of Alliance: Duchy of Inversity Duchy of Scratchwood Gotham - Gotham Phoenix - Deneb Links - Links Zippy - Hydro Capella - Maya Brewski - Brewski Oppiz - Oppiz Hell - Hell Jinx - Jinx Loki - Oberon Zodiac - Karalon Vitro - Vitro Cabal - Crime Bliss - Tristesse Elwyn - Scadia Independent Planets Haven - Haven Mebeskon - Megalusa Rigel - Serendipity Ibex - Ocean Quartus - Quartus Harlequin - Chameleon Xixax - Xixax Muse - Muse Rhylannor - Rhylannor Dahih - Canna **>> FORTHCOMING CHANGES We've been getting a lot of reports recently that planet owners are making life difficult for traders by keeping their stockpile levels low, thus depressing demand. Traders are finding the exchanges flood too quickly so it's hard for them to sell enough goods to make a big profit. When planets first went in, Bella put a "floor" on negative stocks to prevent planets plunging too far into the red. This floor will be removed some time this week - probably Wednesday or Thursday. Stock deficits will be able to go very negative. As a consequence, planet owners will have to keep tighter control over their stock levels - it won't be so easy to make groats by doing nothing! This will benefit traders, because the more a planet needs a commodity, the more it will pay, particularly on the black market. Also coming shortly will be a new requirement for the promotion to Explorer. Following discussion in the MPGames BBS, and a meeting in Chez Diesel last night (attended by people from all ranks in Fed) it was decided that to ensure Rich People know every facet of the game, and to help Poor People, players will have to give out 200 jobs before they advance to Explorer. The capability to do jobs starts when you make it to JP, and any jobs you give out from that time on will be counted. These jobs must be accepted by a Poor Person but not necessarily completed. You can do the jobs as soon as you make JP, or you can save them up until you have the necessary stats for Explorer. A new entry on your score display will show the number of WPs (work points) you have completed. This feature will be implemented in around a week, so if you are close to Explorer you have a chance to try and beat the deadline. Going hand in hand with this new requirement: when a Poor Person voids a job given to them by a Rich Person, they will lose trader points. Bella hasn't decided yet how many, but it will be enough to act as a deterrant. **>> NEW FILES IN THE LIBRARY Bella has uploaded a new Who's Who, a list of all the Fed players, showing their persona name, ship name, company and planet. It is file 2191 in the MPGames Libraries (it replaces the old file 1873). Hazed has uploaded recent issues of the weekly news, bringing the archives up to date to last week's issue. To make it easier for players who are looking for a specific issue of the news, she has added the month and year to the search terms. **>> PUBLIC ENEMY... Otoole is rapidly becoming public enemy number one by his antisocial behaviour. We reported recently that he and Oddball really have the knives out for each other. In order to get his point across Otoole is filling the electronic bar boards with raging messages, wiping off everyone else's words. This is particularly annoying when Bella needs to get information to the players about new changes to the game each day! So, Otoole, if you are reading this: please confine your attacks on Oddball to just a few lines. If you persist in wiping off important messages we might have to take your pencil away! It has to be said, however, that Oddball is behaving almost as badly as Otoole. Both of the feuders are in danger of escalating matters too far! Remember that enmity in Fed is fine so long as it doesn't get personal. **>> SPYNET REVIEW This weeks new Captains are Tao and Nigellian, both of whom swiftly went on to become Adventurers. There are no new Traders this week. Gabriel and Daneel were both promoted to Merchant. Daneel bought himself a company, Posy. No-one solved the JP or GM puzzle, but there were Condor and Khan made it to Explorer. Condor has already finished his planet and it should go into the game early next week. Oxcart finally dragged his planet out of its agricultural phase, and was promoted to Thane. Jinx will be going mini very shortly. Davidge, Freya, Dane and Otoole were all promoted to Industrialist. Rumour has it that Otoole neglected to reduce his stockpiles before advancing, so he lost a great deal of money! Congratulations to all of you. Sadly, Riccardo died dead-dead today. The entries in the SpyNet Review show that he died twice in Links, both times he was insured. He then died in Sol and neglected to reinsure: just 9 player-minutes later he died dead-dead, also in Sol. If anyone knows the cause of his death, please send a message to Hazed. The SpyNet Review now shows the forming and breaking of Alliances as planets and from duchies. We won't list the changes this week, since people are still experimenting - and we provided a full list of current treaties earlier in this news bulletin. **>>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 or Bella in the game * leave a message in the game log * a message to Hazed or Bella * send GEnie 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. (New edition will be available shortly!) Federation has several categories 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 Krell (Mail ID: K.HILLYER). There are also private categories for Explorers, run by Krell, and for the Conclave run by Oddball (Mail ID: D.STALZLE). The MPGames RT also has a Federation library in the files area, Library 5. Library 18 holds the Federation News Archives. **>> BULLETIN ENDS