**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 92.11.15 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> FEDTERM! Fedterm is the new front-end program Bella is writing for Fed, to run on the PC. We've been having a look over her shoulder as she plays with it, and we guarantee it is going to be very impressive! It is designed to enhance playing of Fed, without taking anything away from the text (and the pictures your imagination draws based on the text). Bella is confident that in about three weeks she'll be ready to make in available on open beta-test. Meanwhile, we've been running a competition offering a free weekend in Fed for artists who can supply icons of trading commodities for use in Fedterm. Bella says she needs the pictures by next Friday, the 20th, at the latest. **>> CHANGES TO DUCHIES Bella has decreed that it now costs 20 meg for a planet to join a duchy. This money is taken out of the planetary treasury. Half a meg goes to the Emperor (in the current absence of an Emperor, we believe Hazed and Bella are splitting it to use as drinking money). Half a meg goes into the planet's customs service, for the Duke to allocate to stopping smugglers. The remaining 19 meg goes to the Duke, and will be kept in a special account on the planet. They can remove groats from the account with the command . Because of the new fee to join, Bella returned all the planets into an independent state on Monday. She assumed that everyone would simply re-join the duchy they were in before, so didn't bother to zero the customs duty set for the planets. But far more have remained independent than previously, and people have been getting hit for duty when jumping to independent worlds. Bella will fix this tomorrow. She would have sorted it out sooner, except that nobody told her there was a problem! Please, if you think you have found a bug or a problem with the game, let us know. Don't assume that someone else has told us. We would far prefer to hear about the same thing ten times than not at all! What we are wondering, of course, is why so many previously allied planets have decided to stay independent. It surely can't be the thought of paying 20 meg, can it? After all, this sum is peanuts to the planet-owning classes! We're going to stop reporting on the state of the duchies, because there's a command that lets you do it yourselves easily. Bella put it in when she first put in the duchy code, but she forgot to tell us about it so we've not reported it before! lists all the planets in the game (excluding the Sol planets) and shows what duchy they are in, if any. Our decision not to report on the state of the duchies has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Scratchwood has only managed to attract one planet. Nor to the fact that Hazed is looking very unhappy with no-one except Freya to oppress. Honest! **>> MORE CHANGES Because the new way the exchanges run means that planets make far less money than they did before, Bella has reduced the cost of promotions for planet- owners. Now each advancement costs 2 giga-groats, regardless of which level you are promoting to. Milkruns have been changed slightly, to stop them depleting stocks too much. Previously, any milkrun jobs you set up would keep going until only 50 tons of the commodity remained, regardless of the stockpile setting; now they will cease when the stock reaches 250 tons, or half the stockpile level, whichever happens first. **>> SPECIAL EVENTS The Starship Amiga party has been delayed by two weeks, to keep Thanksgiving free. It will now happen on Saturday December 12th. Kimos has designed a large starship-planet for the occasion. We'll have more information in next week's news. Something strange will be happening for Thanksgiving... but we're not going to tell you what! **>> DOCUMENTATION UPDATED Hazed must have been given a jolly good talking to by Bella, or maybe something else has filled her with enthusiasm, but she's actually been working on the documentation for the game! She's finished writing The Idiot's Guide to Planetary Management, and has uploaded the final version in Topic 15 of the Explorer's Cat in the BBS. She'll also be putting a copy into the Explorer's Library. She'd like to thank all those who helped her by making comments and pointing out her mistakes. She's also put up a brief summary of the commands so far available to Dukes. We do hope that Krell or Occy will need this document soon! The Idiot's Guide to Dukedom is in Topic 16 of the Explorer's Cat. The Version Notes file has been updated to show the changes made when smuggling was brought in. Next on her list of things to do is to overhaul the Idiot's Guide to Planetary Construction. This will probably take her a couple of weeks. **>> A REMINDER Every day the game gets reset so the house-keeping can be done. If you have visions of Bella running around with a vacuum cleaner and a feather duster, you're wrong - this is when old personas are deleted from the file, backups made etc. It takes between 10 and 15 minutes, and if you try to log onto Fed during that time you'll just find yourself "frozen". If you wait long enough, you should be put into the game as soon as the process is completed. The game is normally reset late afternoon on weekdays, before 6.00 eastern time, and at weekends early in the morning, around 5 or 6 eastern time. **>> NEWS FROM ABROAD Fed in France is starting to do very well - it hasn't been advertised yet but it regularly gets several thousand player-minutes on the clock each day. A problem recently was causing the game to crash, and Bella was baffled about it, until she spotted that a buffer was overflowing. It turned out that the French's natural eloquence was causing the problem! The message about the lights dimming as your twin laser fire, which is 40 characters long in English, had been translated to 92 characters, and there was only room for 80! **>> ADVERTISEMENT We received the following advertisement for publication: There are only THREE MORE WEEKS left to solve Rookery's puzzle and collect your TEN MILLION IG reward!!! In just THREE MORE WEEKS, a new, more fiendish, more difficult, more impossible, and more rewarding puzzle will be put in, but you can only get that reward once, so if you want some real cash, you had better get this one as well, and collect your stupendous cash award! Enjoy!!! Hmmm... sounds interesting! **>> HUH? Does anyone know the meaning of the following message, which was left on the Bar boards one day this week? You stroll over to the notice board and have a look at the messages displayed on it: 00001 - Giskard: bELLA, HAZED i'LL BE ON LATER TONGITH FOR QUESTIONING Why would Hazed and Bella want to question Giskard? What about? We think we should be told! **>> GOSSIP, SLANDER, MISINFORMATION, LIES... One of those seedy informants who are forever lurking about in the malodourous alleyways outside the Mare's Nest claims to have heard a rumour that the mysterious association known to some as the 'Dark Side of the Moon' has ceased to exist [if it ever did]. Since none of the members of the group, if it is or was a group, will own up to being [or having been] such, and since we haven't the slightest inkling whatsoever as to what the purpose of the group is, or was, we shan't speculate on why the 'Dark Moonies' [as we have heard them called] have disbanded, if they indeed have [provided the group ever existed in the first place]. Occy, rumoured to be the leader [or non-leader] of the group [or non-group, as the case may be] seems to have absolutely nothing to say on the matter. A homesick Mojo accommpanied Krell to Horsell, intending to hold a perverted family reunion of some sort, no doubt. We don't know what happened there, as the whole bloody place is spy-proof, but Krell has noted the she is now quite sure that feeding Mojo to the Martians is not part of the solution to the Duke puzzle. The lovely Seramarias was joined in matrimony to a vaguely familiar-looking newbod named Patch. The defective newsdroid that reported the event didn't bother to tell us exactly when the event took place, or where, but we do know that it was a lovely party and everyone got disgustingly drunk. Tao, who claims not to be a priest, nevertheless officiated at the wedding. This Week's Helpful Social Hint: A warning to all you people [and there are many] who tend to grope before you look... remember, you may find yourself in a rather embarrassing situation, especially since the SpyNet Report no longer bothers to inform you of what gender a person happens to be at the moment. We've heard of yet ANOTHER case of mistaken gender identity, involving a certain Poor Person mistaking a certain not-quite-so-poor person for one of the opposite sex. We advise strongly that one EX before one GROPEs, especially if one plans to go immmediately on to anything a bit more amorous than groping before checking to see how the other party reacts. Asking politely if your intended happens to be a boy or a girl also works. Mistaken identity can ruin your reputation... don't let it happen to you! **>> ON THE MOVE As we finish this issue of the news, we are surrounded by boxes and crates - including some that are suspiciously newsdroid shaped! Hazed is moving to a new home, and she's decided that the newsdroid will have to be turned off to be transported. We're not too happy about that, because we don't trust those stevedores to deliver us to the right address without dropping us on our heads! We hope we'll be able to write the news as usual next week... but you may find that Hazed has to do it herself!! **>> SPYNET REVIEW We have two new Captains this week - Dynamo and Starlock. Starlock then went on to make Adventurer, as did Kevin and Scotty. Patch and Hawkman became Traders. Patch, Valtras and Tether were promoted to Merchant. Tether went on to solve the JP puzzle. No new GMs or Explorers. There are two new Industrialists: Bochiman and Cyrfox both advanced their planets. Two players became CEOs. Sneezy's company is called Intergalactic Enterprises, LTD and Tether has formed Tether International. Congratulations to all of you. There were three dead-deads this week. Judging by the times, both Sirstephen and Jammur must have commited suicide, but as far as we can tell, Arlock's demise was accidental. Piemur spent most of today dying on Xixax. At last count, he'd died there 7 times! We understand he can now teleport, and was trying to find the teleport address for the exchange. Why didn't he just ask the owner? Hmmm... we note from last night's review that Russ was doing the same! Why didn't he just ask Piemur? We know not how or why, but the SpyNet Review reported that Oxcart's reward reached 300000! He must have been annoying an awful lot of people. **>>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