**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 93.02.21 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> LOADSA NEW STUFF! Bella has been working hard all week to put lots of new features into the game. **>> MORE CONTROL OVER EXCHANGE PRICES Planet owners can now set a markup on individual commodities, which the exchange will use in addition to the general exchange markup when calculating buying and selling prices. This gives even greater control over the prices your exchange pays and receives. The command is . If you leave out the commodity, the markup is assumed to apply to the whole exchange, as before. The display has an extra column showing the individual markups. For those who aren't sure what a markup does: it determines how much profit the exchange wants to make on a transaction. Depending on the exchange fluctuations, the exchange calculates its own base price for each commodity. If you set your markup at zero, the exchange will both sell and buy commodities at its base price. The higher the markup you set, the more profit the exchange will get - it will up the selling price, and reduce the buying price accordingly. You can set a negative markup on individual commodities, if you have a particular need for vast quantities of the commodity. This means the planet will be buying (or selling) the item at a loss, so it is not an option to be used lightly! Barons will find it particularly useful, because they need an enormous amount of inputs to build the facilities for the devilish Duke puzzle, so the need for the items outweighs the desire for groats. **>> BUILDING IS EASIER AND CHEAPER Speaking of the Duke puzzle... the amount of commodities needed to build the facilities, and the cost of the construction and running of the facilities, has been reduced. Barons should go and check the DNI computer for the new figures. **> SELL UNWANTED FACTORIES At last, company owners can sell their factories even if the planet on which they are based is not in the game. lists all the factories your company owns (unlike the company display, which just lists the ones you can access). You can then to offload any of the factories, even the ones that you cannot operate. You will only receive 1 meg for factories on ex-planets, but at least it frees up a slot for you to build a new factory. **>> NAVAL BASES Dukes will soon be the proud possessors of a naval base, which will take care of the defence of their duchies. You can now move your naval base to another planet, or make it an orbital "deathstar". The command is to put the base on a particular planet, or puts the base in space. At the moment, relocating doesn't cost anything, because the bases aren't yet functional. Once they are working, each time you you relocate you will lose half of the base's capacity (although it will never fall below 10%). Putting a base on a planet will benefit the planet, because of the extra services it will be able to sell to the base's personnel, as well as the contract to actually build the base. But if the planet goes out of the game, or blows up when the owner becomes a Duke, the base will have to be relocated. The base will also increase the effectiveness of the customs if anyone tries to smuggle to the planet containing the base. It will be more expensive to build an orbital base, because all the materials will have to be shipped there, and it won't benefit any of your planets. It will only run at 75% of its capacity if it is in space. However, you won't ever have to relocate it. If the planet you build a base on secedes from your duchy, either to join another duchy or to become independent, you will still control the base - but any benefit the planet's owner accrues from the position of the base will not go to your duchy. You can, if you wish, build your base on a planet not in your duchy - but we can't think of any good reason to do so. **>> EXPLORER CREDITS AND MILKRUN JOBS A new entry on the display of JPs and GMs shows the number of explorer credits they have. These credits are earned by giving jobs to Poor People. From tomorrow, no-one will be promoted to Explorer until they have 120 explorer credits. Also from tomorrow, Adventurers will not be able to do simple milkrun jobs by typing . They will have to receive their jobs from the Transportation Central display, or from Rich People. **>> OOPS! Bella received a bug report a few weeks ago from Occy, saying that he had set up an embargo against another duchy, but it wasn't working. She scratched her head, but couldn't see any reason why the embargo would fail. Meanwhile, Hazed was looking at the new layout of the Duchies display, which now shows any embargoes (amongst other things). She noticed something strange in the entry for Zippy. It looked like line noise first time, but it showed up on repeated displays. So she experimented, seeing if she could reproduce the strangeness in her duchy. And she could! The game wasn't checking to see if the duchy or planet really existed. It turned out Occy had mis-typed when he set his embargo. Instead of "Inversity", he'd typed "Inverstiy". That was why his embargo wasn't working! Hazed queried Bella, and Bella told her that it was supposed to work like this. It means that Dukes can set an embargo or a favoured status on a planet that is currently out of the game. So, Dukes (Occy in particular), just be careful you don't spell things wrong! **>> MISPLACED GOODS It used to be that when a Rich Person gave a job to a Poor Person, the goods were completely lost if the hauler voided the contract. But when she changed the way Transportation Central dealt with jobs recently, she ensured that voided jobs would be taken over and delivered by Transportation Central. However, she received several bug reports from Rich People, whose goods were not ending up in the right place when the jobs were voided. Sometimes they just seemed to vanish, sometimes they didn't seem to go anywhere at all. It took Bella a while to track down what was happening, but she finally realised that the delivery was going to the planet that the hauler happened to be on when he typed ! A fix will be going in for this tomorrow. **>> MINOR GOSSIP Once again, it's been very quiet on the gossip front. The only news we have is no surprise at all - Jade and Destiny are going to stay married. How predictable! With all the marriages and pregnancies in Fed these days, it's like a Mills and Boon novel. Can we please have some axe-murders to liven things up a bit? Where are Logan and Blackmark when we need them? **>> PLANETS AND DUCHIES Jade's new planet was linked in earlier this week. Dunnottar is very Scottish, very Mediaeval, and the brisk highland wind goes right up your kilt! Our newsdroid didn't have time for an in-depth look around, but he was impressed with the small part of the planet he saw. Well worth exploring! Total finally showed up again, and his planet Aruba reappeared. By contrast with Dunnottar, this planet is not worth exploring - apart from the usual facilities around the landing pad, the rest of the planet has no full descriptions, and cannot be accessed easily anyway. Total was obviously too impatient to wait until he had finished writing it before asking Bella to link it into the game! Not a good idea. You need to attract tourists to your planet to make up the time requirement for promotion to Thane, and by the time Total has fixed up his planet to make it worthwhile exploring, there will be more new planets in the game to attract visitors' interest. We can think of several people who stayed at Squire for a very long time, and in the end had to pay people to sit on their planets to make up their time! Jade has joined the Duchy of Zippy (surprise, surprise). Occy now has 12 planets in his domain. Total allied with Krell's Gotham. Krell has also enticed Khan to secede from Inversity and join up with her. This gives Krell four planets to play with, and leaves Oddball with just 3. Rezrov's Megalusa stays the same, with 2 planets, as does the much-diminished Scratchwood, owned by Hazed. **>> SPYNET REVIEW Congratulations to all the players who were promoted during the last week. Tiberius and Swifty both paid off their ship loans and became Captains. Astrorambler was promoted to Trader. The new Merchants were Bugman, Noe and Abdulah. Felice solved the fiendish GM puzzle, then went on to become an Explorer. Jade became a Squire, as her new planet was linked into the game. Total also became a Squire - several weeks after -his- planet was first seen! Having written his planet and asked Bella to link it in, he vanished. His planet stuck around for a week, then disappeared too. He came back yesterday, but because his planet was still out he didn't get promoted. Finally, today, both he and his planet were on the game at the same time - so his promotion was posted! Zippo has been busy advancing his planet. He started the week as a Thane, then advanced to Industrialist, Technocrat, and then Baron, with barely a chance to breathe in between! Kimos has played 1000 games. What an achievement! **>> 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 FedTerm, the multimedia front-end program for the game, can be downloaded from the Federation library (option 6 on 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