**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 93.03.21 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> NEW NEW NEW! Recovered from her jetlag and culture shock, Bella has been back at work and has been putting in more of the code to make duchies meaningful places. She's given Dukes the capability to build naval bases. Eventually, these bases will be responsible for enforcing the customs duties, as well as protecting the duchy generally. Although this change primarily benefits Dukes, planet owners will find the goods they produce much in demand, and Traders will have plenty of opportunties to sell goods to the planets that are supplying a naval base. A naval base can be sited on a planet, or it can be a "deathstar" type base in orbit. The command to move the base is to put it on a planet, or for a space base. At the moment, it costs nothing to relocate in terms of cash, but the base loses half its 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. Orbital bases will only run at 75% capacity, but the advantage is that you won't have to relocate the base as planets drop out of the game. If the planet on which you build the base 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 build your base in the same way as you built facilities for the Duke puzzle. You get information about the required inputs and labour with . starts the contruction project. At the moment, if the base is on a planet, the inputs are drawn directly from that exchange's stocks, and paid for at the going rate. Orbital bases can draw from whatever planet you specify with - eventually planetary bases will be able to draw from off-planet, too, giving a lot more flexibility. As with Duke puzzle building, you can have three construction projects running at the same time, and reminds you what each one is doing. They can all be building the same thing. You need to restart your building projects after each reset. If there are not enough inputs, you will get a sendmail message. **>> WHAT'S NEXT? Having built your base, you need to make it useful, so some time during the week Bella will put in the code allowing you to build other things: detectors, cutters, destroyers and cruisers are the different kinds of ship that will patrol your borders; personnel and marines are the people to run the base and enforce your customs; and intelligence, perhaps the most important of all, will allow you to keep track of things. Each of these projects will take a set number of hours to build - you will be able to get the relevant information using the command. Unlike other facilities, these items will have to built in one session - when the game is reset the projects are cancelled completely. However, although the planets will receive payment for inputs as you take them from the exchanges, you won't get charged for any inputs used until the project is completed, so if a project doesn't get finished before reset, all you lose is time. Bella will look at how to continue these projects over reset in the future. None of the projects will take more than six hours to complete, some considerably less. With this in mind, it is worth reminding you of the normal reset times. At weekends, the game is reset around 8.00 in the morning; during the week around 4.00 in the afternoon. Times are eastern. **>> BIGGER LUMPS AVAILABLE! The Galactic Administration has very kindly allowed Explorers and over to increase the amount they can buy at one time. Goods can now be purchased in lumps of up to 75 tons - if no quantity is specified, it will default to 75. This will speed up the hauling of goods! **>> CUSTOMS COMPUTER SYSTEM BREAKDOWN IMMINENT! The Galactic Administration's customs computers are being upgraded on Monday, but of course one cannot possibly expect the GA's programmers to do the job properly. While preparing for the upgrade, they've managed to mess up the records showing the origins of goods stored in warehouses or ships. So come Monday night, those crystals you bought from Jinx might be labelled as coming from Hell instead! You could choose to empty your warehouses and cargo bays before Monday night, to avoid confusion - or perhaps you would prefer to stock up on embargoed goods in the hope that you will be able to sell them freely after the mix-up? **>> HOW TO BECOME A SENATOR Bella has now decided exactly how players will advance to the rank of Senator (the next one up from Duke). Dukes who type see that the current requirement is "Wait until there are too many Dukes..." Well, that's almost right. There can only be six Dukes, so when a seventh Baron solves the puzzle and gets promoted, someone has to become a Senator. But since Fed is a corrupt capitalist regime run by an enormous bureaucracy, of course you have to buy your way into power! Dukes put in a bid for the amount of money they are willing to pay to become a Senator, and the one with the highest bid will be promoted. Dukes are automatically allocated a bid of 100 meg. The bid can be upped with where megagroats is the number of meg you are willing to fork out. Your bid can never be below 100 meg! If the bid is more than the amount you have, you will still be promoted - but you will have a negative balance which won't help you do the things Senators have to do. If there are two or more players who have bid the same amount, the game will decide between them using some arcane method that Bella refuses to divulge. Of course, the bids are kept top secret, and they do not appear on your display, to shield from possible spying eyes. without an amount reminds you what your current bid is. When you are promoted, your duchy will disappear at the next reset and all the planets will become Independent worlds. There are currently four people building for Duke. At least one thinks they will be ready for a first attempt at the puzzle mid-week, so it's possible that next week's news will be reporting on the first Senator! **>> BELLA PONDERS In last week's news we said that Bella intended to limit the number of jobs that a planet owner could write directly to Transportation. Further thought has changed her thinking a little. While she still wishes to put a limit on the jobs, she thinks she will make the mechanism a little more dynamic, so the number allowed will be based on the number of planet-owners online at the time. She is still cogitating. **>> FEDTERM LIBRARY HAS MOVED The FedTerm library, which was option 6 on the main menu, has been moved to option 3. This makes it fully compatible with Aladdin and other GEnie navigation programs. Uploading, downloading and keeping track of new files will be much simpler now. The instructions are now on option 6. **>> SPEAKING OF INSTRUCTIONS... Hazed is in the process of updating some of the advanced instructions. Expect a new version of the Planetary Construction docs later this week, followed by the Planetary Management information. **>> SUICIDE PACT OF STAR-CROSSED LOVERS Last Sunday night Fed was rocked by the double-suicide of the on-again, off-again pair Jade and Destiny. After their fake wedding, which turned into a real wedding, followed by a real divorce which everyone expected to be fake, at first people wondered if the deaths were really real. Tragically, they were. The first to go was Jade. No-one knows what made her take such a final step. Perhaps Destiny's repeated pleas for her to marry him again became too much for her to bear. Possibly the strain of running a newly-discovered planet, at the same time as a hectic social life, proved too much. Whatever the reason, she whipped out her swiss army knife and ran down the final curtain. Stricken with grief at her loss, Destiny felt he had no alternative but to follow her. He too took his own life. They shall be missed, not least by us newdroids who always found something in their topsy-turvey relationship to enhance the news. **>> CONTEST EXTENDED FOR ONE MORE WEEK The "Name Marcia's Baby" content has been extended for one more week, to give the judges more time to rake in as many bribes as they can. **>> PLANETS AND DUCHIES There has been little movement in the structure of the duchies during the week, apart from planets disappearing and others reappearing as their owners die, take breaks or return. There are still three Independent worlds: Ibex, Oasis and Rhylannor. Occy's holding is down to eight, much reduced from his previous holding, but his duchy still has far more planets than any other Duke. Scratchwood has just one planet, Condor's Rookery. Scadia has picked up Oppiz, and now has two planets. Megalusa has just one, Gotham has four and Inversity two. It looks like Occy has removed the embargo against Gotham that chased Topper out of Zippy. Has he kissed and made up with Krell, or is this just a temporary cooling of hostilities? **>> SPYNET REVIEW Congratulations to everyone who was promoted during the last week. The new Captains were Morgan, Phiz, Zap, Renard, Stelfox and Ruanna. Glurg, Hikaru, Renard and Pete made it to Adventurer. All except Pete moved right on to become Traders. Hikaru and Glurg were then promoted to Merchant, too! Azura and Tao also become Merchants. Tao, Patch, Azura and Hikaru decided to dip a toe into the swirling waters of productivity, and bought themselves companies: TT ProdCo, Blackwater Inc., Greymatter, and Lodoss Inc. respectively. The shock news on the death front was the double suicide of Jade and Destiny - see the news story above. Azura also decided to end it all, but we understand she has come back under another name. On a happier note, the last few weeks we've been seeing a lot of old friends returning to Fed, and one of those if Riccardo. He died dead- dead some months back, so it's nice to see he's finally returned. Welcome back! **>> BULLETIN ENDS