The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 7, 2008

Official News page 2


NEW LEISURE BUILD: INFORMER NETWORKS

by Hazed

Any government, no matter how benign, is going to attract opposition. While some rulers tolerate the milder forms of protest such as marches, strikes and political campaigning, despots get very twitchy at any signs of dissent - and everyone worries about more violent protests, crime and terrorism. The solution is to build up your security facilities in the form of police forces to keep order, riot police to suppress serious opposition and surveillance systems to keep an eye on the activities of your population.

But if that isn't enough, now you can add an extra layer of security, in the form of informer networks - recruiting ordinary people to act as your spies and pass on information about trouble-makers, so you can nip potential dangerous situations in the bud before they have a chance to develop.

A good informer network will have an effect on disaffection, partly because it allows you to remove trouble-makers off the streets, but also because people who never know when they are being spied upon are less likely to foment dissent. But there is an inherent danger in this kind of network because if a group of informers is unmasked, the outrage of the spies' friends and neighbors will immediately make itself felt in the form of a big jump in disaffection.

An informer network could get blown at any time (not just at reset) and when it happens, the disaffection level will rise to 50% (although if it's already higher than 50% it won't change) and that might trigger an immediate riot. The build itself doesn't get destroyed because the network recruits new informers whose identity is not know, and at the next reset the extra dis will vanish and the planet's disaffection level will be recalculated as usual.

You can read all the details of informer networks in the Idiot's Guide.


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