The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 20, 2009

Official News page 3


JOBS FOR THE BOARDS

by Hazed

While I was out of contact with Fed DataSpace, Alan cracked on and put a load of new stuff in. He sent out a special email earlier this week on the Fed2 Star mailing list so you would know what he had done, but I'm going to recap it again so it'll also be on the website for those that don't get the Star by mail. (And to inject the missing style...)

The two big changes are that POs can now post jobs on the workboard, and Plutocrats can charge a membership fee to join the cartel, or pay out a bonus. Here's the details.


Posting jobs on the workboard

Planet-owners can now post jobs onto the cartel workboard so that haulers will move stuff from your exchange to the exchange of another planet. However, you have to be a member of a cartel outside of the Sol cartel - so there's an incentive to leave Sol and join a Plutocrat's cartel.

The job is generated from the exchange of the planet you are standing on, so long as you own that planet. The command is 'POST JOB commodity planetname', where 'commodity' is the commodity you want to shift and 'planetname' is the destination planet for the cargo, which must be in the same cartel. You can use this to generate jobs to a different planet in the same system or to other star systems in the cartel.

The job will be posted on the workboard as a 75 ton job. The hauling cost is taken out of the planet's treasury right away and held by Armstrong Cuthbert until the job is delivered, at which point it will be paid to the hauler. The goods are also taken from your stockpile at the time the job is created, and held in storage ready for the hauler to pick it up.

When the job is delivered, the goods are sold to the destination planet's exchange and the proceeds taken out of that planet's treasury and paid to your planet. The cargo will be added to the destination's planet's stockpile.

You can't post a job on the board if there are already 40 jobs on the workboard, but any jobs not taken by haulers will expire after a few minutes freeing up space for your job. If your jobs don't get snapped up by other players, they too will expire - the goods will be delivered by Armstrong Cuthbert's robotic trading ships.

Haulers can't void your jobs but that doesn't mean your cargo is completely safe... jobs on the board are not preserved over the reset, so any that are posted but haven't been delivered will vanish, the cargo being appropriated by the stevedores (they consider it one of the perks of the profession) and if a cargo is in a hauler's hold over the reset, the paperwork that credits you as the owner of the goods mysteriously vanishes and the job reverts to being an ordinary job.


On the receiving planet

The goods will always be bought by the receiving planet, and it works exactly the same as if a Merchant sells goods directly to the exchange. If the exchange doesn't actually want the goods then the goods will be sold off to a private buyer at a heavily discounted rate.

That means the stockpile on the destination planet won't get updated if the exchange is not buying that commodity.


What this means for haulers

One big change for Commanders is that you can now use the hyperspace link to get out of the Sol system once you have got 50 hauling credits - you no longer have to wait till you pay off your loan and promote to Captain. This change comes out of a huge fight between the bankers and the commodity markets; the bankers were worried that people who leave Sol without paying off their loans would abscond with their spaceships, but the commodities brokers were more concerned with ensuring a large supply of haulers to facilitate the free movement of goods.

The brokers won, but the bankers are now in talks with Jarrow shipbuilders about adding technology to ships so they can be remotely disabled if the owners default on their loans. This is likely to be another lengthy debate, so don't expect any result soon!

On the workboard, the PO jobs have an asterisk next to them. Haulers who take PO generated jobs off the board will discover that the hauling credits are more generous than those paid out for regular jobs, but otherwise there is no difference in the jobs.


Thanks to the bug-hunters

Thanks go to Dingbat who spotted a bug that had slipped past the testers, and which could have turned out to be very profitable if he hadn't spoken up: while the money was being paid to the generating planet when the goods were delivered, the receiving planet wasn't having the payment taken out of the treasury. Whoops!

Alan fixed this right away!

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