**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 94.11.27 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> THANKS FOR THE MEMORY We hope you had a happy Thanksgiving holiday. There's still time if you are quick to explore the planet Fowl, in the Digestive system, where you will find some of Fed's families and clans indulging in celebratory gatherings. Many apologies for the problems which meant GEnie users couldn't get to Fed for most of the day on Thursday. GEnie was suffering all kinds of problems, and one of the things that got hit was the routing to the computer that runs Fed (and many of the other games). **>> CHECKING FOR ERRORS Now that you are able to link your own planets into the game, it's becoming clear that Bella used to weed out many problems without realising it. The planet checker, that screens the data for possible errors, can only check for problems that we have actually thought of, and people seem to be endlessly inventive when it comes to finding new ways to cause problems!! Every time some new error comes up which the checker doesn't know about, Bella will add it to the list of things to check. But it will probably take a while before every contingency has been covered. And even then, someone will do something peculiar that no-one in a million years would have thought of before. Meanwhile, remember the prohibition on changing the location numbers of your three important locations: Orbit, Landing Pad and Trading Exchange. This prohibition also applies to the time between you telling the game to link your planet, and it actually appearing in the game at the next reset. Once you select the "A" option, the game hard-codes those location numbers in. So don't change them! **>> MINUTES OF THE MEETING Last Sunday Bella met with the planet-owners, to consult and get their opinions on a few matters, and to let them ask questions and make suggestions. It was a productive meeting for both sides. An edited transcript has been uploaded to the Federation official library on page 220 on GEnie, file #189. Here are the main subjects that were discussed, with comments about the results. Bella asked the planet-owners their opinion on whether they should be able to cast the votes from ships registered to their planets. Not surprisingly, the planet-owners were in favour of this (with the exception of the planet-owners who also have Duke personas, also not surprisingly). Bella will not be making a final decision on this until the end of the year, so there is plenty of time for you to put forward your opinions. Bella agreed to add two variants on the command for Merchants and over, to enable them to get prices for one commodity on one planet, and one commodity for a duchy. This will go in sometime in the next month. Planet-owners asked when planet decay would start. Bella said she was delaying this; planet-owners will get a month's notice before it happens. A line will be added to the planet display showing the number of days until resource depletion commences. Once depletion is in effect on your planet, it will indicate the extent of the depletion; on promotion it will go back to telling you how long until it starts again. Planet-owners wanted to know how they could tell if someone had sent an embassy to their planet. Bella will add some code to inform you sometime in the next month. Some of the things talked about in the meeting have already been implemented - see below for the details. We will continue to hold meetings with players at regular intervals. The next one will be sometime after Christmas, for lower-ranking players. **>> THE FUTURE OF PLANET ECONOMIES Bella talked a little about the changes that planet-owners will see as the planet economies get more sophisticated; here's a summary of her comments: "Investment points were deliberately made better value than the old duke purchases because of the decay. I wanted to make the planet owning levels much more interesting for you all cause you have to juggle and tune things on a regular basis to maximize the profit. You don't have to do much tuning at the moment, but with decay first and then other bits and pieces coming in it will be more difficult - I have to put decay in first so I can get it right, then as other things that affect production/consumpiton go in I can cut the decay to compensate - but first i have to have one variable that i can use to get the right balance. I will use decay to get the balance between investment and decay correct. For instance: what the planet's population consume will depend on the level of the planet - and how many of them there are; i.e. leisure planet hedonists have different needs to farmers. Then there are other things - if your population starts rioting they are likely to damage investment. If you have to call in the marines to put down a riot there could be damage. Imperial marines are likely to do the most damage. The other things that could have effects are sabotage by spy rings spilling over to damage real estate." **>> INVESTMENT POINTS Planet-owners complained at the meeting that when they invested money in their planets it was before they knew about planetary depletion, so hadn't put their groats where they could have the best effect. Apparently some paranoiacs had pumped all their points into security, and completely neglected to actually develop their economies. Bella agreed to remove all investment that had already been made, and refund the money, so they could try again. She has now done that. All the things you can invest in are important, for different reasons, and it is expected that you will have to make some pretty hard decisions about where to invest your groats. A new entry on the planet display helps you to see the effect of your investment by showing the increased production. **>> ROLLING, ROLLING, ROLLING... Bella is considering removing the option for planet-owners to ask for their exchanges to be re-rolled. In NewFed, it is more more difficult technically for her to re-roll an exchange. In addition, planet-owners now have many more ways to improve their economies. So, unless any of you come up with an overwhelmingly good reason why the option should stay, there won't be any more re-rolling. **>> REGISTRATION FRUSTRATION Planet-owners now have an entry on their display to tell them the size of their merchant fleet - how many ships have been registered to their planets. This will be particularly significant when voting for Emperor takes place. We've heard a few mumbles that the number shown was incorrect, but until someone gave us some hard facts and firm evidence there wasn't much we could do to check things out. Now, we've received the information we need, and Bella has discovered that there is a problem which only shows up for planets that have a different system name. When ships are bought they are registered to the system: the code that checks the merchant fleet each day checks ships registered to the planet! Bella has changed it now so that ships bought register to the planet. However, any ships already in existance, which were bought on a planet where the system name is different, won't show up on the display. When it gets closer to election time, if there are still any such ships, Bella will wave her magic wand to fix them. **>> BASE DETERIORATION TURNED OFF Base deterioration has been turned off until next Friday, to make up for lost builds due to the problems last week. There's nothing more to add to that! **>> INFORMATION SUPERMENU On GEnie, we've made a few more changes to the Fed page. You will no doubt have noticed (unless you've had your head in the proverbial bucket) that there's a nice new graphic of a rocketship on the page. A new option on the menu, called Supplement to the Idiot's Guide, gives the latest details of changes to the game. Read this in conjunction with the manuals to make sure you have the most up-to-date instructions. A new file in the library is called FEDFAQ.TXT. This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions. As well as the Questions, it also contains their Answers - it wouldn't be much use otherwise! It is aimed at people who are interested in the game but want to know a bit more about it, and new players who aren't sure what they are supposed to be doing. New in the library on Cris: the game manuals are at last available. Thanks to Lyrynna for uploading them. She will be uploading more useful information over the next few weeks, including the Supplement to the Idiot's Guide, and the FAQ document. On GEnie, the Federation News Archives are taking shape. Issues from 1990 and 1991 have been uploaded; the following years will be made available over the next few weeks. The files now available are #116 to #185. **>> THE ORIGINAL SIN Religions have come and gone, faded into the mists. If they have not faded, then they have merged or diverged into different fascist cults. Such religions that have founded the Church of St. Pegasus, Church of St. Glurg, and the Followers of the Winslow. Tracing back lineages and chains of commands, we think we have found the -*Original*- Federation Religion. The following article was found in the depths of an old H-by-A publication: Following the collapse of the subversive group The Dark Side, Oxcart has been at something of a loose end. In order to fill the gaps in his life, he has decided to start a new religion. The Holy Church of the True Faith of the Sacred Chicken has declared a crusade against all unbelievers. Religious zealots will be searching ships on landing pads, and if they do not have an icon of the Blessed Saint Reginald displayed prominently in the control cabin, the heretics will be sacrificed in all kinds of unpleasant (and probably very newsworthy) ways. You have been warned! Well, it makes as much sense as any of the other religions! **>> DANGEROUS DIERDRE Did you know that Dierdre is an evil witch? Neither did we. But she tells us she sits, like a black widow spider, in her lair on Cove and lures young Traders and Merchants into her web with the promise of high buy prices - and then she eats them for supper. Eats them raw. While they are still alive. And concious. She likes to watch them wriggle and scream, apparently. She also has a closet full of broomsticks, and she floats to the top of water. She admits to having a wart, but says only Budwarp knows where it is. We have no confirmation that she once turned Sean into a newt (but he got better). After imparting this shocking news to our roving NewsDroid, Dierdre made comments about having to go indoors because the light of the sun would kill her. Yes, it appears she is a vampire as well as a witch, having been bitten by the vampire Alucard. We asked if there was anything else she'd like to tell us. Yes, she said, she also had leprosy. Charming! Did Budwarp know what he was marrying? **>> PLANETS AND DUCHIES There are currently over 40 player-planets in the game for you to explore. That should be enough real-estate to ensure you never get bored! Galena's planet, Mallavia, has re-appeared as she returned from the dead and regained her former position. Two new worlds were added suddenly this weekend: Pink's Idyll, in the Salamander system, and Aren's Naug, in the Erie system. Pink's planet looks promising, but it's only 16 locations, so we are not going to review it until next week. Hopefully it will have expanded to its full glory by then. We are also going to hold off exploring Aren's Naug until next week. We took a look at the planet, and it needs a lot of work to tidy it up. It's rife with spelling mistakes, in many cases the movement table doesn't match the moves given in the description, and some of the descriptions are most Occy-esque in the depth of their inpenetrability! Aren hadn't joined a duchy when we checked earlier today. Pink has, unsurprisingly, joined up with Nightstalker's Nightfall. Galena has signed with Zagmar's Valaria. The only other change to the duchies has been Dirge switching his allegience from Amigan's Athens to Budwarp's Epini. **>> SPYNET REVIEW Congratulations to everyone who promoted during the past week. We may have missed a few promotions, because the data-collecting droid threw a wobbly - if your name should be mentioned here but isn't, sorry! The new Captains were Arian, Bahba, Hans, Astrin (back from the dead), Arlaan, Kiellan and Hanna. Astrin, Gigo, Ceinwen and Kiellan were promoted to Adventurer/euse. Knightfall joined the Traders Guild. The awesome JP puzzle was cracked by Astrin and Mastermind. Pink and Aren solved the fiendish GM puzzle, then went on to make Explorer. Pink and Aren both become Squires when their new planets were linked into the game. Galena became a Squire again when her planet was re- linked, following her return from the dead. JP Astrin went d-d while rushing about Snark trying to solve the GM puzzle. He's come back, and now checks his insurance every five minutes! **>> 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. The current Federation Party Hosts are: Mira, Redqueen, Caterpillar, Lyrynna and Varina. Their function is to answer questions, help new players get started, and make fun things happen. In the event of a problem or question, you can: * talk to Hazed or one of the Party Hosts in the game * a message to Hazed * send mail on your host system to the Federation team: on GEnie, mail FEDII.2 or use the option on the main Fed page on Delphi, mail FEDERATION2 on Cris, mail FEDERATION2 **>> BULLETIN ENDS