Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 30, 2006

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INFRASTRUCTURE BUILDS FOR PLANET OWNERS

The Fed II Star is back after a two-week break, and while we were away Our Illustrious Leader Bella has been working hard on exciting things for planet owners. New in tomorrow will be the first of the infrastructure builds that you can do to enhance your planet.

Bella's design for planet infrastructure splits the builds up into categories - these are currently listed on the planet display - with each category containing a number of different builds. Some builds cannot be done until your planet is at a higher level; some require you to do other builds as a prerequisite. A complete list of the builds will be added to the web site tomorrow as part of the Idiot's Guide and as each build is implemented, the full details will be filled in.

Builds will have a number of effects on your planet - some permanent, some expiring at higher economic levels. The most common is a boost to productivity - either to an individual commodity which you specify, to a group of commodities such as defence industries or sea-based industries, to a whole commodity group, or to the economy as a whole. Builds can also increase population, reduce disaffection, or allow you to increase the size of your merchant fleet.

Sometimes failure to build the required number of certain installations will have a negative effect, such as increasing disaffection: you will need to build the infrastructure just to keep things where they are, like the Red Queen's race.

Some builds will themselves have negative side-effects, such as increasing disaffection or reducing population, so will need to be balanced with other builds to mitigate the bad effects.

Altogether, there will be about 50 different things you will be able to build to enhance your planet. The correct strategy will not be to just build absolutely everything that you can, but to pick and choose which of the infrastructure builds will work best for your planet - and in what order! I predict that players will come up with many different methods of conducting builds.

Bella will be putting in the builds one at a time over the next few months, starting with the builds relevant to agricultural worlds. First up will be one of the communications builds - heliograph and signal towers, the basic way of ensuring your population, while spread out over your agricultural world, can keep in contact. These will give you one extra production point which you can allocate to any agricultural or resource commodity. You can have up to five of these builds. POs who own agricultural or resource planets can build them, but they expire when the planet become an industrial world. This build will be going into the game tomorrow (Monday).

Basic infrastructure builds cost 10 meg. The command is 'BUILD infrastructure', where 'infrastructure' is the type of build you want to do. In the case of a heliograph build you will also need to specify the commodity to which you want the production point to be added. So the command to build a heliograph will be 'BUILD HELIOGRAPH commodity', where 'commodity' is an agri or resource commodity.

The next build to be added will be part of the defence category - planetary defences. These are ground-based defence installations, intended to defend your world against attacks from pirates and other lawless forces. You can expect this in the next couple of weeks.

Builds are not just important to improve your planet; you are also going to need to do a certain number of builds before your planet can move up to the next economic level. However, the exact number and type of builds required has not been decided yet.


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