Official News page 3

AN INTRODUCTION TO CARTELS

by Hazed

Alan has started to work on the code for the next and final rank of the game, Plutocrat. These exalted creatures own and run cartels, which are groups of planets linked together into an economic and trade organization. For those that remember classic Fed, it's the equivalent of the duchies in that version of the game. POs will apply to have their star system join a cartel; the Plutocrat will set the membership fee, and will be able to accept or reject the bid for membership.

The first thing that Alan will do is to make a change to the workboards which display hauling jobs, so that jobs are limited to within a cartel. Of course, this will make no practical difference in the short-term, because right now all systems are in the same cartel, the Sol cartel, but when we do get some Plutocrats, then haulers will notice the change. Each cartel will have its own workboard, containing jobs with pickup and dropoff locations within the cartel - no jobs will cross cartel boundaries.

Jumping through hyperspace to another cartel will be limited to travel via the capital system of the cartel - that is, the system owned by the Plutocrat. In the case of the Sol duchy, the capital is Sol. So if you're in another system that is in the Sol cartel - say, Rigel - you'll have to jump to Sol first, then to the capital system of the destination cartel, and then to a member system of the cartel.

Once the jobs are working right, Alan will code the promotion so we can actually have some Plutocrats and cartels. He's still dithering about what the promotion requirements will be - he's open to suggestions; send your ideas to feedback@ibgames.com (don't forget to put Fed2 in the subject line).

After that, he can concentrate on the things that Plutocrats will do, such as fiddling with their tax rates and customs duties.

Long-term, he's going to reintroduce pipelining, so that POs will be able to post jobs on the cartel's workboard to move goods from a planet's stockpile to another planet, and CEOs will use jobs to shift stuff from one factory to another. That will mean that haulers will be able to work directly for higher-up players again, as they used to do, with the PO or CEO setting the wages for the hauler. Jobs that are not accepted by Commanders and Captains will eventually be dealt with by Armstrong Cuthbert workers automatically.

So that's what we have to look forward to in Fed DataSpace. Of course, we all want to know how long this is going to take, but when I asked Alan, I got the traditional mumbled response...

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