Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 17, 2013

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WHAT BELLA DID NEXT

by Hazed

Now the crash bug has finally been laid to rest, Alan can turn his attention to more interesting work on Fed. Here’s a rundown of the things that are on his to-do list:

What happens to Blish Cities with Plutocrat promotions

What’s supposed to happen is that if a PO promotes to Plutocrat, any Blish Cities that the cartel owner has docked in the system will be sent back home again - just as if the PO leaves the cartel.

But that’s not happening. The Blish City is staying in the system even though it’s now a cartel of its own.

This needs fixing! Thanks to Jeffro for reporting the problem.

Reworking the Trader rank

There is a problem with the rank of Trader, which a new player pointed out to us a few weeks back. It is that futures depend on market volatility, but since the game only has a small number of active players at the moment, those ups and downs in prices don’t happen very often.

In fact, about the only time you can get any decent futures is when a new planet is linked into the game, or an existing planet promotes to a new economic level.

As a result, Traders find it very difficult to get the credits needed to promote.

So Alan intends to take a look at the whole system and come up with a way to generate profitable futures that is not so dependent on the player planets.

This isn’t something that can be fixed with a quick tweak, but I will keep you posted if there is any progress to report.

Auto-linking of second and subsequent planets

I am keen to see this implemented because it will remove the burden from my shoulders of having to make the files for people who want to link a new planet but are unable to use the Workbench for whatever reason. It’s a fiddly process with many opportunities for mistakes to creep in (even with my demi-divine abilities).

However, it’s complicated, because there are so many things to be set when a new planet is linked into an existing system. Different things have to be done for a second planet than for a third planet, and so on. Then there’s the fact that the third planet has to be a bio, but the fifth planet can be either agri or bio. And each time, the space map is going to have to be altered to add in the orbit location for the new planet. Yes, I said it was fiddly!

So don’t expect to see this soon.

New FedTerm

The Fed front-end is looking a bit long in the tooth now, and it’s time for a new version. For one thing, it needs to be made more compatible with Windows 7. There’s also a number of different screens that should be added, such as cartel display screens.

So Alan is going to be working on a new version. As with all of these projects, it’s impossible to make any guess about when you are likely to see the new FedTerm, but I will tell you about any progress in future issues of the Star.

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