MPOGD News: Merchant Empires - Spoils of War - New Round

From:  http://mpogd.com/news/?ID=2109



July 29, 2006
Merchant Empires - Spoils of War - New Round

Submitted news from Atlas:
AdvancedPowers.com is proud to bring you another exciting round of Merchant Empires. We're calling this one the Spoils of War and it will be starting today, Saturday the 29th of this month.

Significant changes have been made to the backend code to allow us to bring you this new round. Heres a list of changes to look for!

* The market has been removed from the game
* Trade: Alignment can be gained / lost during cargo inspections based on whether or not illegal goods are found. Trading at one's own race's ports will result in more alignment gain. Inspection while trading in contrabands will result in greater loss of alignment. (amount of inspections is increased for evil players and decreased for good aligned players)
* Trade: Cargo Inspections, whereby contrabands are found, impounded and the player fined. Also results in loss of personal relations and alignment
* Trade: Removal of tradable personnel, introduction of illegal goods and a couple other new goods (beer, nanobots, graphites, figurines, aso.)
* Trade: Dependencies between goods were redone
* Trade: Local Sales tax of 5% for ALL races (including the Xollian)
* Trade: Imperial Sales tax of 5% in all Imperial protected areas
* Trade: Trading goods costs 1 turn per 200 holds traded (or equivalent part thereof)
* Bases: Taking goods from Stockpile no longer costs any turns
* Alliances: Alliance leader is given the option to reset password of an alliance base
* Alliances: There will be no Groups of Alliances
* Alliances: Non Aggression Pact (NAP) treaty, disables attacks on non-allied players, but still shows them as hostile in scans
* Bases: All bases to be started will require 1 hour construction time (half hour for Gold Members) and cost 2.5M
* Bases are divided on the planet_orbit screen as allied and not allied in the planet orbit screen, like ships are in current_sector.
* Formula to calculate turns used when Gating:
30 + (cargo / 10) + (turns_per_sector * 10) * 2
* Formula to calculate turns used when Jumping:
ROUND(((TPS * 4) + (Cargo / 240) + (TPS / 2.4 * Distance)),0)
NOTE: Jumps are maximized at 50 turns, unless the ship is equipped with a Galaxy Jump Drive.
* The shiplist has been updated to provide a more balanced gameplay experience

As always we are committed to bringing you the best possible experience. As such we will continue to fix both code and content bugs and issues as they arise during the round. We will however ensure that we minimize changes and that all players are properly notified when issues are found and addressed before changes are pushed live.

We invite you to join us at AdvancedPowers.com.