IDIOT'S GUIDE TO FED2
JOINING THE PLUTOCRACY
BLISH CITIES
Building a Blish City
Once you have built a graving dock for your cartel, you can put it to use building some Blish cities.
A Blish city is a mobile habitation, built in space by the cartel and able to move to other star systems in the cartel where it adds its production facilities to another planet. IBuilding a city costs money, uses commodities and takes time, just like when you built the graving dock itself. It also takes workthings from your population, to crew the ship when it launches. You can build as many Blish cities as you like (or you can afford) and the cities can vary in size, with the larger cities giving more production slots to the planets they visit, but taking more time and resources to build.
You start by issuing the build command: BUILD CITY cityname' where 'cityname' is what you want to call the city. You can have spaces in the name. Note that if you want the name to include the word "City" then you have to specify that along with the name - for example, for a city called Nutbush City, you use the command 'build city Nutbush City'.
The city name doesn't have to be unique - since your city will only operate within your cartel, it doesn't matter if there is a Nutbush City in another cartel, too. In fact, the game will let you build more than one city with the same name within a cartel, but that's not a good idea because you won't be able to control them both!
The city name cannot be the same as the name of a production group, ie agri, resource, sea, tech etc, so you can't call your city Tech - although Tech City would be fine.
When you have started the build, you can see the details on the graving dock display with 'DISPLAY GRAVING'. The build process is the same as when you built the dock: you use 'DIVERT' to get the commodities needed sent to the dock.
The initial requirements for building a Blish city are:
Blish City 6 meg, 5 days
Alloys - 3,975
Monopoles - 1,200
Generators - 2,700
Droids - 3,525
Nanos - 1,350
Workers - 10
The workers won't be taken from your pool until the build is completely finished and the city is launched.
While the city is being built, the planets in the hub system won't suffer from disaffection, because all the usual trouble-makers are hoping to be given a job in the impending city so are on their best behavior. Once the city has been launched, disaffection will return as those left behind start to grumble!
When the five days are up, you have a choice. You can fit the city out as a basic size 1 city, or you can expand it. A size 1 city will have one production slot, enabling it to produce one commodity for its host planet, a size 2 city two slots, and so on up to a size 5 city which will offer five production slots. To increase the city's size, you type ' BUILD CITY' - you don't have to specify the name because you can only build one city at at time.
Obviously, the larger the city, the more benefit it will bring to its host planet - size matters! But each expansion takes more time, more commodities, and more money. The details vary depending on the size. The next page gives you the requirements.
Fitting Out
Building a Blish city to its maximum size takes 15 days. Then you have to fit it out. This is the point where you decide which economic level it will have, which will determine which commodities it can give a production boost to when it is docked with a planet. The command to fit out the city is ' BUILD CITY level' where 'level' is either agri, resource, ind, tech or leisure. Blish cities cannot be fitted out to bio level - the risk of spreading contamination throughout your cartel would be far too great!
Just like building the city in the first place, fitting it out uses up commodities and takes time, and the requirements are listed on the next page.
When the fitting out is complete, your city will launch, and at that point the workers required to run it will be taken from your population. (Don't worry, though, they will gradually be replaced over the next couple of weeks.)
Launching the Blish city will clear the graving dock so it is ready for its next building project - which means you can start to build another Blish city. Eventually you can have a whole flotilla of them, ready to go and spread their economic cheer throughout your cartel.
Meanwhile you can check out the status of your new city with the command 'DI CITY cityname' which will show you its details, including its whereabouts and its production slots.
Moving the City
Having launched your Blish city, you have to decide where you want it to go. The command to move the city is 'MOVE cityname TO systemname' where 'cityname' is the name of the city you want to move, and 'systemname' is the destination star system, for example 'move Nutbush City to Limits'. The destination must be in your cartel.
The journey will take a while - between 3 and 5 days - because moving something the size of a large asteroid takes a lot of power, and the city's engines are not tremendously powerful.
Of course, you don't have to move the Blish city to another star system - you could leave it in the hub system of the cartel, where it was built, and use it to boost production of one of your own planets!
You can change your mind about a city's destination in mid-journey - just issue the 'MOVE' command again. If you do, the current journey is cancelled and the trip to the new star system starts from scratch. So if you're not sure where to send your city, while you dither you can have fun steering your city around the Galaxy!
Allocating Production Slots
Once your city arrives at its destination system you need to tell it which planet it should attach itself to, and then tool it up to produce specific commodities.
'ALLOCATE cityname TO planetname' will dock the city to the specified planet, for example, 'allocate nutbush city to church house'. The planet must be in the star system where the city currently resides. This happens straight away.
Once the city is docked, you can tool it up to produce something. 'SET PRODUCTION cityname TO commodityname' will set up the first free production slot to produce the named commodity, for example 'set production nutbush city to furs'. The commodity must match the city's economic level - a leisure city cannot produced an agri commodity. You use the command as many times as needed to set up all the available slots. It then takes 2 days for the city to tool itself up to produce.
In order to change what a slot is producing, you have to cancel the production so it becomes a free slot again, and then you can issue a new instruction to set the production. The command is 'STOP PRODUCTION cityname slotnumber', for example 'stop production nutbush city 3'. This happens right away, and you can then set the production up again, which will take the usual 2 days.
If you change your mind about what you want a slot to produce during that 2 days, issue the stop command and the tooling up will be cancelled, clearing the production slot.
You can re-allocate the city to any other planet in the star system, and this will clear all the production slots. If you move the city to another star system, that will also clear the production.
Producing the Goods
You've built your city, you've fitted it out, you've moved it to another star system, you've docked it with a planet and you've tooled it up... so finally, it's ready to produce.
For each production slot, the city will dump a load of commodities into the planet's exchange at reset. The amount produced will be between 20 and 200 tons. That means, if you have 5 production slots, you could potentially get 1,000 tons every day. Of course, the nature of randomness means you probably won't... and sod's law means you're more likely to get 100 tons a day!
The Blish city display will show you how much was produced at the last reset.
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