Official News - page 1

PLANETARY EFFICIENCY EXPLAINED

by Hazed

Normally when players have a question about how something works, we tell them to RTFM - that is, to read the absolutely wonderful manual, the Idiot's Guide to Fed2. But, folks, it's confession time: there's something the manual fails to mention, and that's what planetary efficiency is all about. It tells you how to increase it, but not what happens when you do.

We will be updating the manual to cover this unusual lapse in the next few days, but meanwhile, for all of you who have been confused about efficiency, here's the details.

There are two ways to increase your planet's efficiency:

• You can build infrastructure, which will increase the efficiency of some of the commodities on your planet. For example, building an agricultural college adds 8% to the efficiency of all agri commods, and canals add 1% to all agri and resource commods.
• You can build up a merchant fleet. If you buy a ship registration facility for your planet - the command is 'BUY REGISTRY' and it costs five slithy toves - then any ship bought on your planet will be part of your merchant fleet, and for every ten ships in the fleet, you get a 1% increase in efficiency on all commodities.

The efficiency level for each commodity is shown on the exchange display which you get when you type 'DI EXCHANGE':

Cereals: value 347ig/ton Spread: 20% Stock: current -525/min 100/max 800 Efficiency: 108%

and on the production display which you get from 'DI PRODUCTION commoditygroup':

Cereals: production 7, consumption 14 (-7), efficiency 108%

Efficiency levels are calculated at reset each day, so changes from builds or extra ships won't show up right away.

So what does this mean? It's not complicated. If the efficiency for a commodity is more than 100%, it simply means that the exchange is going to produce more of those goods over time. The production points are not changed - if your cereal production is 7, and then you increase the efficiency, the production is going to stay 7. To use an analogy, if production points equate to the number of machines churning out the commodity, then an efficiency boost doesn't give you any extra machines, it just makes the existing machines work a bit better.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page