Official News - page 1

CAN'T GET NO SATISFACTION

by Hazed

I have been promising for a number of weeks that I would give you the details about dissatisfaction, but getting the facts out of Bella has not been easy. Her vagueness always increases the more important the information one is trying to extract. In the end I had to resort to the most extreme methods... well, let's not go into details; suffice it to say that I succeeding in finding out what all Engineers are desperate to know.

Under normal circumstances, dissatisfaction would start to be an issue as soon as a planet-owner promotes to Engineer. Right now, Engineers have a period of despite while Bella finishes up the code, so you need to make the most of it to put your planet in order and ensure your population are kept happy.

Once the code is implemented - and no, I can't estimate how long that's going to be - here's how it will work.

Dissatisfaction is what happens when your population gets unhappy about conditions on your planet - this unhappiness is a result of the side-effects of some infrastructure builds. You can offset it by other builds which will make them feel better.

You need to read through the information about the builds that you have been implemented so far to see which ones will make your citizens get disgruntled and which ones reduce their misery.

The effect the builds have on dissatisfaction, both positive and negative, is calculated each day at reset, and the resulting figure is shown on your planet display as a percentage. Dissatisfied citizens are prone to rioting, and if there is any dissatisfaction at all then there's a chance of something bad happening - even a figure as low as 1% could be enough to get them to kick off. The higher the percentage, the higher the chance.

Should your population riot, they will cause damage by destroying property on the planet. The things they could destroy are:

• The stockpile of a particular commodity
• A factory
• A depot
• An infrastructure build

You can see why it's going to be important to avoid this kind of trouble! Your CEOs are not going to be happy if one of their factories suddenly gets knocked down by a bunch of rioting plebs! Having an infrastructure build torn down could also make dissatisfaction worse, in a vicious circle, or perhaps a spiral of destruction, or even a helix of obliteration.

Having rioted, your populace's taste for violence is only going to be inflamed, and the dissatisfaction will not go down until you do something to reduce their unhappiness. So if you fail to stem the tide of unrest, more damage could happen at the next reset.

Details of riots and their effects will show up on the SpyNet Financial reports so that everybody will be able to see just how angry with you your citizens are.

Historically, rioting peasants have created a great deal of destruction and mayhem. An example is the Gordon Riots in London in June 1780, when a mob opposed to religious tolerance for Catholics stormed the Houses of Parliament and then took over the whole of London for a week, destroying several prisons and catholic churches, and attacking the houses of known catholic sympathizers and the sponsors of the law they were protesting about. In the end, the rioting had to be suppressed by the army. You can read about it at http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/18reform/gordon.htm.

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