Category talk:The Interstellar Master Traders

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Host 198 had some undocumented features affecting IMT.

1. Driller Killer mechs now mine and smelt ore.

2. IMT bases no longer have any happiness effects from lots of mines.

Points 1 and 2 are "nice touches" which ad flavour to the race. They don't alter game balance much, though it may become more worthwhile ground-chunnelling an IMT "mega mining base" to fresh planets now.

3. IMT government centres work slightly differently now. If you are player 4, you must set your base command code to 004 to transfer cash to your own central account. You can transfer the cash to player 003 or 021 or whoever if you wish. This was intended as another minor bit of colour for a trading race, leading to new ways to do deals. For example, it allows much more rapid conversion of other peoples' metals into gc in their central accounts.

(Each base transfers cash to the player set in that base's command code.)

However, Tim introduced a bug here. He forgot to include the line: "after transferring cash from base reserves to central account, decrement it from the base reserves."

This generates free money! In a test game, I generated 30,000mc in 3 turns, for free.

Tim has sent me a mail saying: in the next Host, this will be reduced to a 25% refund.

Ie the following line has been added in Host 199:

meBaseT.Cash = meBaseT.Cash - Int(0.75 * t)

where t is the amount transferred. Note that It will still be worth people using IMT as a bank: pay them cash for your central account, split the 25% profit! There should be plenty of interesting trades that can be built on this. (I suspect the sensible IMT players will be more interested in food rather than that 25% commission.)

host 199 Remove the IMT free money bug