Star Merchant II

Version 1.1.0: The Honest Chronicle

A maintenance release, all of it from reports off the live boards. The daily Chronicle stops repeating itself, learns its grammar, and stops giving directions it cannot promise; and one line of the diplomatic grid returns to formation. Overlay the files and the next tick does the rest. Nothing about a running round is disturbed, and boards with the stuck markets heal themselves within a few days.

The markets move again

If your board's Chronicle has been reporting the same line every day, one per region, something like "Ore are up 30 percent in Region 2", this is the release that ends it. The cause was found in the daily tick: the regional price drift was being read back from a value that already had the scarcity premium multiplied in, so on a quiet board that premium compounded, day over day, until every region was pinned at the +30 percent ceiling. Once there, it stayed there. The Chronicle was not making it up; the prices really were stuck.

The drift now keeps its own ledger, with the scarcity premium applied fresh each day on top of it. Regional prices wander, recover, and answer to what captains actually deliver, the way they were always meant to.

• Upgrading boards heal on their own. The stuck value seeds the corrected drift, and the daily pull toward normal brings it home within a few days. No reset, no intervention; the Chronicle simply starts telling a different story each morning.

Small print, set right

• "Ore is up." Ore is a mass noun and takes "is". Organics and Components keep "are". The Chronicle's market lines now conjugate accordingly.
• No more "type the door command to join." The Chronicle's closing line assumed every board reaches its doors the same way. SysOps build their menus however they like, so the sign-off is now simply "Star Merchant II, playing now on this board."
• The Kessendri Combine falls in line. On the Diplomatic Standing screen, the Combine's row sat one column to the right of the other four factions. Its name is exactly 21 characters and the column was padded to 20. The grid pads to 21 now, and a test holds all five rows in formation for good.

For live boards: what the upgrade does

Extract the zip and upload the starmerchant2/ folder into doors/ off the ATDT install root (for example /atdt/doors/starmerchant2/), replacing the files in place. No schema changes, no data touched, and the running round continues exactly where it was. The market fix takes effect at the next daily tick.

Version 1.0.0

First release. A full space trading and conquest game in the TradeWars tradition: a thousand sectors, ports whose prices move with their warehouses, colonies to plant and fortify, five factions with their own plans, and four ways to win by trade, territory, exploration or diplomacy. Ship to ship combat, sieges that resolve at the turn of the day, a free trade computer and autopilot, and a daily Chronicle posted to your message base.