Hi!
The demo has been updated and is available on Windows and Mac. Not a huge list of changes, but the ones that are there matter.
New: limit orders
A regular exchange works the simple way: you buy at the price currently on the board. A limit order means something else, namely "buy when the price gets down to here". You leave a note for the market and go do other things.
You spot a war warning in the Summary, so you place a DARKCOIN buy below market ahead of time. If the panic pushes the rate through, you pick it up at the bottom. If it doesn't, your money sat idle for three turns.
The rules are simple: three active orders per run, each lives three turns, and placing one costs a non-refundable 0.5% fee. The price also can't sit closer than 10% to the current rate, otherwise the order would just catch ordinary market noise instead of an actual event.
Exchange rebalance
The main change: you now pay for how much you move the market. Previously a sale paid you at the old price, and the crash only hit coins you no longer owned. Which meant dumping an entire position in one click was free. Now a large trade fills at the average price, and the bigger it is, the more it costs.
There is no ceiling on that anymore: double the trade and you always pay more. On top of that, every coin has its own market depth. USDCOIN is deep, so cashing out through it is cheap. DARKCOIN is thin and collapses on far smaller volume. There's now an actual choice of which way to cash out.
Small trades, by the way, got cheaper than they used to be. Only the large ones got more expensive.
Interpol can see the money now
Swapping more than a million worth of coin into USD in a single trade leaves a trace, and Interpol goes up. How much depends on the coin: USDCOIN is the quietest, DARKCOIN is the dirtiest.
There's also a new anomaly detector. It doesn't look at the sum, it looks at the pattern: heavy volume in one turn, one enormous trade, or a string of split ones. If it fires, an investigation opens for three turns. Interpol's natural cool-down switches off, and the bribe on the Pressure screen costs double. Sit quiet for those three turns and the case closes for free. Keep trading and you get an 8% fine on your balance, and in the high zones there's a 50/50 chance they freeze your most-traded coin instead.
The point is to turn "cash out before the arrest" from a button into a decision.
Bribe failure chance removed
A bribe now always takes off the full amount for its zone. The failure roll was breaking your ability to plan anything. If it turns out too easy, I'll put it back into Hard mode. Let me know.
Performance
Fixed the main cause of PDA slowdowns: the mail list was recalculating text truncation for every letter, every single frame. By mid-run that was dragging down even strong machines. The Alerts tab, the news feed, the map and the tooltips got faster along with it.
Small stuff
Country status icons on the Map are bigger and no longer get covered by route lines
Country dossier panel was relaid out, at four statuses the icons overlapped the graph
Better puzzle distribution in ordinary flash drives, no more runs of four identical ones
Amounts in the top bar now round down instead of up
The syndicate chart was labelled "Price" while drawing reputation. It now draws the actual share price
Font fixes: a few characters weren't rendering and showed up as boxes
Tell me what you liked and what broke. I read everything. And if you're waiting for the full version, wishlisting really does help.
-BadGafi