[geoschmo]

The game is restarted. Not sure why the mail isn't working. Must be related to the DNS problem. There is a new turn and a new news message.

I attempted a compromise and went with 20K starting resources. The people without natural merchants are going to have to plan their first few turns carefully, but at least there is a posibility now that they can keep their empire economy from crashing if they play it right. As I realized with 5K there was no chance. It simply was impossible to build a space port and a single mineral fac before the storage would be depleted.

I hope noone minds too much that I changed the settings without asking. The reason I didn't was that honestly I saw no reason to change your empire file so taking a poll to me would have been another uneccesary delay. In my mind anyone that took Natural Merchants would have still taken natural merchants, whether the starting resources were 5k, 20k, or 100k. Those that did not take natural merchants would have been screwed with a 5K start because of a simple mistake in empire setup. That's no fun for them, and no fun for anyone beating them either.

If I had this to do over again from the start I would probably give people 4 faciliites instead of zero.