Design, Cartel, and Culture Updates

A big change for affiliated cartels has just been released. Affiliated cartels are those that belong to a nation and each nation has one of each type. Trademasters in those cartels are elected, not appointed.

For as long as there have been cartels, only Trademasters could work on designs, requiring designers to mail them their design submissions and include the fee in an envelope for cartel-specific designs. For affiliated cartels, the nation would then often reimburse the designer or the Trademaster, creating even more red tape.

Now, affiliated cartels will allow all members to work on designs! The Trademaster still retains the sole right of deciding which designs move forward by submitting them, but this change shifts their role towards review, tutoring, and support. Should a design be rejected, members can now fix and resubmit it on their own, as well.

The second part of this update gives Ministers of Cultural Affairs an Endowment Fund. Trademasters of affiliated cartels can draw upon this fund directly to cover the fees of cartel-specific submissions, removing the need for reimbursements.

Information about all this and more can be found in Changelog #3166.

As these changes extensively alter how the DESIGN command works, please help us test that everything is working as intended. We did not add designer limits or a way to “ban” a member from working on their own designs as we assume such will not be needed, but should it become required we will do so. Also, the design permissions change only affects affiliated cartels at the moment but, if desired, we could make it a toggleable option for private cartels as well.

Happy designing!