New game, anyone?

[Xentropy]

Would anyone like to see a new game out there? I plan on a few edits, including:

- Scout Mauraders reduced to 1 turn/warp so they can, you know, SCOUT.

- Battleship max figs increased to 20000 and shields to 2500. Their 4 turns/warp and small cargo capacity keeps them balanced at this level IMHO.

- Gave Colonial Transports access to density scanners. Making this ship fly blind seems too big a disadvantage when it's already a slow, defenseless barge.

- Increased CargoTran's defensive odds from 0.8 to 1.2. This should help balance it against the Mule.

- Decreased Constellation's odds from 1.4 to 1.3 to help balance it against the StarMaster.

- Gave the T'Khasi Orion holoscanners. (Turns out this was already done in the defaults in v3.05. Guess I wasn't the only one that felt this balance was necessary.)

- Increased Tholian Sentinel shield max to 15000 and decreased its fighter max to 500. May finally be useful as what it's supposed to do, protect planets. Low holds and not much else make it worthless in any other role even with the high shielding.

- New ship: Scout Orion. Fills the void in the game for a decent 2 turn combat ship. 2500 fighters and 500 shields, 1.3:1 odds, but only 30 holds make this ship decent for well-defended exploration and perhaps doing a little alien hunting but little else. It also gets combat scanners.

I also plan on some planet tweaks to make some of the currently useless planetary types useful in some way, and two new good-only ships which require ever-increasing amounts of experience to purchase. Good traders need a reason to gain XP, I'm kinda tired of seeing maxed ISS's with 999 experience sitting in Fedspace every night LOL

Lemme know!

[Wittlich]

Looks good so far Xentropy. Yes, I will probably try-out this universe of yours.

When do you expect to have it up and running?

[burbel]

Hey, I'd be in. As for the planet types, I read that Deserts should be made to be the best fighter producers in the game (not good for much else), earth planets should be made better (heh, we started life on one, not a volcanic, why can volcanic hold more?)?

Maybe lower the people total for an organic planet a bit to make it more reasonable...

Just thoughts, but I would be in.

Also, if you want to play and experiment a bit, try the War of the worlds game mentioned elsehwere, not firaxis. It should be pretty clean except for a lot of my 1 fig tolls, kill all ya want...

[Xentropy]

I'd had similar ideas about deserts already.

I was also going to make glacials excellent at equipment production (making them, per capita, the best moneymakers, but still a fairly low max pop so a maxed organics world would make you more money but take longer to colonize to max).

Max pops on ALL planets would likely be changed in some way such that Class M's would have the highest max pops (but be average in every other way). Gaseous would get extremely fast citadel building, if you really want to take the time getting colonists to survive long enough to build them, not to mention supply everything yourself.

May add new types, like a Gaian with extremely high pop max but low productivity across the board.

Was planning on the game having full delays implemented, and 2 commands per "tick" (second) max, to help take a bit of the advantage away from the script users. Trust me, even with these settings, trading scripts still go by fast, it's other scripts like attack and warp-on-fighter-ping that will be crippled.

Anyway, going to be working on the "perfect" edits. I work the next three days but then have a four day weekend, so I can probably bring the game up Wednesday, if that sounds good to everyone. Maybe sooner, we'll see. Keep an eye out here for game notices.

One possible problem, once I implement all these changes I'm going to want badly to play in the game, myself. I wouldn't cheat, but the problem is if I started to get ahead at any point, people would ASSUME I was cheating even if I wasn't. "Hey, he found my home sector, he must've been spying on my node when I was playing!" >sigh<

The trials and tribulations of being a GameOp... Why did I pay $80 for this again? LOL

ALL settings/edits will be announced beforehand so if I do decide to play no one can complain that I knew something they didn't about the customization. And obviously all local echos would be off and tedit wouldn't be used whatsoever after the initial edits were implemented (basically never post-bigbang).

If anyone wants to just play in a brand new game meanwhile and have fun, not to mention help me stress test my server, I've got a stock 1000 sector 600 turn game running @ 12.224.252.182 port 2002 as of right now (sorry, don't have a domain name, but the IP is static). Well, mostly stock. Only changed setting was no planets at player creation, since I find that a silly setting with every homeworld such created in a useless location.. heh

Oh, if anyone is any good at ANSI art and would like to create ship stat pages for the ships/planets I add, I'd appreciate that too. If not, I'll just have text pages for those, no biggie.

[Wittlich]

Ok, I'm in the test game right now. I noticed that Burbel has also logged on to "stress your server" Xentropy.

It looks like your server is performing smoothly so far...

[Xentropy]

No lag of note, I hope? I noticed Firaxis's server is (strangely given the pipeline to the net they must have) kinda laggy most of the time, even when I'm "alone" in the game..

Glad to see you two had no problems connecting and playing for a while. Did either of you do any ZTM or run any scripts? Did they seem pretty smooth, if so?

Man, I'm excited, can't wait to get my modded game up and see how well balanced I can make the game. Evil/good settings are going to be a tough one to find the right spot for.

Now if I can get more than two interested players I'll be set ;>

[burbel]

The lag seemed OK, but I was mainly scripting/port pair trading, not doing anything interactive. The delay is an interesting change; not sure how I feel about that.

To me, if the turns are limited (say 600-1000 total), then I think that the delay can be turned down, but that's just me. Also, I have never seen a twarp to fighter script or others like that...

I ran ZTM, all 4 types that Swath can run, and also a few port-pair trades with no problems. But as for the 2 players - no idea on that one...

[Xentropy]

Actually, that game up right now is fully stock settings, including stock "delays". I suppose the main one that's getting to you is the one second per turn delay when warping. I may go with half delays instead of full on that. Can you believe "double" is an option?! Imagine half a minute per sector in an interdictor. Eight seconds even in an ISS. THAT is a bit much hehe.

I actually think higher delays make more sense the lower the turns, since a high turn high delay game would just take too long even with scripting. Delays are part of the balance in multiplayer tradewars between ships of different turns/warp. If you're in a scout or merchant freighter you can really outrun an ISS or battleship (discounting that ISS transwarping in front of you, of course).

The other scripts I was referring to are some dangeorus attack scripts some real die hard players use, ones I don't agree with because they detract from how I feel the game should play. They have bots sitting in the game 24/7, and if a player hits a toll fig, their script will transwarp to an adjacent sector in which they also have a toll fig and photon the poor victim, draining their turns. Then warp in and use a capture script if they want. They have until the next hour and the player's turn regen to make a move after that.

Anyway, I'll definitely keep half delay in mind. The little bit I played in a test game even the full delay didn't bother me that much, though that was in a merc freigh with therefore the lowest possible delay. ISS would probably bug me somewhat hehe.

Let me know if there's anything you two would like to see (besides more players; I'm trying to advertise without advertising TOO publically, because I don't want to attract those players that use those attack scripts.. I want a smaller, friendlier crowd than that, ya know? I'd love 50 players if none of them was going to run 24/7 bots and such.)

[burbel]

Wow, well, the most people I've seen on at a time is 2 so far, so I guess I am just not familiar with different delays for different ships - the most populous game I have played on had around 6 different active players, spread out through 4 corps.

I guess I am interested in playing without any die-hard players too. And I've never, IIRC, photoned another player that was online, although that sounds cool. I think I tried it once...

For me the important thing is more players than me and Wittlich (so maybe we can team up for once???), and to better balance the planet types, so people keep planets other than Volcanic and Oceanic (and the occasional Mountainous)... The pop limit on Earth planets always make Ferrengal a capture/clean/destroy thing, I would love to keep it around because it could be useful.

As for ship types, maybe an evil nice ship? I have fun playing evil, but, to me, the lack of ability to twarp colonists combined with the lack of a nice ship kinda sucks... Just a thought, something to make being evil more exciting (in my last game as a good I was making around 40million every 3 days, not to mention 4 million a day in interest (at least), so an evil SSTing couldn't even keep up)...

Just thoughts (stream-of-consciousness like)...

[Xentropy]

Yeah, definitely hope for more players. Hopefully significantly more. I'd like to see at least 20 fairly active players to use some of the interesting settings.

One interesting thing TWGold will do in the latest version is bigbang with very large "bubbles". Not quite the same as simply a dead end, these bubbles would be sort of like, say, a "quadrant" of the universe. I could bigbang with four bubbles, each 220-280 sectors large, with 2-4 gates each, and a total 1200 sectors in the universe. This would create something with 200 "public" sectors and then four huge areas off from that. Protect the entrances properly and you get your own quarter of the universe to use with near-complete safety.

For something like that to REALLY work though would be a game with, say, 20 players. Four corps of 5, so each corp could find and claim a bubble, then you'd have "bubble wars" of a sort. Could really enhance the strategy in a TradeWars game doing something like that.

I don't know if you know, but the latest version even supports galaxy sizes up to 20000 sectors! Massive overkill for these small games (even the 5000 used fairly frequently in these games online is overkill for under 20 players), but I'd think it would be awesome to actually get hundreds of players playing every (or nearly every) day to really fill a universe like that.

As for nice evil ships, that's really the whole balance between good and evil. Evil players get to VERY early in a game make metric tons more credits than good players. This allows them to have more resources quickly. This is balanced by the good players' ability to very quickly colonize at an earlier date and therefore end up with a level 4 citadel earlier for planetary trading to finally get the monetary edge over the evils.

The point of the game for evil is to spend those extra resources finding and squashing good corp/trader's home sectors BEFORE they can get a class 4 citadel. An evil corp can afford to spend millions on ether probes to seek out those home sites.

This is why the best good traders have an evil ally supplying them with credits to defend while they colonize. It's very difficult to beat an evil/good mix.

You mention a previous game where an evil SSTing couldn't keep up. You'd won by then. They failed to stop you from GETTING those planets to make the money you did. Once you reach that "point of no return" where you're making more money, you've won. Evil only has that one advantage (high credit/turn earnings without planets), but it's a big one, especially early.

I hope that balancing the current ships helps evils somewhat, but frankly I think in most games (Firaxis's server excluded; they have some very good-friendly settings going there), and definitely with defaults, evils have an overall edge. They take a more experienced player to play properly, and require a very ruthless playing style (fittingly), but with evil played right, good has no chance because they can never keep a home sector secret for long enough to get a level 2 citadel, much less lvl4.

[King Thor]

Hiya,

I'd love to play in a game with 50-100 players playing actively too, however, its hard to get that many people to play it frequently.

I myself used to play these games frequently, howeverI just dont get the time I need to develop myself properly.

[Xentropy]

I know how you feel, Thor. One thing I'd like TradeWars to allow you to do (which it doesn't at the moment) is set max turns to a different value than turns per day. Say, 400 turns/day, max turns 1600, so someone can play 400 turns daily, or if they're busy and can only play every four days, they can stock up and play them all at once at that time.

Hopefully in a future version this might happen.

Daily players will always have some advantages, but at least the game could make it easier for those who can only play more occassionally.

Such a setting would also make things fairer even for daily players who play their turns at different times of the day. As it is now, if you play 7am one day and not until noon the following day, you miss out on 5 hours worth of turns, but if you then go back to 7am, you have slightly less than a full day's worth. The way the game works now, you'd actually have to play slightly MORE than daily (or at least be extremely careful to log on the same hour of each day) to make sure you never miss out.

Go ahead and join my game, though, Thor. You'd be one of only four players including myself it looks like at the moment, so even if you couldn't play religiously, you could be a contender. Maybe corp up with Wittlich and give him a fighting chance against Burbel

[Wittlich]

Hi KT! long time no see.

I concur that having a 600 Turn, 1800 max turns stored would be great...actually, this type of system occurs in Earth2025 (of course, Earth2025 has nothing in common with TradeWars2002).

[Woodersn]

wicked wicked

Yeah, a way to allow making you unused daily turns "bankable" to a certain max would definitely be a wicked idea. It's too easy for casual players, like myself, to experience burnout if you feel that by missing a day or two here and there you're just absolutely screwing yourself. Maybe one day, they'll put that in there...

Woodersn