I was just wondering what everyones thoughts are on custom ships as far as how many fighters they can hold, do you think ships that are built to carry 200-400k fighters make for a better game then ships that are set for 1k-100k? here is my thoughts

i think for small sector games 1k-10k sectors with turn limits, ships with massive amounts of fighters could be bad, since it requires everyone to work hard to get that many fighters, and thats not including custom planets that make 1 fighter per colonist,possibly not a good setting for a small sector turn game.

on the otherhand for larger games 10k-20k sectors with lots of turns, or unlimited turns, larger fighter carrying ships could be good i think, since people have more time to build up resources to stock the ship, and maybe custom planets that make good fighters could help also, but not to the point where everyone makes that planet type and floods the game with fighters.

this is just some stuff i'm tossing around in my head. just want to know what everyone thinks on the topic.

Marious

My philosophy tends to stay near to stock ships and planets. I like games to last a while, as it helps casual gamers like me have a shot at competing. In a low turn game, with stock edits, if I miss a day, it won't totally kill me . I also find its much more strategy centered, if you can limit people's time in game, and make the game advance more slowly, with big fig ships you tend to have more arcade action, which may please some but is not my thing. I am actually thinking of ways to address mixed alignment corps, as it is, its too easy in my view. I am thinking about just disabling steal from buy port. That would suck a lot of life out of reds, but hell, reds are broken in my view, they are too powerful in mixed align corps... so I am thinking about taking out soem of their teeth, to try and slow down the game.

"Jedi do not concern me" -The Sith

Col

When it comes to reds. I believe the same as you. I think that they are too powerfull when playing mixed corps or mega-corps. In some of my games. I do have the steal from buy ports turned off. As a result no one wants to play in those games.


The WABBIT
ICQ# 12988803
http://www.shadowworldgame.com

I find that if you balance everything for good and evil, you can make bigger and badder ships in a 20k universe. My game is set to run 60 days, and I have what I call a Sovereign Class for the goods that they get when they reach the Admirals Rank that is maxed out, as well as an Executive Warcraft for evils to buy for 250 mill that is also maxed out. I think gold edit ships and gold edit planets and alien races are what people want these days. I'm a TW'er from way back when I played with a state of the art 14.4 modem, but alas, times have changed, so as sysops, it's partly our job to keep the game evolving with EIS to keep it around and interesting. I'm even using my game to tell a story, that the players help evolve, it's kinda following a famous movie series if you know what I mean. The first game was part 4, now we're on part 5, then part 6 will finish it out until we go back to part 1. Just my 2 cents

Hawkeye
Galactic Struggles
Http://Home.Cfl.RR.Com/Tw2002

Hawkeye
Galactic Struggles
Http://Home.Cfl.RR.Com/TW2002

I think if you balance the actual game settings with the ship and planet settings you'll be fine. You can have a 400k ship in a 500 turn game and it won't upset the balance. Why? 'Cause people don't have the turns to make a lot of cash each day. It'll take them a while to come up with 400k figs. And even then if you crank the turns per warp on the ship, or make it weaker in offensive or defensive odds, it would be fine. You just need to fine tune all of the settings.

Fuseblown
http://www.thestardock.com

The most important thing about custom ships/planets is attempting to have a balanced game. Anyone can edit a ship that can hold max figs, move 1 turn per warp, and have an Interdictor generator. Having a ship like that balanced with other ship classes is difficult.

Not too long ago I edited a "Manned Etherprobe" for Nazwes Chaiwind at Mission Nighthawk. It was zero turns per warp, and carried an assume complement of 5 fighters! The ship was usefull in some circumstances (though most of the players were too scared to use it). Another ship I built was the "Super Marauder", which was basically an upgraded Scout Marauder. 4.0 to one combat odds, 2500 fighters, 50 hold, T-Warp, Interdictor, Holo Scan, 2 turns per warp move ratio. A Great ship for exploring, and a great ship for planetary invasions during the first two weeks of the game.

While it is possible to edit a ship with over a billion fighters (I have my own custom editor that I built), and I've love to use one sometime, I have yet to come up with a good reason to have one in a game!

The Mad Hatter

Yeah, as I stated before, one of the hardest things to do in a game is balance, but it's the most important.

Unless you want a game that lasts for a couple of days, having planets that have a 1:1 fighter production ratio is bad. When players don't have to struggle a bit to get their fortune, then it's not worth anything in the end - What's a million credits when you can make 12 mil an hour? What are 20 thousand fighters when your planets make more than that in a day?

But make them work for it, and suddenly, 1 million credits seems to be a bit more money, and those 20 thousand fighters will be hoarded more carefully.

Balance = Good.

Click Here for your Tagline!

Which brings up a point - I'm holding a ship design contest on my Test Bed Server. If you have any decent ideas for ship designs, feel free to drop in and build one.

Telnet to 24.156.254.93 Port 2003

And you are into Tedit.

Telnet to 24.156.254.93 Port 23

And you you are into the game and can test it out.

Note that when I call it a "Test Bed", that's what it is. I'm not running it as a playing server, and the games that are there may change without notice if I get in the mood for playing around.

I will be holding a vote on the ship designs near the end of May.

Oh, and make sure that your alias is in the Manufacturers field, so I know who to blame .

The Mad Hatter

The only game I have edited ships in for now is merely my idea of balance against the existing design.

I added various levels of Imperial ships, requiring more and more experience, to give good traders a reason to gain experience instead of simply staying Fedsafe (which I find pretty boring). And I added a combat-worthy 2 turn/warp vessel since the existing ships were missing such a design. But nothing is overdone.

I also made the following tweaks to existing ships:

Scout Mauraders to 1 turn/warp.
Battleship max figs to 20k and shields to 2500.
Colts get density scanners (they're already vulnerable enough IMHO).
CargoTran defensive odds to 1.2:1 (more balance against the superior Mule).
Constellation odds decreased to 1.3 (to better balance against the StarMaster).
I was going to add holoscanners to the Orion, but it seems one of the revs had already done this ;> Guess THAT balance issue was agreed with by more than just me.
Increased Tholian shields to 15k and reduced figs to 500. Maybe SOMEONE will actually use them someday that way.
ISS dropped to 30k figs to give more breathing room to the higher experience Imperial ship sliding scale.

Fairly basic changes which will hopefully make some of the ships no one ever uses more often used.

I also changed the planets across the board, and since all planets are more useful in general, gave my universe a max planets/sector of 2, to avoid minmaxing as much as possible. At least make someone take a larger bubble if they want to minmax, so they're therefore found sooner.

Everything should have its pros and cons. Just keep that in mind as you make your edits and you should do well.

quote:
ISS dropped to 30k figs to give more breathing room to the higher experience Imperial ship sliding scale.


Rave's Trade Wars Trivia: Did you know the original Imperial StarShip only carried 30,000 fighters before Trade Wars 2002 v2 was released?

(Something I think should have stayed the same...)

In regards to your other ship edits, you might want to consider giving the StarMaster a TPW of 2. The StarMaster used to be one of the best ships in the game before the turns system we have today was introduced in v2. In turns equivelant, it would have a TPW of 2.5 (which is impossible to edit). It was a great ship before the moves/turn system was revamped in v2, at which point it became nothing more than a filler ship.

Lisa M. Wilson
aka Rave

quote:
quote:
ISS dropped to 30k figs to give more breathing room to the higher experience Imperial ship sliding scale.


Rave's Trade Wars Trivia: Did you know the original Imperial StarShip only carried 30,000 fighters before Trade Wars 2002 v2 was released?

(Something I think should have stayed the same...)


Yes, quite aware of that, actually :> It's mostly due to nostalgia that I jumped right in and bought a full registration to everything when I found out TradeWars was still around after all this time. I played TradeWars all the way from 0.98 (when I was a wee one at 13 years old hehe) through the infinite fighter/shield bugs of 1.03x and to the MBBS version that introduced true multiplay. The ISS went from 30k to 50k when v2 was released because the variable holding fighter counts went from 16-bit int to 32-bit and I guess someone decided it should've ALWAYS been 50k but the field just couldn't hold the value before.

For the sake of my edits, the ISS gets 30k fighters, and there is now an Imperial Battleship which reqs Lieutenant J.G. (8192 xp) which holds 50k and includes 1.6 odds and a battlescanner. Basically barely an improvement on the v3 ISS and requires you lose your Fedsafe to use it. (My games are also fairly small affairs, so even 8192xp takes a while to reach.) Beyond that is the Imperial Dreadnaught, which is muchly a 6 turn/warp Interdictor Cruiser, but which requires Commander (65k XP). I'd increase the XP req for such a powerful ship if I had more players, but with only 4 or 5 players really being very active, 65k XP is nigh on impossible without megadumping, which would still take a couple of weeks at 960 turns.

Just for giggles and grins I threw in an Imperial Admiralty Cruiser with kickass stats (3 turns/warp, 250k figs, but even this guy is sort of balanced--no photons and basically no holds), but no one is going to be able to get 520k XP in such a small game, and if they did they'd have probably won already anyway, so it's mostly there to look pretty in the ship catalog and make the players drool LOL

quote:
In regards to your other ship edits, you might want to consider giving the StarMaster a TPW of 2. The StarMaster used to be one of the best ships in the game before the turns system we have today was introduced in v2. In turns equivelant, it would have a TPW of 2.5 (which is impossible to edit). It was a great ship before the moves/turn system was revamped in v2, at which point it became nothing more than a filler ship.


Way too much of an overedit there. I realize it was an awesome ship back in the day, but things have changed since then. Dropping the StarMaster to 2 turns/warp would obsolete the Merchant Freighter, the 2 turn/warp combat ship I designed, and just about every 2 OR 3 turn per warp ship other than the CorpFlag (and MAYBE Havoc, for the transwarp).

One thing I COULD do would be double all the turn/warp values to allow for "halves", double turns/day, and halve the delays (from the half I use now to quarter). Then I might give the Starmaster 5 turns/warp and the Constellation 6 and get a decent balance. But then I'd have the problem of porting and transporting basically costing an equivalent of 0.5 turns, overbalancing evils.

I think based on the "modern day" StarMaster vs. Constellation debate, simply making theirs the 3 turn version of the CargoTran vs. Mule balance works just fine. Give the StarMaster enough extra firepower and it makes up for having less holds in at least some situations. (StarMaster also gets holoscanners where the Constellation does not.)

quote:
I think based on the "modern day" StarMaster vs. Constellation debate, simply making theirs the 3 turn version of the CargoTran vs. Mule balance works just fine. Give the StarMaster enough extra firepower and it makes up for having less holds in at least some situations. (StarMaster also gets holoscanners where the Constellation does not.)


All I can say is WOW! You certainly thought this out... I'm very impressed. It's these kind of very well thought out edits that I'd be willing to play in a game with! Most edits aren't balanced, often favoring too-powerful of ships and over producing planets, with no thought of what they mean in a long term or strategic game.

I'm very impressed!

Lisa M. Wilson
aka Rave

quote:
quote:
I think based on the "modern day" StarMaster vs. Constellation debate, simply making theirs the 3 turn version of the CargoTran vs. Mule balance works just fine. Give the StarMaster enough extra firepower and it makes up for having less holds in at least some situations. (StarMaster also gets holoscanners where the Constellation does not.)


All I can say is WOW! You certainly thought this out... I'm very impressed. It's these kind of very well thought out edits that I'd be willing to play in a game with! Most edits aren't balanced, often favoring too-powerful of ships and over producing planets, with no thought of what they mean in a long term or strategic game.

I'm very impressed!


Thanks for the kind words >smiles

I'm definitely a balance nut. There are so many things (as you've seen in some of my posts in other threads by now) I'd like to see in the game to help balance even further along. And a few other things that would just make it more interesting.

(One example that springs to mind is activation of that custom formula option for Gold aliens. I'd love to be able to set up a game where one or more aliens actually start strong and get WEAKER over time by putting a negative multiplier with the T in an equation. Would help force a war between two alien sides to go the way I'd like, with one side winning at first, and the other side slowly taking over. Ya know, make a real story unfold in my game. Unfortunately custom isn't active and none of the current equations multiply T by anything, only add, so the best I can do is make one side increase strength more slowly and max out sooner to try to force the same thing to occur.)

I'll be sure to let you know when I have a good public game going with my edits intact. For now, I'm sort of running a "beta test" of my set of edits with just me and 5 or 6 other people. Yes, I'm playing in my own game, but only because everyone I'm playing with are people whom I know and who know me. I wouldn't play in any of my own games which I publically advertised for all the reasons you yourself have stated. Even though I don't cheat, just having people THINK I were would be a pain :> Friends know they can trust me, strangers don't, and I wouldn't expect them to...

In case you'd like to drop in just to see my edits "live and in person" in the catalog, tho, I'll drop ya a line on ICQ and give you my IP... Heck, maybe you'll even play in the game. (Although it's 9 days old, most of my friends don't know what they're doing, and I'm not exactly fully back in the swing of things after being away from TW for a few years, myself. ;>) We could use a serious evil player.. >shrugsquote:
I would like for this to be a Topic to help all sysops.
* What are the Bottle Necks to a Server? And
* How can we improve our servers?

I have just ordered: a
2.0GHZ P4 Chip w/512k Cache
Micron 512MB PC2100 266mhz CL2.5 DDR Ram
and I have a 20GB HD at 7200rpms
all hooked to Cable at 1.5 Download

The Parts have not come in yet, but what can be
done to make this a Faster Server ?
Right now i'm running a 1.33mhz with 386 PC133 Ram
and when 10 players get on running ZTM's and other
scripts it does slow down. so whats Next? Besides a T3(hehe)


TW Free Play
http://www.twfreeplay.com
telnet://12.219.136.27

Edited by - fatcat on March 28 2002 02:01:13 AM


Your hardware setup should be able to handle 10 concurrent ZTM's without a burp, *I* think the problem probably lies with your upstream bandwidth (like Darax mentioned), at least from my experience. That seems to be the problem with most servers out there. They're hosted on home broadband connections, which is fine, but the upstreams are almost always capped too low to host a server to comfortably to support a larger amount of concurrent users.

That's where EleqTrizi'T was very fortunate, his upstream was a bit bigger than most (768Kbps I believe). Over 60 users on the system simultaneously, unlimited commands per cycle, no ship delays, a bunch running ZTM, others trading or whatever, and not a single burp. He had some good horsepower on the server-end also, but I think the bandwidth was the biggest help in that situation. A situation like that on a 128Kbps or even 384Kbps upstream *probably* would not have cut it. I could be wrong in saying that, but that's my take on the situation, for what it's worth.

Fuseblown
http://www.thestardock.com

Edited by - Fuseblown on March 28 2002 11:26:27 PM