Planet construction times are fixed, but red's ability to find them scales with the number of turns. Given enough turns, red can probe the entire universe in the time it takes to build a L4 planet, and blue automatically loses. Turns, sectors, corp size, and universe size all figure into this balance. I think I got it about right, but I don't really know because the test game doesn't have the corp sizes I designed it for.

Are you still thinking in terms of mixed corps? Or Red corp vs. blue corp?

Players today are used to playing this game start to finish in a few weeks or even a single weekend. A game with 500 turns, I think you are figureing best case senerio, the most efficient use of those 500 turns, but that's not how real people play, most are sloppy and not very turn efficient. But even at the most efficient use, this game could take well over a year to play, and that's a huge time commitment.

Now, I haven't studied your planets, just what you've written in the desc and I did scan over them in tedit. I don't know if you have a planet that is very effient at producing equipment or not. That is one of my favorite edits on Ice-9, his mineral planet. 2 colos for every unit with a max production of 16k. I think.. anyhow, it's one mineral producing planet per 32k port on a 2 day cycle.

So, if you increase the turns, then you'll need to increase the ports and the port regen cycle to maintain the balance you're after?

I'm shooting for a balance between RRB and BBB corps. I'm trying to force the mixed corps to dedicate most of their resources the first few weeks to hunting instead of amassing huge numbers of fighters, or else face blues with mobile planets. Of course, reds could just build their own planets... but without the ISS, they would do so at a disadvantage, and give up their cashing advantage.



I know, but I hate that kind of game, and I know that at least a few people feel the same way. Remember JP's polls on FB? I'm trying to give people an alternative to the trend toward more and more turns.

And I don't think a 500 turn game would take months, let alone years. It'll be decided long before that. With stock planets, I couldn't build a base in a 750 turn game without a 2-man red-blue corp finding it before it reached L4. With more than one corp hunting, it would be even worse. And more builders only helps to a point; given enough turns, more planets built just means more planets found.



Discipline themselves, they must.



Yeah, Geothermal are good for that. Not as good as ICE9, though.



That would have limited effect. Mainly I'd have to cut citadel construction times down even further. Terrestrial is already 4 days to L2, vs. 7 for Mountainous in a stock game. If citadels are too fast, then both hunters and builders are forced to play every day.

Ok then, promote on the FB page, get'em in here.



Yeah, life gets busy, I love the turn bank, best thing to ever happen to TW I think! So the 500 turn daily players are happy, and can wait and rip off 1500 turns every 3 days and I'm happy.

It's great that your trying, but I have been hearing the same stuff forever. Low Turn, Stock, bleh bleh.... you bang it and it will sit empty. I have no idea why but people keep saying that is what they want but the games remain empty. Maybe if you keep trying it might happen, but for me 500 turns is just to painful for a 20K game. Well now that I think about it a little more, it is just the 500 turns, the universe size doesn't bother me. I can't remember the last time I played one under 1500. 1500 to 3000 is the amount I like to play regardless of universe.

Actually, my most popular game is the 750 turn game. I also have a 1k and a 5k, all on cozy 5k universes.

9 players - 5 Active / 4 SD
Not exactly grand central station, but at least people are playing.

Yeap, and since I have my settings to drop inactives after 30 days, those are pretty good! I think comet is only in the player list in one of my games now, instead of all of them.

I resemble that remark. or is it resent? i dunno i was playing on there until puppy decided he wanted to hunt me down. guess killing him wasn't such a good idea

Yeah, I dunno. I think part of it is the Catch-22 that players see nobody else in a game, so they don't join the game. And for all these old-time players who talk idly of coming back, another obstacle is that TWX has a steep learning curve and SWATH costs money.

bump

I think it was the time limit that turned me off, wasn't there
also a few delays on there as well?

There's 1/3 s/t ship movement delay and 5s static planet twarp delay. Even with those delays, it takes maybe a half hour to an hour to play 500 turns. But maybe it would take more than that to run SST/SDT. Do you think that's the case?

The time limit is designed so that a 3-player corp cannot sit online for any significant portion of the day. But I guess I could raise it a bit and still achieve that effect.

I don't mean to derail this topic with a debate about the
setup. You want a serious corp to come in and test your
edit. My position is that you would have a hard time finding
a 'serious' corp that want to play a time limit game with delays.

You have the planet delay set, to counter planet drops? So
why would you need to have a time limit? If time is limited,
why further penalize players with a movement delay?

From a red perspective, it looks like a painful game to get
set up and going.

Why do you look at a movement delay as a "penalty"? Or a time limit for that matter. I don't get that mindset at all. Are you saying you want to sit online all day and use reactive scripts? Because that's the only reason I can think of why anyone would want more time than it takes to play their turns, or care that it takes about a second to move most ships. One second!



From 1993 to 2003, I pretty much exclusively played red. I don't see a single thing that's "painful" about my settings... unless your expectation is to dominate the game within a few hours. But that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.