Significant burning plastic smelll... out indefinately... will return when comp is better.

Sorry to hear. All that leaves now for you is drinking... lol

Might be what caused that smell in the first place!

hey, you can always go to the library

For a drink?  I'm moving to your town!

Actually the branch I play at is co-located with the community college (oh my the girls) and there is a bar on campus. But I was talking about playing, hehe.

Come To The Dark Side My Son   

I think Everybody should experience 600 and higher pings at least once in life, (thank god they finally went fiber optic)

No thanks on the 600 ping, I was that and then some for a some of the recent turns game. The server in Australia I was playing on a couple of years ago at least gave me a ping of 500.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Silence
How in the world did you let the magic smoke escape?

you know - electricity is just a myth for the masses. things really run on smoke. i know this because whenever you let the smoke out, stuff stops working.

Laff, Heck I was gridding in the last game with anywhere from 600 - 1300 ping at times, and still wasn't getting hit...

Because gridding (in a good gridder) is ping independant. The best gridders abort display and macro their hits, so you're in and out as fast as the server can process regardless of your ping. This is one of the least understood mechanics of gridding, sadly, despite how simple it is.

The same is not true of a grid defender. Your ping is very important because the msg has to travel from the server to the player, then the command has to return back from the player to the server.

You are right about the gridder.  You get all the info before you enter the sector and then send everything in 1 macro or packet while in the figged sector.  Makes it almost impossible to stop.  I said almost.  The real grid defender can set his grid up properly and get a good gridder very quickly unless they want to go to a lot of trouble clearing limpets and mines.  Laying armids and limpets is a good deterent for gridders.  They will have to make sure they don't grid over your limpets. Of course there are always those blind gridders, but sooner or later that will get you killed too.
 

Laff, in an unlim game you aren't torping. It's a waste of time since you can shrug off a torp due to the bug. Pdrops don't require quite as much precision since you're dropping adj.

It's not a pain in the butt to clear limps tho, I have scripts that do it all automatically. They are hard to catch, even if you're a "real grid defender." I've used these scripts in games against the best unlim players around (you know who...) and they've lost every time. Yawn...

It's a simple matter of knowing how to stop on unlimped sectors, learning to read if your enemy is plock waiting, and then using a counter limpet gridder or planet-based limpet cleaner. Unlim grid technology has advanced a lot in the last 6 months, and an unbelievable amount in the last few years. That's the fastest growing element of the game today, no doubt.

The risk to these gridders comes when the number of hitsecs or jump points decreases to a critical level. Then it becomes easy to predict the next hit and you have to change your tactics a small amount to avoid a plock drop (assuming ISPs are on). That's why the way to stop a good gridder isn't to always defend your grid, but rather to counter grid faster than they can.

Enter team gridding... I believe I'm one of the only players that actually have a team gridding script. A good team gridder can knock out JPs faster than you can reclaim them, allowing them to shut you down for good. Then there's the matter of people @ keys to monitor progress.

That is where ping time comes in with unlim gridding. Not in the actual hitting of the sector, but how fast you can hit across multiple sectors. You really do need to wait for a fig lock on the jump point before you can go, not doing so is a sure way to die very quickly. That means you can only hit as fast as your ping will allow. Fortunately a grid defender has a much easier time, pingly speaking, since there is not only a delay on the jump in but also a delay between the JP and the hitsec, in addition to the delay on the way out of the hitsec.

All of that gives you atleast 2 full lag cycles instead of just the 1 that a turns game does.

In a turns game all of this is moot however. A single hit gridder will burn a lot of turns, but be very hard to hit regardless of ping. The grid defender's ping is the most important part in that situation. Fortunately most people don't do a lot of single hit gridding because of the turn cost, so you can usually anticipate their next hit and torp ahead of them instead, giving you much more leeway. Enter afew gridder types that I won't mention here because I hope I never have to face them...