Think for a moment about MMOs like World of Warcraft, where a player's class determines their role in cooperative play. In TW, your "class" is more or less determined by what ship you happen to be sitting in at the time. But different ships aren't really all that different. You can trade a little, or you can trade a lot. You can attack weakly, or you can attack harder. There aren't really any interesting teamwork dynamics.

What if battles and invasions in TW were fought in groups? Other than the trite "tank/healer/damage" roles, can you think of any interesting ways ships with significantly different capabilities could cooperate?

Well, you can xport to whatever ship you want, so you can change your "class" whenever you want. And a lot of us, in corps, do exactly what you're talking about. We trade, fight, and invade as groups. We use those groups to create a whole new set of tactics.

Do those tactics include different roles? Are different ships better suited to different roles, or is it always just a matter of bringing as much firepower as you can?

I'm thinking about stuff like, what if TW had ships with special roles like oilers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replenishment_oiler), wild weasels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel), etc. Or some other fanciful role with no real-world counterpart.

its more like different people are good at different things, so when plans are made this guy does this, that guy does that, etc. there is a tactical depth, it just isnt thrown in your face like it is on a WoW or everquest, where you get shoehorned into one role, one way of doing things, etc. just the different scripts used in any given game can totally change the tactics used..

Oh yea, it includes different "roles" in the sense that different people are in different ships. Like if I'm pgridding around, I may have 4 other ppl on the planet. One will be in a cheap holds ship or something I can use to rob/mega cheaply. If there's a gbonus ship that can ride, it'll be on there too. Also, a colt, so I can buydown ore easily. Finally we'll have a light weight gridder to take sectors w/o spending a lot of turns, then a big blaster ship to fire a few rounds if needed. All in all, it depends on the edit, but we usually have more than 1 ship type in a situation like that.

Player roles also matter. If a player plays red and isn't going to be online much, we might have him sit on the planet and log out. Then we can swap around his ship as needed. Or, if the planet is very lightly armored, it would be suicide to put a valuable red on a vulnerable planet. So that guy might cloak out instead, using a special red ship that has cloaks, ore, and twarp.

The equivalent of a "replenishment oiler" would be a planet or port with a lot of ore on it (like an upped port). That's going to be a decent target, if you find it then you drain it and blow it. An equivalent of a "wild weasel" would be someone tapping the grid to test it for enemy fire, or perhaps a counter gridder taking out enemy grid in key areas so someone else can probe explore it later.

Man... things have changed a bit since I quit playing. I don't know what half the words in your last comment mean, Singularity!

Yeah I think somone needs to put a TW dictionary together.

Already done, has been for years. Check the site in my sig. There's also rexxcrow's attempt, too. It's posted here on this forum.

Okay, I must be blind or stupid. Maybe both. But I don't see it on your site.

TW-cabal, glossary.

http://tw-cabal.navhaz.com/glossary.html

OK, let me see how well I can translate this.

4 players all parked in the same citadel, this planet must be level 4 or high so it's mobile.

Colt - Colonial Transport, or some such ship edit with 250/+ holds for buying down ports.

grid ship - a low turn ship, 1 tpw today's players use to move around the universe laying a grid. (Grid is a fighter/& or mines in every sector of the universe.)

Red robbing ship - usually a cheap ship, maybe has a holo scanner, but no holds or t-warp drive. So if you bust while robbing you're not loosing anything.

Then of course you need at least one player in a ship with high offensive odds to kill the enemy with.

"Replenishment Oiler” First I've heard that terminology, but I'd have to guess a planet with a large fuel ore capacity. Stock game would be a class H Volcanic.

With 4 players parked in one citadel, you only need one player at the keys and they can swap ships as needed, or have everyone logged in so they can be “botted” by one player.

The reason for the grid – they have scripts that will warp the planet should anyone try to enter a sector with their figs.

How close am I?

Makes sense. Some of that stuff is old school. I think trying to fill the whole universe with fighters was a pretty new strategy around the time I quit playing. And driving planets around like they're ships... I never did that. I did publish a planet drop script for Swath, and then regretted it because I felt like it was cheap and dirty.

Yeah, that's about the time I left too. JP has given us some edits now so we can slow the planets down, and emulate different modem "speeds". The really cool thing is we can set input and output at different emulatons now. So new or returning players may have a slightly greater chance than a snowball in H*ll to stay alive long enough to get a shielded planet.