I didn't want to reply in the "feature request" area, and hopefully Sing and KB will reply over here.

Photon's are used as offensive and defensive weapons. I would hate to see their effectivness watered down. We just, I think, got the unlim photon bug fixed and made it somewhat useful in those games. Photons are also intended to uncloak a cloaked player. I am not sure if that was the original intended use or not.

I lost one of my first played games when a player photoned me and my corp in our base of L1 or L2 planets - been too long ago. We were sitting ducks for the most part. I thought it was an excellent move and in my newbie state I wasn't able to escape.

Someone had brought up photons and how they were originally implemented as an invasion tool. JP mentioned the possibility of changing it so they wouldn't affect players. I had a thought of a way to compromise the current settings vs no affect vs users.

Right now photons are pretty deadly to users. Get popped, and you lose all your turns and are a sitting duck unless you have a corpie who is running saveme. The same applies to someone packing one and running into navhaz or mines or offensive figs.

My idea is this: Leave photons so that they affect users, but instead of taking their turns and leaving them dead, change it so that they lose one third of their turns and incur a movement delay penalty. This will allow them a chance to escape by either X-porting, calling saveme, or making a run for it.
Getting hit by multiple photons will incur a greater penalty and take another third of their remaining turns. The movement penalty can go away after time or by X-porting to another ship. However, if you X-port back to the stricken ship, you should assume the penalty again. I don't know if JP can code it to affect only the ship and not the user, but that would be something he can answer.

Any thoughts? I'd really like to hear from Sing and KB as they seem to run the best offensive scripts out there, but I would love any feedback on this.

Without functional photons, anyone will be able to walk completely over your fighters in a short amount of time, thus they will find your base very quickly. This game favors the invaders and attackers and always has, so the builders will be at the mercy of the players that know how to data mine.

If there is any hope of restoring the game to its roots, it will require addressing all of these issues. It's too easy to find and destroy a base, so fighter gridding is needed. The primary value of gridding is reactive attack scripts. For any player who isn't engaged in this particular style of play, the game has devolved into a very one-dimensional affair. Try to move, hit a fig, die. Go play Angry Birds. So I think it boils down to making it harder to locate a base, making it cost more to invade than to defend, making cost actually matter, making it a waste of credits to spread figs around the galaxy, and making it impossible to kill or incapacitate a player just for hitting a single fig. And really, all of these issues came out of one single change. Making the game interactive.

I believe the easiest way to solve a lot of these problems is to limit the amount of information one can datamine. If you were to remove the ability for scripter's to log warp paths into a ztm, it would slow the game down immensely.

As impossible as it may be to implement, It would be effective.

I'm going to have to agree with Micro, we don't want to cripple the game so much to prevent certain tactics that it's no longer fun for anyone.