Bad start....

To say the least….

OK, we discovered something about this edit, and I for one executed it incorrectly and for that I was killed by Bundy, whom I’m told is Vid Kid.

Bundy did the first surrender to get a pod. He sold his start ship, bought the little ship that costs 5k, surrendered and turned his 5k ship into a 750k pod. Took that along with the cash from selling the start ship and bought the Over Pass. Using aprox only 5 turns, he's in a ship that costs 2.3M.

That’s why you see everyone on that corp surrendering ships. The start ship DOES NOT have a pod, you must do this with the little ship that costs aprox. 5K.

You CANNOT attack SD to self pod like I did… duh… I went -10 alignment and got killed. You must enter a sector next to SD with an enemy fig or a corpie’s personal fig and surrender your ship rather than paying a toll or attacking. Then you turn that 5K ship into a 750k pod to sell.

It’s a cheap down and dirty trick, but now it’s out in the open. The only “fix” would be to correct this edit and make the pod much less valuable.

So basically you could make infinite cash without ever going more than one sector from SD. Someone obviously didn't think this through. (Or maybe they did and they just have a weird idea of what makes an edit fun.)

You're still limited to your two pods per day. So using one pod to get a jump start is a good strategy for this edit.

I'm just curious if this was intended by this game's TWA author.

Reminds of a mistake the sysop at Eclipse made, pre-TWGS. An unported stock Havoc could be sold for the buyback value of an unported twarp2 Havoc. CEO had carpal tunnel running the F1 key macro until I wrote him a script with a DO loop.

Sounds like someone was better prepared and knew the edit.

It was not an "edit" as now understood. It was HVS MBBS time. Back then, sysops 'tweaked' the settings at their whim. I don't know if the game settings were even portable, duplicateable certainly.

SG found the anomaly, he was always an inveterate tinkerer and we drove on from there.

In the case of "On the Road Again", yes, I'd say my opponent was better prepared, he co-authored this TWA and when asked did not share it with us prior to the game.

Oh, we had a little time to play this edit, and this particular strategy was out in the open in ship specs. We missed it. Funny thing was, we were looking for just this sort of thing, but thought it would be better hidden, say in a special Alien ship or planet.

We've capped 4 of the 9 Alien home worlds in this edit, our practice game became corrupt and had to be reset prematurely. (T-storms)

I'm just sharing a strategy we encountered with this particular edit so that others may also benefit from this knowledge. We're still playing, and still looking for more "hidden" treasures.

TEdit actually takes into account the value of an escape pod in the recommended pricing for a ship, but you need to actually look at the cost area in the Gold Ship Editor to see where the current ship cost is relative to the suggested cost. If you add a valuable Escape Pod to a ship, it'll bump the suggested cost up, but it won't change the specified cost.

To see what I mean, go into TEDIT, Gold Ship Editor, then go to any ship and selects another valuable ship like the ISS as its escape pod, then go to the Cost tab, tab 4, and see that the set value of the ship will be very low compared to the suggested value. Doing this with the TKO, for example, ends up with a value that's only 12% of the recommended value.

Just a tip. After you tweak a ship, you should always look at the costs tab and make sure it's a reasonable cost. You're free to make it ridiculously high or low compared to the recommended cost, of course.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was intentional.

Cruncher I am personally responsible for that particular tactic in the on the road again edit. But to make it fair I used make ansi so that all players could see this, making it fair to all. This was not a dirty trick just check the ansi! Its right there in front of you.

It most definitely was intentional. Hehe.. but thanks for building in MSP John!

You did everything just fine, we have the nice ansi display of all the player ship and planet specs. It was right in front of our noses, and we missed it.

I'm just forewarning others who may like to play this edit. Using that tactic was clearly "outside" of the box thinking.

That's why you practice an edit before you play it. You learn how to best take advantage of an edit before you get into a serious game and get toasted. However, in my edits there are very few hidden tricks within them. I am much more concerned about the balance of red/blue, offense/defense than any other factors.

Just to give you some advice Cruncher, don't play Moo2 againt Vid either.

Wow! Wish you had posted that earlier lol. Does this mean the killbillies are not coming back to the game?

We're still playing, how about you?

I'm usually not a fan of heavily edited games. And I've always been the one who shares information about the game. The more the merrier.

Now that more people are aware of this tactic, who knows... this may become a very popular TWA.

We still have 9 races, 9 planets and dozens of alien ships to inspect. This particular edit may take a while. I do prefer the turns version over the unlim version, naturally.