This takes imagination. There are alot of 'fun' and not so 'fun' things you can do to try and SD/Pod someone. Some top Secret Tactics that I use (all the bleow assume some knowlege of the game; that Planets involved have shields and cannons set to Pod, and lots of Figs:

Air Support
- Hit an adjacent Fighter, drop Fighter and Limps, then Bot your corpie to PLOCK your TA.
- Study enemy Fighter hits, determine pattern and anticipate
- If you're Red and can't get to Fed Space, Blind Twarp to a MSL with *NO PORT* immediately after TERN, then mow to fed/class0

Cloak & Dagger
- Always sit in a kill ship when not doing anything. A CLV change from COLT to STARTSHIP sends up a big Red-Flag
- When Gridding/Exploring, always have a big ship in Tow
- Photon under enemy figs and drop mines
- Ride Enemy planets as much as possible

Dirty Tricks
- Leave Level 4 planets scattered around the universe with enough ore to pod a big ship (5/6 Ways usually a good start)
- Get in ship with Defender-bonus. Have corpie set Battle-Planet to personal, turn off CANNONS!! (very important). Land on planet and sit at attack shields prompt. Have corpie make planet Corp again, turn on cannons
- Study Map and determine where enemy is likely to materialize, photon under figs drop mines (if BWARP'n), or Corp Planet and a few Heavy Ships to Land-Moth when enemy planet arrives, have corpie hit enemy fig to trigger Foton Script
- Exploit Script Bugs


That's about all I can think of atm. I'm sure people have their own little bags of tricks and will want to contribute. Hopefully people will see my few examples and expand on them in their own way.

Nod. Slow as heck tho, and if ISPs are off the plock script will need a timer or you're going to have a hard time getting them unlocked.



This is extremely easy. Let's face it, you can only hit sectors that are adjacent to your own sectors. So lets say someone hits sector 3456, and adjacent to that is only one unfigged sector, 1234. You know, by definition then, that 1234 is a jump point. If 1234 has any other figged adjacents, odds are good they'll hit it at some point. I combined all of that work into part of my private pdropper for easy prediction.

The thing is of course, just because you can predict the hit, doesn't mean you can catch them easily. If they're mine smart (not hitting adjacents to mines or limps) you can always plock. But if you pdrop directly on the lock, and they're fast enough, you've got no chance to catch them.

How do you get fast enough? By minimizing the stuff you do in the sector and using retreats instead of twarp. Twarp is a little slower, and there's a window of effects, retreat either has no such window or it's just much much smaller. Either way, it's faster. If all a person does is go in and kill the fig then retreat, without laying anything, you're not going to successfully catch them.

Of course there's a trade off here. For every thing you do to speed up your time in the sector you reduce the amount of grid you're getting over time. That means that safety and speed (grid per unit time) are inversely proportional. There are a myriad of combinations here then that allow you to trade some safety for speed, or speed for safety, all to find the best mix for your particular opponent.



Unfortunately this is wayyy too common in games. Once my grid is decent the first thing I do is pop planets in 0 density MSL sectors.



Nod, and vice versa. This isn't as useful in unlims tho as turn games. My private twarp gridder (turns based) can check for changes in the CLV after every run for specifically this reason.



Dual-edged sword of course, if the ship is expensive and/or has corb. If they're smart they'll target you instead of your ship, then cap your ship for cash. Citkilla can be easily modified to target only traders.



Nod, oldie but a goodie. Choose the best targets for this . I like ore ports around dock the best, especially on early on, hehe.



Hehe, be careful here. Obviously in unlims you'll get blasted by cannons. In a turns game it's pretty easy to setup a trap around this. Farm up some cheap mobiles, they land, you retreat back and zdy... poof, bye bye player. Combined with other lockout techniques and it can really suck.



My public gridder doesn't really distinguish between unshielded and shielded in the holoscanner for this exact reason. Of course that means popping a lot of worthless planets all over will slow it down some, but not sufficiently to matter over time.



Hehe, discovered and first used by Jester in a fun little game many many moons ago. I think Vid and them wrote a script around this, to automate the whole process. It's fun if the big ship is strong enough to moth the enemy planets, but the reset is slow enough that you only get one good shot at it.

A lot of people don't set their cannons correctly of course. Especially in turn games. It's a trade-off, too high and you get merf'd, too low and you get rode.

This is where a little creativity comes in. Go pgridding around and wait for them to come to you, they will. Then run a quick atmos moth macro using a cheapo merf. A few hits is all it'll take to figure out what their planet is running at, odds are you'll pod out (be quick w/ the recover tho, lol) and they'll lose a lot of ore. Most people at that point will be in a bind... are they remembering to reset their cannons? Are they setting them for the merfs or for bigger ships? At that point you can go in with the bigger ship and try to ride. You can script that up (I did) and often times get a rider of your's on their planet, or you can do it by hand to screw with their psychology some (it's a tough decision, a lot of people cannot handle this).

I think the best tactics employ some psychology, personally. Make the enemy afraid to come after you, ever time they try something you hit them with a new technique... twisted a bit. If you don't twist it just a little, of course, they'll be ready for you, but if you can keep people jumping enough eventually they'll just blow a gasket and the enemy corp will fizzle out.



Nod, of course a quick foton script won't let you get far with this. My quick foton on navhaz is a good example. Odds are you'll miss, or odds are you'll just hit once. If they're smart they'll be using a staging area anyway for torps, a sector in the middle of a secured part of the universe, farrrr from base, that doesn't eat up too much ore per pwarp loop. I usually setup a few of these, and we almost never go to base. Kills the chance of getting a limpet drug home.

An easier way is to load up a scripted sector and have your corpies ready, then start pgridding. A natural response to pgridding is pdropping, and a planet to planet warp starts. It's more or less unavoidable really, since you can't just let people pgrid all over you. At that point you can have a planet ambush waiting.

Of course, again, don't let people know you're doing this in advance. I had a game years ago where a player spent 10 minutes photoning around to position ships under figs... it was clear from his pause-in-gridding that something was up, so I checked the logs. Became obvious what he was doing, so I just setup a cheapo planet counter-tactic. He landed, I zdy'd, he died. We had a ship buyout that game too, so that was the end of him.

Naturally in unlim games most of this doesn't play out. Most of us can refill our planets w/o a problem, at the drop of a hat.



I think there are 2 kinds of these. Technical bugs and tactical bugs. Technical bugs, like spoofing, and tactical bugs like finding a key weakness in their methodology and exploiting it.

I've used both, but I don't personally like technical script bug exploits all that much. There's an older well-known saveme that had a bad technical bug that would lock it up, but once these bugs get out a lot of nasty can occur. I think it's good form to find the author and let them know first.

Tactical bugs are different. Take for instance unlim gridding. Practically all scripts (atleast the good ones) have to scan from a sector before moving forward. If all you do is wait for limpet hits in unfigged sectors, you know they're probably scanning and making a decision about if to go. If the script is a little slow, especially with the callsaveme, or they're gridding without one, this makes for an excellent time to torp them. You don't need a lightning ping then, just something decent, and you can hit them while they're waiting for the scan results.

Of course once you've torped them they can just callsaveme, land, restart and move on. Atleast a good script will automatically restart (my public one will). But if they're slow on the saveme, or don't have one, it's then trivial to pgrid in and kill them.

But naturally all good tactics have a counter tactic. In my private gridder I've put a "pop planet on saveme" option, and often times the saveme will also run a smart citkilla. If the guy goes in w/o a planet for the kill they're not going to do much, and they might get eaten alive.

There's a very common "plock, drop and wait" sector stake-out technique that people do too. You plock a sector, they go in, take it out, you don't try for an immediate kill. You wait a little bit and then drop in. Sooner or later they have to clear that sector. That's where people invented these "planet clear" scripts... to pwarp a planet in, check for everything, and clear the sector w/ a bunch of exit-enters. Variations on the plock theme can catch these, tho.

In my public gridder I took this in account by allowing the first gridder to not lay figs. That way if someone does a delay drop there's nothing to sit on top of. Later on when the fig is gone someone can come in and refig it (checking for planets first), making it much more difficult to apply this technique. But naturally that opens up another one (well a few actually), if someone can hold the plock long enough and only drop on an unfigged limpet hit, then naturally the technique works again.

Sound easy, a great way to kill someone? Well think again, lol. All of this takes time. You might get a successful catch, maybe even a successful kill, and they might not pod out, and you might be all happy about it. But how much time did it take? During this time, how much grid did they take? And are they continuing to grid?

It's a case of "winning the battle but losing the war." I've had people spend hours trying to kill me, and they might succeed, but in the process our team's up to an 18k limpgrid. The game is effectively over, and I'll be on at extern to clean things up. That's why, in the end, it comes down to team coordination and keytime. An active, attentive corp can continue pushing forward despite a few small tactical weaknesses and win.

heh not much to add except to add to Dyn's couple of key notes at the End...

KEY TIME
team coordination

Even with the right scripts.. these 2 things can win OR lose a game...

and NEver run an afk Direct pdrop on an enemy u can't hit think they might hit a lag... while this is true.. they might just kill u and take ur planet with an easy trap cause ur afk...


oh and if u do kill Dyn... buyout all the ships right away...laff