I have tried repeatedly and am having no success accessing the beta

I'm not aware of any outage. Do you get any message? Or just fail to connect?

telnet://twgs.classictw.com 23

So, if there is a situation where the attacker monopolizes the combat and the defender is unable to strike back, whether or not it's been like that for a long time, I'd like to fix it.

I found something on this subject a few weeks ago. It seems that for at least several years the game has favored attackers. This is from the Stardock I think.
The Quick-warpin’ Colonial – Well, not exactly…. It’s a little realized fact that the game favors the attacker. When you launch waves of fighters at someone,
your ship will be ready to fire again BEFORE your victim fully receives all the computer messages. Try it out with a corpmate. Have them quit the corp
for a moment, and launch 100 waves of single fighter attacks. Then page him, go to the bathroom, wash your hands and come back. You’ll notice no response.
Why? Because while your end of the game is ready to resume, his end is still dealing with the attack.

fastattack.gif (6345 bytes)
This is me, pecking at Hosem.
This is Hosem, getting pecked.
fastattack2.gif (4041 bytes)

Now let’s put this in a situation…let’s say you ARE in a Colonial Transport and Hosem comes along looking for fresh prey. Obviously the CT can’t outrun,
or outgun much of anything. So what do you do? Hit Hosem fast and furious with 1 fighter for as many times as you can, and run! By the time the game lets
Hosem move again, you can be 20 sectors away and long gone.

NOTE - on some BBS’s that aren’t poweful enough, this quick-attack-then-run feature could cause the WHOLE BBS to lag except you, even people not in the
game will experience huge lag. I would say go ahead and try it until a sysop scolds you.

ADVANCED – Turn the tables…if you find a player that is known for corbo and you want to capture his ship, quick attack him for 100, then take your sweet
time capturing while the game keeps him locked up.

Much what what I've done with the new version has been to address these kinds of issues. I believe it is possible to fix it. I'm not sure what was behind this problem in the earlier version, but so much has changed under the surface that we just need to approach this with a fresh look. Now, in my tests here, I was not able to duplicate this. I would guess that the biggest issue was pacing, and the fact that the earlier version would allow the attacker to issue atttacks as fast as the connection and CPU would allow. Now there are systems in place to control the pace of actions. So if it is still a problem, I just need to understand the cause.

I will say that these problems come out of a desire to run the game without any delays. The option is there to run the game as fast as you want, but it's up to the op to determine what's an acceptable speed. What's described in that post is clearly not acceptable, and by using some attack delays, I don't believe that problem would continue. Now I've taken the choice out of the hands of ops and am forcing a reasonable amount of pacing on all games.

The test that T0yman and I ran was in the Sandbox game that's set-up to emulate 56k modem up and down. That did not effect the attack spam.

Couldn't connect to host... (and still can't) in Swath

That's strange, MB. It's been up and active all day. I fired up Swath and connected with no problem.

I checked the addy twice. telnet://twgs.classictw.com, is a no go...

what's the IP?

LOLOL!

If you add the "telnet://" to the addy, it doesn;t work in swath. I never knew that!

I'M IN! (Seee, I aint' too sttopid!)

oh perfect! Terra is ringed!

Let me know if you want a game for testing.

So, ok, I just ran a test on my stress game, game R. Set to 56K up/down, 150 ms ping emu, 250 ms attack/move delay, with two loaded ICs going head to head. I macro'd 100 attacks at 100 figs each for the first player and got that going. The output wasn't outpacing the prompt, because you could see the command prompt redrawing at the bottom after every line of output. That's the key. If you can outpace the prompt so it never draws, the player can't enter any input. I can fix that if that's the problem, of course, but I'm also interested in seeing if there's anything else going on here.

After a few seconds of player A attacking player B, I macro'd the same attacks into player B. At this point, they were trading blows at a steady pace, not looking like any one was getting more hits than the other. Player A finished, then displayed the output from player B's attacks until he finished. Seemed pretty clean to me. What do I need to do to break it? Is it because I'm on the same connection and one isn't faster than the other?

My connection is about 20 ms. Is that a factor?