Nod. The stock tholian can have 0 gtorps. I don't
see any problem there.

Very true, but the sector defense vs a single planet defense does matter.

[Edit] This scenario may or may not be what is being talked about so...

The unprotected planets, if < L2 would feed fighters to the attacking player to use against the sentinel. The attacking player would attack the sentinel, land, grab figs and attack again. The sentinel's reload script would have to pick the correct planet to reload from.

Again, not sure if this is what would happen or not

[/Edit]

[Edit2] If the sentinel just blocked your landing, then wouldn't the gBonus be in effect? [/Edit2]

[Edit_Last One] I guess the sentinel could just use a harvester script to keep the non-protected planets clean of figs. [Edit_Thats It]

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Yeh. Atleast all of the planets you own.

It would also be nice if aliens obeyed this rule, too.

Yes, I think there is a disconnect here. What I'm working toward is a set of options that allow the game to be played more like it was originally designed and like it actually played for quite awhile. I'm not trying to change the way the game is currently played. I'm trying to create the tools to create edits with a more classic feel for those who want that.

As long as I've known the sentinel, it's always been
a sector defender. That is it's best trait, it's what
makes it worth using. Sometimes it makes it a bit
too powerful, but usually that's because the edit
is imbalanced and the guardian bonus just makes
that worse.

I think most people prefer it that way. I think it
works best that way. I also think just upping the
default stock fig levels will do most of the task.

The funny thing tho, most people I know don't
play stock games. They're kind of boring. I mean
you can't really attack w/o messing up your align,
or blowing a ton of figs. Planets level up very very
slowly. It's just boring. Who wants to grid around
in a merf all day long? How long can you stare at
an LV2 volcanic before you stop logging in? How
often can you SDT before it just gets tiresome?

I mean look at the social edit. It was designed to
be a builder's game, and even the builders were
getting bored by day 10.

I have a "neostock" edit I made a long time back,
and it fixes most of the issues w/ the stock edit.
Slightly faster planets, better sentinel, red ship, etc.
Even when I banged it monthly, I still never got
more than a few corps and maybe 5 players.

People say they want a classic game, but 2 weeks
into it they're bored and off playing EVE. It's not
that they lie, they just don't know what they want.

What we need aren't ways to restore a classic feel,
a lot of people don't really like the classic feel. What
we need are better tools to help us create balanced
edits that players will enjoy. To that end, we can look
at the games that are most popular as a template.

A lot depends on the edit, but here's the settings I suggest for the theolian ship based on stock settings.

Ship normal odds (offensive = 1.0) (defensive = 2.0) (theolian odds would be 8.0 defensive)
10 to 15 turns per warp
Maximum fighters 5,000
Maximum shields 5,000
Initial holds 10
Maximum holds 40
IG = Yes
Can land = No
Photon missiles = 0
xport range = 5
Gtorps = 0
Dets = 0
Mine disrupters = 10
Eprobes = 10
Mines (10 armids) (10 limpets)

@ D , I'de also set not capturable and alot of carbo .. so your giving your life for a life in the deal.

This is where I'de suggest carbo max be increased to be able to take out a 400k fig ship with 16k shields if needed or could be afforded.

But that might be better for another thread.

my 2¢

I think bumping up the shields instead of the the figs on the stock sentinal would provide a better balance. Shields are usually cheaper than figs so it's a more cost effective defense early in the game. Also low figs and high shields will negate the advantage of reloader scripts when defending planets under L5.

Let me explain how the Sentinel worked for years. When you enter a sector with a Sentinel and attack it, it would get 1:1 combat odds. When you enter a sector and attempt to land on the planet when there's a Sentinel there, the Sentinel would go into guardian mode. The game would tell you that you have to destroy the ship before landing, but when you attack it, it gets 4:1 combat odds for defense. So what does that sound like to you? Sector defense or planet defense? As a sector defense ship, it was 1:1. As a planet defense ship, it was 4:1. I changed this at about the time Gold was released, as I established the "guardian" ship ability. I made it so that the ship would get 4:1 odds when attacked whether or not you attempted to land. In hindsight, this was the wrong solution to the problem. The Sentinel was irrelevant because you could just attack it directly. I changed it so you had to deal with the 4:1 odds even if you didn't land. A better solution in terms of keeping true to the design would have been to require you to land before you could even engage the ship, as I'm proposing now.

So I can appreciate that you know a lot about this game and what people want when they play this game, but all I'm saying is that I want to restore this game to what it was originally designed to be, and I know what that is as well as anyone. I don't care if this makes it a better game or a worse game, my goal is to restore the game, not because I think it's going to be on X-Box or suddenly bring in 1 million players, but because I care about the game as a classic game worthy of restoring and preserving. The best I can say for players today is that I don't intend to pull the plug on the game you play. There will always be options to play the rules you currently play. But if not for my desire to restore this game, I wouldn't be here working on it at all. So you'll just have to deal with my misguided efforts if you want all of the bug fixes, etc, that are included in this update.

People can either accept what you're attempting to do and play on the new TWGS, play the old version, or find another hobby. It's not the end of the world, and not worth you having to sift through opposition at every turn. As the developer, you will sometimes need to just make that call and be done with it. Otherwise, you don't gain anything and fall behind your deadline for release. My wife and I use every ship in our games we play for a specific role, including the Tholian. Others may have their own strategy. You want to change the Tholian, that's okay- we can adapt to the changes.

Actually, that sounds like a sector defender to me.

They cannot land on ANY planet until the sentinel is
gone. That defends the entire sector. If it just
doesn't trigger until you land, that's a nice bug to
bypass sentinel defenses. Just kill it before you try
to land, problem solved. That provides no protection
at all.

If you cannot land on any planet until the sentinel
is gone, then that protects the entire set of planets.



But why would anyone in their right mind use that then?
They can still be killed. So why would anyone use it if
you're just protecting a single planet?

The current behavior is so much better.

I thought this started because you wanted to make the
sentinel an effective protector of early game planets,
right? How is making the sentinel less effective going
to achieve that goal?

It's a simple risk-reward. The risk is getting killed.
The reward is protecting all of the planets in the sector.
That's an okay trade-off. If the risk is still getting
killed, but the reward is now only protecting one planet,
then how does that make the sentinel more effective?



Right, but why restore the game to make it worse? I
thought the point here was the make the game better.



Except it isn't that simple. People can just make an
edit w/o a guardian ship, rather than having to suffer
thru a broken feature. Either the goal is to make the
ship an effective defender or not.

The classic game is gone. You'll never be able to restore
things back to that because technology is fundamentally
different. You can get close, you can make the game work
better, but if people wanted the classic game they could
just find a copy of v1.0 and host it. There are reasons
why they don't.

Then do just that and quit appearing to have concern about the issues that are brought up. If that sounds negative, so be it, but no more so than your last sentence. Want to alienate members your current player base? NP on that, you are the developer, so just make the changes you wish and be done with it. The current TWGS works fairly well, and while there are changes regarding bug fixes that would be good, it won't be the end of the world if we stay with the current version. Players as they say will vote with their feet if they don't like the way things go. Shame for it to be that way, but that is life.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Right, but that yields the same thing. I just take out
the planets that I want first, and if I hit a sentinel
then I blow it sky high. It can't refill or refig since
it's all an in-game function, so ka-bloowie, it's gone.

Now I can invade anything I want, you're dead, and
it totally wasn't worth protecting that single little
planet.

Trust me, protecting a single planet isn't worth it
in a stock game. In an edited game, that'll vary,
but in an edited game it won't matter anyway.