its all about collision math. say you're invading someone's sector but you don't have the figs to actually militarily invade. you can overload the sector by +10 over the max and get a 100% chance of "a" collision - your best odds of actually killing your opponent's planet for "free".

now - turn the tables. say you're being invaded and someone has overloaded your sector. you have two options - try to detonate the extra planets in your sector - or - you can put a *lot* of planets in your sector - because at extern, only two planets will collide. effectively, you can reduce the odds that the planets you care about will collide by putting a lot of planets in the sector. there are lots of scenarios where this is actually a better strategy than attempting to detonate the 10 extra planets that your opponent has kindly overloaded on you.

two features i've always wanted as a sysop are:

1. you can set a game up as 'closed' - i use this to keep players out until an official start time. then i use a script on a timer to flip it in tedit to an 'open' game. it would be really great if the 'start time' was a setting - i.e. the twgs would keep the game closed until the start date/time was reached.

2. you can't kick or ban a player from an admin session. in order to kick or ban a player, you have to have access to the gui. you actually need both actions unless the act of banning a player also kicks them if they are currently online. there are two reasons this would kick Butt:

1. i wouldn't have to give guest game-ops RDP or VNC access to my server in order to manage problem players.
2. i could write a script that monitors the game log for duplicate accounts - against the rules at most servers - and automatically ban/kick them.

I agree... those two features that Rev suggested would be nice.

Ok, I don't have time to delve into these more right now, but I've added them to my notes and I'll see what I can do. Thanks!

Speaking of turning back the clock on tradewars as far as making it apealing to those who liked the way it was back in the day.

Might look at the scout merader , a podless ship .. manned or not
could not be captured.

Same was true for the IDC , which I used alot as a xport ship laying around in space as my mode to get from base to base alot in far away base pairs.

But somewhere down the line it got changed to "if it were unmanned then it could be cap'd"

I'de love to see it returned back to the way it was .. even in todays TWGS.
Cause when I put my hard earned credits into carbo , and some bozo can cap my podless IDC (or any podless ship) , that ticks me off.

As a side note .. this changed happened in one of my first tourneys , we didn't
have a very well defended base , but as game rules went .. your team was not out till you lost all your ships and planets.
So during that tourney , the opposing team musta got mad about eating carbo for every ship and asked for this change.
That was the first tourney I ever heard of that a sysop would upgrade the server during the game too.

Lots of flack went down cause of it and I have tryed for years to get it changed back the way it was .. and at one point I think it did.
But alas , Its back to : podless unmanned is cap-able again

Maybe someone who has some of the original tradewars programs cares to check my facts.

An on/off switch for bounties would not be a bad deal either. They have not been used as intended for decades. Normally they are used to boost alignment quickly by creating a ficticious player, sticking a bounty on him and blowing him up. It makes alignment managment trivial. If you really want alignment managment part of the game you really have no way of preventing this activity.

Hey Vid, do you recall at what revision this change first happened? I have no recollection of this

Yes , in the doors version .. the no cap scout (manned or not)
then in about 1.12.123 to 1.12.125 it came back.

I remember when I resurfaced in the mid nineties you could not cap a podless ship manned or not. Mad Hatter used leave corbo bombed scouts around for harmless amusement. I cant remember when it changed.

I've done some research on it. The v2 code allowed you to capture any ship, regardless of whether it was podless. In March, 1997, I changed it so you couldn't cap podless ships. Sometime after that, not sure of the date, I changed it again to the way it is now, where you can capture a podless ship that's unoccupied, but not if it's occupied.

Personally, I favor the original approach from v2. I'm not sure why I changed it to not allow capture of podless ships. I guess it seemed more realistic, but that doesn't have much to do with gameplay. Obviously, if you can't escape in a pod, how can the ship be captured? But that change has been in place for so long, it's not trivial to change it back. I don't know if there's a consensus about how it should be, but if there is, I'll change it. Should podless ships be always capturable, or should they never be capturable?

I think a reasonable limit would be 20.

I like this idea. It's been years since I've played a tourney, but running around trying to kill that one last hold-out is boring! LOL

Ok , J.P my server has been stable for a long time with exceptions
of one small problem , at extern on occasion the maintanace will go so fast that a parent window closes before TWGS see's it.
And responds will error box saying exception error , parent window missing
or something like that.

But after closing error message , extern will continue to run on the remaining games.

(It just happened and I spotted it)

Hmmm, ok, Vid, I'll look into that. If I can't reproduce it here, I may just be taking a stab in the dark with something like a 1 second pause at start and end of extern to make sure it isn't outpacing the window. I guess we'll just have to see if the problem disappears with that change. How frequently does it happen for you?

The last time I seen it was maybe 2 months ago .. it doesn't happen often.
I think its just closing the extern screen too fast on each process , and it out paces itself maybe 1 in 30 runs ...

I can not guess if/when it may happen again , I just try to be aware of it.
That way once I close the message screen , the other games get extern ran on them .. and the logs show it ran late.

Lucky I don't have a large user base or someone may move planets and get caught cause it didn't run at its normal time.

Your right , if you put a 1 second or just under one at end of each run may just fix that problem.