Hey, Singularity, I'm not sure if you saw where I posted this on another thread. I wanted to do some initial testing of the new changes at 21-6.com before installing it on classictw.com. There are some major internal changes related to IO and events and I want to make sure I didn't break anything before moving to classictw.com so I don't disrupt those games any more than necessary.

I created a game for you on slot S and it has the same password as the one on classictw.com. Can you put the game through some paces and let me know what you find?

Thanks!

Yeh, I'll check it out in a bit. Need to boot up XP and stuff.

Quick thought: Any way to up the max ships from 2000 to something larger?
Would be nice in combating a buyout.

Small bug:
If you have 999,999,999 creds, sell a ship, then
try to buy a ship, it says you can't afford to buy
the ship.

Is that new?

The first issue here is that you can't carry more than 1,000,000,000 credits. So the question becomes, do I allow you to sell the ship and only get 1 credit, or do I not allow you to sell the ship? Of course if you're selling a ship for less than you're buying, the net effect is you'll have less than 1,000,000,000 credits, and I could make the code smart enough to account for that net loss. But if you sell a ship, then buy a ship with a net increase that puts you over the 1,000,000,000 cr cap, that's an issue.

Somehow I don't think this a game busting bug John.

Laff, people shouldn't be carrying that much cash w/ them.
And I don't think it's new.

Why not just penalize them w/ a message "Well if you can't
carry it, I'll just keep it!" or something snide from the dock
owner.

It's not so much the loss of the sell money, as much as the
annoyance of not being able to buy a ship if your current
ship takes you over the limit until you drop some cash first.

On the question of raising ship count, the threshold of "no resistance" would be 30K. No changes would be necessary to support a ship count of 30K. Of course, that says nothing of efficiency. Any operation that scans through the entire ship database is going to suffer from a 30K size vs a 2K size. But I don't think there's any harm in trying this out and seeing if the game can handle 30K ships.

If this works, would it be reasonable to set a cap of 30K/N ships per player where N is the number of players? In the extreme, with N=500, that would be a cap of 60 ships per player. A more realistic cap would be N=50 for 600 ships per player. Even though it would be cost-prohibitive to buy enough ships to reach the 30K limit, it would be better to have a hard cap on ships per player, as long as that cap is such a large number that nobody would be hindered under reasonable play.

You're right, Parrothead, but the first thing that goes through my head is "did I screw something up under the hood that created this bug?" I don't think I did, knock on wood.

Ship and planet buyouts have always been a problem, and some consider it part of game play. But when it comes to the good between the game and my server, I agree that ship/planet buyouts should be eliminated. I'm not sure however that increasing the numbers as a game total will stop buyouts. What would be nice if there were a cap per player/corp instead of a total game limit. I'm not sure if that's feasible or not, it's just a suggestion.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. With enough ships, I don't think anyone would be hindered by a ship cap.

Another way to deal with buyouts would be to recycle ships and planets based on some value quantity. If you attempt to buy a ship or planet when no records remain, the game would remove the oldest, least valuable ship or planet from the game and replace it. The general idea is, if you're buying ships and planets but not using them, they'll just keep getting recycled. If it happens that every ship or planet is being utilized so that its value is beyond a set threshold, no ships or planets would be available. So the only way to have a "buyout" would be to not only purchase, but to build up (add fighters and shields, colonists, etc) ships and planets, and that's a much more difficult thing to do.

I have no problem with a buyout as a tactic, but it would
be nice if a sysop (or players organizing a game) could
prevent it if they wanted. In a turns game, even 10k
ships would be a huge improvement. 30k would be more
than enough. In an unlim, it wouldn't take much to outfit
ships to a minimum (to avoid recycling) while buying
them.

The problem with limit/N as a game function is that
it would make duping, or bringing in extras, a lot more
powerful. People could bring in players just to hold, or
lock out, ships. To combat that, maybe just have a
sysop option "X per player" and "X per corp" instead
of automatically basing it off the ship limit.

This leaves a lot of room on the list, then, to make an
extra players tactic more difficult. Also, the sysop could
close the game and raise the limit if there's a need for
more ships per corp.

Let me ask you this. What is the ultimate conclusion of a successful ship buyout? Does it lock a player out after being #SD#? Or does it hinder another team's operations by limiting the number of ships they can have in action? What is the final goal that "wins" the game?

If all ships are bought out, anyone ship destroyed can't get back in the game until a ship is available. The issue is when a corp buys out all ships and someone on that corp hits "x" then the server will lag badly and can even lock up.

Lagging the server or locking it up is a hardware problem, not a game problem. A knowledgeable operator adjusts the ship and planet settings to his hardware. Ask Sage.

H