It's been too long since I played around with aliens, but suffice to say, when you only had 2 or 3 of the little bastards running around, it added more to the game than it took away. And I am one of them 'Gridders'. The messages were no worse than a typical corp going against your grid, assuming you left the Movement Chance alone. It discourages AFK photon bot scripts. People would still them, but typically only when they were at/near keys.

I'll poke around a bit in the alien editor some and try to remember what seemed to work best for me. (i.e. the least irritating, yet still having aliens in there for a slight random fun factor [:D])

Yeah! You're a smart one! Bonus tip:
(Of course, what's really fun is to change the name file of the aliens to match your player list. Set it up so it's 5-6 days before they start appearing, then grab the list of player names and overwrite the alien name file with their names on day 4 or so heh...)

what bothers me is when you get like 5 fig hits for 1 sector.
another thing is Trade Wars is a game of cashing.I am sure everyone will agree.No cash no crap at all.When you give everyone the abaility to get mass money for alien ships,it takes out some of the fun of haveing more cash than another.I am in a game at Panthers now.Aliens galore.I got so many aliens that I actually had to drop money in a cit 3 times as not to max and get no money.Thats overdoing it.
That is Wildstar's Newbie player rant of the day.

quote:
Originally posted by Stockton

anyone who likes aliens hasnt played in a game with alot of action from real traders... aliens are quite simply the worst feature i have ever seen in tradewars.. the fig hits are unbearable.. who still plays this game and doesnt put up a grid??

Do you actually expect to setup your little grid, a couple of home sectors and then have smooth sailings for the rest of the game? The aliens assist in keeping the game balanced, now of course putting in to many of them and/or allowing players to cash in on their ships in exchange for tons of credits, starts to cause a negative effect within the game. Like anything there is a line that when crossed in either direction starts to result in undesired effects.

Also it has not been mentioned but they are good for keeping your alignment balanced. Dont forget also that fighting aliens costs you fighters and shields, so most the credits you obtain go right back into restocking your ship. On a final note they also cost players their turns, so they are an added distraction for players wishing to hunt them.

i expect the other corps to hit my grid and balance it otu.. not stupid aliens that tough the figs every second and fill my screen but dont even kill the figs.. just go and sit there.. cant even tell what is goign on in the game.. stupid stupid stupid

quote:Do you actually expect to setup your little grid, a couple of home sectors and then have smooth sailings for the rest of the game? The aliens assist in keeping the game balanced, now of course putting in to many of them and/or allowing players to cash in on their ships in exchange for tons of credits, starts to cause a negative effect within the game. Like anything there is a line that when crossed in either direction starts to result in undesired effects.

Also it has not been mentioned but they are good for keeping your alignment balanced. Dont forget also that fighting aliens costs you fighters and shields, so most the credits you obtain go right back into restocking your ship. On a final note they also cost players their turns, so they are an added distraction for players wishing to hunt them.


If you have a little grid, then the alien fig hits are not a problem, but an active gridder will have more than a little grid steup. The messages I had for approximately 12 hours was 119,032 and that just seems to be a tad bit excessive to me.

As for most of the credits going back to restocking the ship, it depends on the edits. One edit had alien ships that returned about 40 mil with less than 10k figs on them. Cap one and you had a pretty good return on your effort - cap 3 and you had the best non-alien ship in the game with a pretty good start at maxing it out. No need to ppt or ssm in the game - just alien hunt as soon as you had a semi-decent ship.

The game I was in when I started this thread was an unlimited move game so moves were not an issue.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Oh no doubt that is extremely exessive both on part of the messages and the credits, although maybe the SysOp/GameOp wanted to make a game that players make profit from battling aliens rather then PPTing? Could be an outside the box idea, I think that might be kinda kewl to try out as a game theme... and the added messages are just an unavoidable result?

Aliens are teh suck. Period.

While I am the first to be willing to try new things in a game, I have to say that this subject gets beaten into the ground alot.

One group likes em, one group doesn't. If u don't like em, don't play with em. It makes the game so much easier. If a sysop wants to know what is popular, he can do a search.

Jhereg

A TWX script could supress alien hits, but might cause other problems. It would be a bit tricky to get just right. I'd be happy to help someone write it, but I'm not going to tackle it myself anytime soon.

PM if interested.

+EP+

Sorry to bug ya EP, but im confused by what you mean; ive been sitting here tying to figure out how that could work, and its just not coming to me. Do you mean a script for the SysOp to run in a loop? Sorry don't mean to be ignorant. [:(]

No Rexx, I believe he means a TWX script that an individual player would run to filter the incoming text stream and automatically edit out the alien hits before passing the stream to your telnet client.

Ohhhhh, now I see the light, ok I was thinking only on the SysOp side of it, that didnt even cross my mind, darn it!... guess the dark-side had taken me momentarily; and just in case your wondering, yes i've been messing with that dang vader game, to much.

quote:
If a sysop wants to know what is popular, he can do a search.

I have. I've noticed its basically "Game edits". I don't mind using someone else's work, to get the players, but I like to be creative. I would like someone to come on and play a game that they DON'T already know. ( Yes, understandably, when you bang the game - things change - but the edits are still there. The warps and stuff just change )
I tested this theory, I have 3 game edits on my TWGS, and 1 game I created just randomly. 1 person, was kind enough to log onto the game and try it. Mostly, everyone was on games A-C, because they were game edits.

quote:anyone who likes aliens hasnt played in a game with alot of action from real traders... aliens are quite simply the worst feature i have ever seen in tradewars

I have to disagree. I use to play TW long time ago, on the BBS'es. I like the GOLD aliens, and I use to play on the old games, that didn't have alien traders.

quote:although maybe the SysOp/GameOp wanted to make a game that players make profit from battling aliens rather then PPTing? Could be an outside the box idea

I just liked the aliens. To be honest, I didn't think much of cashing, PPTing, or anything else. I just liked seeing them as part of the game.

What about those non-GOLD aliens ( the ones you could set to "blood hunt" a corp or trader? What did people think of those? They were considered "aliens" ... just not magically run by the server.
quote:Gold aliens constantly regenerate, not just at extern.

Actually, you can set the GOLD aliens to not regen. So, honestly, they don't always regen. Once they reach the max amount set by SysOp, thats it. There is no more being made.

quote:Originally posted by ElderProphet

A TWX script could supress alien hits, but might cause other problems. It would be a bit tricky to get just right. I'd be happy to help someone write it, but I'm not going to tackle it myself anytime soon.

PM if interested.

+EP+

Been there, sorta done that.
Anyway, I wrote a script that would weed out alien messages from your computer message report.

This is an off-line message of an alien hitting one of your offensive figs (i.e. computer, mail):
Received from Deployed Fighters at 03:00:35 PM S.D. 06/21/17:
> Report Sector 5013: M.I.B. Kay's Ominous Black Sedan entered sector.
> Your fighters in sector 5013 lost 1 attacking M.I.B. Kay

This is an off-line message of a player hitting one of your offensive figs.
Received from Deployed Fighters at 00:01:38 AM S.D. 06/22/17:
> Report Sector 2575: Traitor's Grand Vizier entered sector.
> Your fighters in sector 2575 lost 1 attacking Traitor

I used CURRENTANSILINE to check if the color in the 2nd line, after the :, was Cyan (#27[1;36m) for a player, or Yellow (#27[1;33m) for an Alien. If it was yellow, I would put that in a different list from the player hits. You could do the same thing for messages recieved while on-line.

online message from an alien hitting your figs:
Deployed Fighters Report Sector 5196: M.I.B. Kay's Ominous Black Sedan entered sector.

online message from a player hittig your figs:
Deployed Fighters Report Sector 4440: Enemy's Malefactor entered sector.

So, having nothing better to do during lunch today...

# Fig Hit Watcher
# for TWX v2.03 Final
:waitForIncoming
settextlinetrigger incoming :incoming "Deployed Fighters"
pause

:incoming
# The following two lines convert the CurrentLine and CurrentAnsiLine
# into variables.
setvar $line CURRENTLINE
setvar $ansiLine CURRENTANSILINE
# the following 4 lines are anti-spoof.
getword $line $spoofCheck 1
if ($spoofcheck <> "Deployed")
goto :waitForIncoming
end
# The following lines grab the sector number, and
# remove the colon from the end.
getword $line $sector 5
striptext $sector ":"
# The following line will get you either
# " #27[1;36mEnemy Name" if it's a player,
# or " #27[1;36m#27[33mAlien Race Name [36mAlien Name"
gettext $ansiLine $isTrader ":" "'s"
# The following grabs the 9th character (remember, the 1st char is a space)
# It will be a letter if it's a player, or a #27 if it's an alien
# (and I'm using #27 in the above comments to represent the escape key.
# In reality, it's a single character. So if the math below looks off, it's really not.)
cuttext $isTrader $traderCheck 9 1
# The following removes the escape Char
# leaving either " [1;36mEnemy Name" if it's a player,
# or " [1;36[33mAlien Race Name [36mAlien Name"
# I do this AFTER I've gotten $traderCheck, but BEFORE
# I set the $traderName or $alienRace and $alienName,
# because I don't want to deal with the escape code(s) anymore.
striptext $isTrader #27
# So, here is where I do the actual check to see if it was
# a player or an Alien that hit your figgie.
# so, if $traderCheck is an escape code (#27)
# it has to be an alien, since you can't name yourself an escape code.
if ($traderCheck <> #27)
cuttext $isTrader $traderName 8 99
echo ANSI_10 "*It's a Player! Player Name = " $traderName "***"
write GAMENAME & "-fighitlog.txt" DATE & " " & TIME & " " & $traderName & " " & $sector
else
gettext $isTrader $alienRace "[33m" "[36m"
gettext $isTrader $alienName "[36m" ""
echo ANSI_12 "*It's an Alien! Alien Race = " $alienRace " Alien Name = " $alienName "***"
write GAMENAME & "-fighitlog.txt" DATE & " " & TIME & " " & $alienRace & " " & $alienName & " " & $sector
end
# now that I know what hit my fig, I want to ignore the next line,
# since it may or may not contain the phrase Deployed fighters too
# depending on what type of fig was hit.
settextlinetrigger ignoreAttack :ignoreNextLine "is attacking!"
settextlinetrigger ignorelostfig :ignoreNextLine "Your fighters"
settextlinetrigger retreated :retreated "retreated."
pause

:ignoreNextLine
# this is so it doesn't try to parse the next line.
# generally, if they touch your fig, it's dead anyway.
# And you already got the info you really needed.
# cause nobody puts out tolled figs, right?
killtrigger ignoreAttack
killtrigger ignorelostfig
killtrigger retreated
# here is where you would change your fig array to note that you
# no longer have a fig in that sector.
# i.e.
setvar $figArray[$sector] 0
# or however you are storing your figs in an array.
goto :waitForIncoming

:retreated
killtrigger ignoreAttack
killtrigger ignorelostfig
killtrigger retreated
# looks like you didn't loose a fig. so no need to clear
# the array entry here.
goto :waitForIncoming

<sigh> Pity about the formatting. Wish Grimy was back up...

This script just happens to grab the player's full name too.
That can be handy for certain scripts I suppose... [:D]
It also makes a nice log file with timestamps and everything.

Of course, depending on the length of the name of the ship class, or the player or alien name, or the alien race, the text will cover either 1 or 2 lines. So it's a royal pain to check for how many lines up or down you need to move the cursor. And offensive fig hits give you 2 lines of feedback, defensive and tolled figs give 3 lines. And if the alien bounces off your fig (hits it, but doesn't kill it) then you only get 1 line...unless it's name is long and it spills over into 2 lines... And, of course, TWX will still see these long lines as just 1 line, and not 2, but your TERMINAL probably won't. Anyway, it's a royal pain. heh.

I've tried playing around with manualy toggleing the TWX_TOGGLEDEAF menu, but the problem is whenever I call that with openmenu, I can't get the stupid menu to close again from within the script. Once the menu is open, it won't process anything else until you hit a key, like q. I've tried using getmenuvalue on TWX_TOGGLEDEAF, and no matter what it's set at, it returns 0. I've tried using setmenuvalue to set it to 1 and 0 and that hasn't worked either. I would love to be able to suppress incoming text on the fly, but...

http://www.twxproxy.com/support.php?show=623

I've gone over this with Xide in the past already. And as far as I know, it wasn't addressed in 2.03 Final.

-edited for clarity...

Ok, while doing some more research on GOLD aliens in general, I found that the biggest freaking problem with them is that the odds of them moving that the sysop sets NEVER seem to be considered. (option i on screen 1, Movement Chance) I created a race (Men In Black, M.I.B) which only had ONE member. That little guy moved every 30 seconds like clockwork, even though I had the movement chance set to 1 in 100. That means that in a 24 hour period, the little guy will move almost 2900 times. That's about the equivalent of a 6 man corp's moves in a 1k turn game.

I take back what I said earlier. More than one alien TOTAL is excessive. heh. I can see why most modern players (myself included) HATE them with such a passion. adding just 20 agressive aliens to a game has the potential to sweep all the deployed figs in a 5k sector game in just over 2 hours.

It didn't used to be this way. I'm gonna bug JP about it.