Hi, I used to play this game in the old days. I mean on dial-up, when you weren't just limited by the number of turns in the game, but also by minutes allotted to your BBS account to keep you from clogging up the phone line all day.

Anyway, I want to get back into it and from what I can tell, the unlimited turns, load-up-on-scripts games are the most popular (also something called "truce" games). I don't want to need to have to play long each day to keep up, and I don't want to just play simcity in space either.

Also from what I understand, low turns games aren't as popular, and in fact I spent the afternoon scrounging the bangs forum for a good one and came up empty. And when there are low turns games, I think they don't get that many players.

What I am looking for/suggesting is a low turns game, just about 400 or so turns and classic ships and so on. A real "pure" game. I'm sure, despite my fruitless searches, that many of these small games exist nearly empty on TW servers and BBSes here and there. The thing is, not only are they hard to find, they're probably scattered about not exactly busting with activity. I think there should be a large low-turns game, well-publicized and advertised and consolidated, to keep this breed of TW alive. How about that? Or is there a well-known one like that I can try to jump into at some point?

It's extremely rare to find a game below 1000 turns these days, with the 1 to 3k range being the norm for a low turn game. It's not 'quite' as bad as it sounds... turns go by a lot faster these days, but I feel ya.

I wouldn't mind seeing a consistent and recurring time-limited low turn game. 1 hr time limit maybe, 1k turns tops. Basically play n' call it a day. Cherokee tried something like it a while back, and it met with modest support from the low turn crowd. Nothing stellar, but enough to make a game out of. Might be a concept worth resurrecting.

I'm all for the low turn games. When I was very active, the 750-1000 turn games were my favorites with planet and ship edits not too radical or not edited at all.

Perhaps, if I can find such a game, I might be coaxed out of retirement.

Ice9 has all low turn games, nothing over 1500 turns right now. Our building games, P and E have time limits of 8 hours each. They are a bit more social games, where you can play TW and chat on FedComm, often find someone willing to help out or show you the ropes. They are both stock-ish games, with a few extra ships in each game, to fit a few niches.

Thanks for the info. All my tradewars stuff are on my old computer which is not connected to the internet.

Just a matter of grabbing a flash drive and moving them to this one.

I'll check it out in a couple days, get my feet wet and see how it goes before I play for real.

Thanks

I tried ice9, your server's games came closer than most others I could find.

But still, everyone had a "ViperX" ship, which I don't know what it is. From what I could tell, ViperX unbalanced the game so evil is easily better, esp. with frequent bust clears.

And 800-1k turns is still a lot, at least to me. I know that sound absurd these days, but I'm thinking of a true LOW turn game. I do like what you had going at ice9 (and Cat's Cradle is one of my favorite books of all time), but it wasn't for me.

Ah, the purpose of the Viper X ship is to serve as a balance for the Imperial Star Cruiser, which is a souped up ISS... I try every time I introduce a new ship to have a check and balance in it, either by having a corresponding ship for the other alignment, or by weakening some other aspect of it. For example the Reconnoiter is a 1 tpw ship, good for exploring, but it has few holds (only 35), so it cannot TWarp that far, and few figs so it cannot as easily be used for gridding and attacking... as for the bust clears, that has to do with MBBS mode. I do agree that it is difficult to find a low turn game that is stock or near stock.

I think there are some good, old school type games on bluelobster.dyndns.org:2002

Last I visited, he was running version 3.11.55 which give some newer scripts the willies.

imho gridding = exploring. at least, in my book, if you are exploring you should be deploying figs. 250 fig capacity makes the reconnoiter mostly useless, which shouldn't be the case for a 3.3m credit ship. 1-2000 figs would be enough to make the ship useful for exploring/gridding, but still keep it from being an attacking force. i think the low holds twarp is a good idea but i would make the holds a multiple of 3 since it is clearly only used for twarp, not product/colo capacity - i would only buy 33 holds for that ship.

just my 2c.

Hehe yea, that ship is pretty useless. 50 holds and 2k figs would make it a lot better.

Why not 75 holds and 5k figs? Its all about balance. Give them something, but take something away too.

My thinking with this ship is two fold... first it is designed for one of our building games, where we want gridding to be discouraged, or at least not super easy. For those people that want to grid, or use it in our non regulated games, most sectors are 11 hops from SD or Terra, so it is not a huge deal to Twarp, fill up on figs, and twarp back and keep gridding. Still better turns per sector coverage than most other ships. I made it as I did so there would be balance... yes you could use it for that, but there are these risks, and these pains to go through.

Shrug, would start to weigh in on the havoc I guess. Last game the 35 holds and 200 figs made it pretty useless. We used it a little for unfigged gridding, but in any game where people shoot at you... waste of money.

As for twarp gridding, that's a 2 way fuel cost. Which means 35/6 or only 5 hops away. That's simply not enough to make it useful. The only solution to that is to use a tpad one-way, which means gridding from a base-worthy location, which is simply going to be more than 11 hops away from other target sectors (which are, naturally, some of the most distance sectors in the game).

IMO the ship's cost makes it a balance for the TPW. Ship could be capped quickly within 2 waves (probably one, but no more than 2), so merely using it presents sufficient risk.

Anyway, that's just my experience from the last game. The ship was more or less pointless, we didn't buy one until everyone else was dead or under control... and then it was just to play around. I think we used more turns hunting for fuel ports and refigging the ship than we gained by using it.

Anyway, that's my $.02 for the edit. It's off-topic tho, so best of the luck to the original poster.

Toadville server has 2 stock games with low turns, just needs some players.

UTW offers an assortment of lower turn games using Classic TW Game Settings. The only modification that we generally do is to cut the citadel build times in half:

Telnet://www.ultimatetw.com:23 will be banging Game U:
"Solo Classic" on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 7PM Eastern U.S. Time

This new game will have the following settings:

- NO TRUCE / NO RULES GAME!
- Classic Standard Ship and Planet Edits
- 20K Sectors
- 800 Turns With a 2 Day Turn Bank
- Daily Playing Time = 360 Minutes ( 6 Hours )
- Minimum Login Time = 10 Minutes
- Citadel Build Times Have Been Cut In Half
- 1 Player Per Corp.
- 5 Planets Per Sector
- MBBS Combat Settings
- Colonist Policy: Classic Default
- Extern Runs At 11PM Eastern U.S. Time
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Telnet://www.ultimatetw.com:23 will be rebanging Classic Game B:
"Hard To Find" on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 7PM Eastern U.S. Time

This new game will have the following settings:

- NO TRUCE GAME!
- Classic Style Game
- 10K Sectors
- 3K Turns
- 3 Day Turn Bank
- Unlimited Time
- Classic Standard Ships and Planets
- Citadel Build Times Have Been Cut In Half
- 5 Players Per Corp.
- 5 Planets Per Sector
- MBBS Gold Settings
- Colonist Policy: 10 Million on 1st day
- Extern Runs At 11PM Eastern U.S. Time
- General Rules Apply

General Rules posted at http://www.ultimatetw.com/forum under Rules

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Telnet://www.ultimatetw.com:23 will be rebanging Classic Game R:
"Classic 1500" on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 7PM Eastern U.S. Time

This new game will have the following settings:

- NO TRUCE / NO RULES GAME!
- Classic Style Game
- 20K Sectors
- 1,500 Turns
- 4 Day Turn Bank
- Classic Standard Ships and Planets
- Citadel Build Times Have Been Cut In Half
- 5 Players Per Corp.
- 5 Planets Per Sector
- MBBS Gold Settings
- Colonist Policy: 10 Million on 1st day
- Extern Runs At 11PM Eastern U.S. Time



Sage