Over the years, I'd developed various versions of this file. Its main purpose is a tool to tweak the Qcannon settings to keep you out of my sector. I just remade it and I'll just let it out for use by whoever wants to use it. I haven't spent too much time debugging it. It looks right to me, but, I haven't hand-crunched the numbers to verify every single formula. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, it's a game, anyways.

Notes:

Only edit the Light Blue cells. The rest are either formulas or data needed for the rest of the spreadsheet.

I don't care about atmospheric settings. If you get into my sector, I'm toast anyways.

Moth settings are easily determined by having the first 1 or 2 planets firing small shots (at your comfort level) and bigger shots with the rest of the planets.

Right now, you have to enter the ore values by hand.

Use only at Level 5 or higher. If you don't know why.....you probably won't understand the tool anyways.

Use Excel to view. It might work on OpenOffice and it might not. I haven't tested it and I'm not going to.

Nothing is protected or covered up. I use only formulas and no VBA code.

Enjoy.

Angoth


PS: I'm a base builder at heart. If anyone needs one on their corp (red, blue, same-same), I've loved the game since 1200 baud modems, so give me a yell.

Thank you for posting the sheet. It will come in handy. I was asked by my wife to create one, but you saved me time. Appreciate the share.

This sheet is spectacular. It will definitely help me in redesigning my sector defenses.

Thank you!

Thank you very much.

I tried to make it display as much useful information as I could. There comes a point (9 Q cannon shots, in this case) where the tedious nature of creating it overcomes the usefulness, so I stopped cutting, pasting and fixing formulas. Once you catch on to exactly what it's doing, you can add more shots to it if you want.

Since I'm just getting back into TW after a long hiatus, can someone answer me a question regarding game rebangs: What's a buyout and why are they forbidden in all games? I thought I knew a lot about TW. There's always more to learn.

EDIT: Nevermind. I found the Glossary B.

Buyouts are not forbidden in all games. That is a server rule that is up to the Op. It is not enforceable through game settings.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Buyouts are a cheap tactic used by a few players for a couple reasons and I have NEVER stooped to that low ratlife level. There are a couple reasons to use it. If all the ships in the game are bought and someone is running a script to buy all ships as they become available then anyone who is #SD# is unable to get back in the game as there are no ships for them to return after maintenance runs. The next is creating the maximum number of planets the game edits allow in order to prevent others from making new ones and is usually used in games where planets either come with resources which can be sold to make credits or prevent opponents from colonizing new planets and that usually happens in games with huge amounts of colonists available to fill the planets. In either case some folks think it is a fair smart tactic and others like myself consider it a rotten scum sucking way to play so I tend to avoid games that depend on cashing from planet banging or locking out other players. If you see the ship numbers getting high quickly as well as planet numbers then it is a good idea to create planets in various places (without overloading sectors) and create a reserve pool of ships in case they are needed to either replace lost ships or work out a method of getting dead corpies back in the game and that can be tricky also if opponents have someone at dock buying ships continuosly. Hope that answers your question about 'buyouts'. It is a game so just pick the ones you enjoy! Have fun!

I really didn't want this to degenerate into a debate after I read the definition. When I did, I knew it was going to be a hot-button issue. I'm reminded of the words of Captain Jack Sparrow, "What a man can do and what a man can't do." I think it's fine to have rules about this and that, but, when you do have them, enforce them harshly so it leaves no room for any ambiguity. That way, people can argue about the rules, but, their enforcement is a matter of: convicted -> mandatory punishment.

Anything else is a whine fest about opinion and that rarely gets people anywhere.

Just my 2 cents.

Are you suggesting that it was intended that those resources be limited?

I'm thinking the reason those numbers are limited has more to do with the original implementation, i.e. system resources, which were much more limited back then than they are today, and couldn't easily be changed in new versions.

Maybe you've heard this before, but another problem I see with these kinds of arguments is that the game was written with stock settings in mind, and ship or planet buyouts were not really feasible. Now we have all these unlimited-turn edits with ridiculously large quantities of resources available to all players, and that's enabled tactics that were not originally intended to be part of the game (imo).



Pardon my ignorance, but why would this be a problem? If there is some good reason to run extern irregularly, is any sysop really stupid enough to heed the opinion of a single corp? Maybe I don't know the full story... do corps spoof other corps' email addresses demanding that extern be run? If so, then I agree it's completely despicable.

Anyway, I really like what that other guy said. I've been lurking these forums for a while and there sure are a lot of "debates" that seem to go nowhere. I personally believe that ship buyouts should be illegal, but each op has to decide themselves, and then they need to post and enforce their rules. I'm sure that's one reason why UTW seems so much more busy than other servers.

Thats exactly what i am saying..it was the intent of the auther of the game to LIMIT comodities such as Planets and Ships.you can Email the Auther of the game at JP if you would like to hear it from him directly.




Both games that ive seen this done in were Tournaments..Both Tournaments were STOCK ships and planets and both were under 1200 turns per day..i might add that BOTH buyouts occured in the game at a point where level 6 planets (which take a long time in stock) were out and about.





Well for instance if during an invasdion the sysop "cycles" the server anyone involved in the invasion will hit a q CANNON UPON RE-ENTRY TO THE GAME..but what i was actually reffering to was a different situation..where "cycling the server" caused people to be kicked out of the game at a Very bad time .The sysop in question admmited he was tricked" into doing this by Vetyern players who wanted one team to lose an advantage.

Anyway, I really like what that other guy said. I've been lurking these forums for a while and there sure are a lot of "debates" that seem to go nowhere. I personally believe that ship buyouts should be illegal, but each op has to decide themselves, and then they need to post and enforce their rules. I'm sure that's one reason why UTW seems so much more busy than other servers.[/quote]

The original tournament I was thinking of when I posted my earlier comment was WTC 2001 which evolved into 2 major megacorps of about 50 players on each swapping players in and out of various corps with assigned tasks to perform. I believe it was hosted at The Stardock with Eleq'Triziti as the gameop. Naz Chaiwind was the head of one megacorp and prestone headed up the other. At one point prestone's corp was down to 1 warpship, a couple other ships and a pod that folks were swapping in and out of after Naz's corp did a total ship buyout storing ships at dock. At the time all you had to do was make ships personal and be online in sector with them when maintenance ran thus you could theoretically have all the ships in game sitting at dock and not lose them. The Reverend and hellCat were cranking out ship buy scripts at times within less than an hour of each other to counter the ship prob and with 2 fedsafe blues at buy prompt eventually started getting ships that were cheap and could be traded in for other good ships. That became a major contributing factor leading to a data file corruption and the game was brought down a couple days while Eleq sent the data files to JP to correct them as there were about 150-160 players in the game at the time. Result was that JP made a major change after end of the tournie that limited the number of ships you could store at dock to 1 locked in tow but others discovered you could have 1 in tow and another at the sales prompt in stardock so thus one could hold 2 at dock...JP corrected that by having ship in tow disengage when heading to the sales prompt in a later revision. One of my main jobs was fixing up planets plus moving products and with planet buyout in effect also I ended up building and fixing up every crap planet we had and the settings were pure stock. With both main corps turning to total planet and ship buyouts I learned to hate that tactic then and do so to this day. In same game Hellbitch/Hekate showed me how to move things such as 100K fuel and 50K colos from one planet to another using 0 turns by making a macro to grab full holds...enter citadel-beam to same sector-land on other planet-unload-lift-land on start planet and repeat ad infinitum. She was part of the EIS beta team at the time and when tournie was over she submitted her fix to EP and was simply that when entering cit after taking anything from planet the same 1 turn penalty took place that one would have lifting with anything. A much harder bug for JP to fix was something which happened to me in another game which people had told Wildstar was impossible when he asked if it was possible and that was taking a foton at dock or any fed sector...kind of nasty being fedsafe with reds cloaked at dock and suddenly no turns....reds uncloaked then #SD# and the bank gone.... I ate a lot of crap for posting the logs about it in a fresh thread called 'Is this a bug?' and also at Naz's website as it seems several players had been using it and did not want others to know about it. That took JP about 4-5 revisions to fix correctly as the first few tries created fresh bugs that had to be fixed until it ran smoothly again. You can find that info in the TWGS history at the EIS website where you can DL and/or buy your own TWGS script.
That is when I developed a total distaste for total buyouts which remains to this day. Most gameops who disallow that as a tactic usually post that either on enter screen or on their website. Some gameops allow both styles of play but then usually leave beacons at both Terra and Stardock as Sage does at UTW in games where it is banned. Some players also like blowing Stardock as another tactic and there are a couple things that gameops can do to solve that problem. The first is to blow dock several times before opening game to make it very costly and dificult to do and then set rad clear to 100% else run one of the new scripts that will bring dock back even faster. In either case I tend to avoid games allowing buyouts if I have prior knowledge.
It is a game after all...pick the games you like and above all else have fun!

The biggest problem concerning the amount of planets and ships in the game is that it can drastically effect two things in some circumstances. If someone puts a large amount of planets in a sector, the data files are updated all at once when you attempt to land. This can and probably will max out the servers cpu. The more planets there are in the sector, the longer it takes. Another problem is data corruption. The more planets and ship in the game, the more chance that the game data will become corrupted and then you'll probably lose the game. Most of the time the only option is rebang.

That's what increasing the number of planets and ships is not advisable.

The best method is to implement a rule prohibiting buy outs, for your servers sake.

On the subject of buy outs, I have to say that I don't really like to use it and I have only done it once in a game, under special circumstances - the assist. sysop was playing in the game and cheating, as well as doing a number of things that would be called unscrupulous if not cheating. I probably should have just killed everything and posted my evidence and warned everyone away from that board, would have saved me a lot of frustration and heartburn. On the other hand, seeing him scream and cry like a baby on fedcom did have it's pleasures.

As far as watching the planet count thing goes, that might be good advice in most games, but if you are in a game where the contest is base building then there might be a high count of planets in use but it isn't a buyout, they are good planets being built by people not junk planets socked away to keep others from getting planets. Of course who's to know, other than the sysop, that one corp isn't stockpiling junk planets for future use? But that one could be handled by the sysop finding out from the corps how many sectors they had in their bubble(s) and if the game is expected to run a long time let them have extra planets in the bubble for future use - and to protect from someone else deciding to do a buy out later.

I think if I was a gameop what I would do is no buy-outs, and then if the planet count started to climb too high I would start to ask questions and investigate to make sure no one was abusing my good graces. Same with ships. Maybe a sysop script to check for an abnormally large number of junk planets in the game? And maybe another one to check and see what was on the good ones and who owned them, so that you could make sure they weren't making an excessive number of bare good planets stockpiled for future use. It's a tough balancing act for the gameop and adds to his workload, but probably needs to be done. Just my 2 cents.

And tell me, what have all these opinions have to do with scripting?

Helix