Yeah, it really never occurred to me that the comms system would end up being used to coordinate mutliplayer bots. Crazy stuff. Again, though, I'm not sure if the point of attack should be to try to make it impossible to do that kind of scripting, but instead to make the effect of those kinds of scripts much less.

I think the main objective should be to a) provide some internal automation so scripts are less important and newbs can play the game with basic automation without having to learn 3rd party apps. And b) address the most powerful tactics that use scripts and make changes that will diminish the advantage gained by those tactics, whether they're done manually or by script. And do this as either a new game mode or as a new game.

That's the general idea. Whether that's possible or not, I don't know. But for starters, I'll just clean the game up a bit. Then we'll see what happens.

This sounds somewhat similar to what one person wanted to do for TWX - build a front end that would "level" the playing field by providing scripts that ran on the server for everyone to use. Non-server scripts would have basically been throttled down from what I could understand and where I had a major issue. Standard server scripts are fine, but crippling innovation and scripts we put in a lot of time was a different story. If you can't innovate, all you have is a game-in-a-box which normally keeps me interested for a month or two

One issue with TWGS in its current form is that sysOps cannot enforce truce rules in the game easily. There is no way to prevent player-to-player attacks which generates a lot of complaints, and when I think new players in particular say the heck with it. I really dislike truces, but they seem to draw the most players. A toggle of the attack on non-aliens would prevent problems in many cases - one that switched on at V=whatever. Yes, there are other ways to break truce rules.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

It seems reasonable that a truce could be imposed in-game, but I'd have to know all of the details of what would be required to keep a truce. I'm assuming it's more than just saying you can't attack or invade?

That front end to TWX Prom is talking about is the server-side proxy Mr. Don and I (mostly Mr. Don) worked on. The beauty of the idea is that the existing state of TW gameplay can continue for those who like it, but a slower version can be enforced without requiring changes to TradeWars itself. Everybody wins, or at the very least, remains unaffected.

I'll put some effort into getting a working demo online over the next few weeks.

There are several factors that would have to be enforced until the end of a truce if one was to go this route.

1) Players should be unable to attack other players ship to ship.
2) Players should be unable to change planet ownership and planets could only be made in dead end sectors.
3) Players should be unable to lay mines of any kind.
4) Players should be unable to attack large amounts of fighters without drastic consequenses.
5) Players should be unable to lay large amounts of fighters except in dead ends.
6) Interdictors and photons should be disabled.

Many of these things can be accomplished with the current options, but some can't.

Also it would be nice for the sysop to be able to introduce new ships on a timed interval like you can with the gold aliens. This would help control some of the things mentioned above by only allowing players to buy lesser ships at 1st.

A 1 second delay on sub com and hails would't prevent these scripts, but it would slow down some scripts such multi-player cashing, gridding, saveme calls, etc. I was opting ways to slow down the pace of the game. Now granted this woudn't effect single player scripts, but it would slow down any multi-player play.

Edit> I also think this would promote players to play thier own turns instead of basically being a dupe by logging into a game and letting the 24/7 connection and 1 player do all the work.

This is somewhat off-topic in regard to the discussion, but one of the problems with creating edits for the game is that once an edit is created, and let loose in the wild - it can be changed completely from its original state. We have all played an edit that we are familar with and enjoy playing only to find out that someone without a clue has made major changes. I've had it happen to edits I've made, seen it happen to Vader's also. The edits need to be able to be locked to prevent changes in order to encourage people to develop edits, and not be a "buyer beware" situation when going from server to server to play. The ability to view the edit in regard to documenting it would still be needed, and also server as a learning example.

From a new player's possible point of view - they learn the Sub Zero, Moo2, whatever edit only to go into another server's game of the same name to find out that what they learned in regard to planets/ships is no longer true. And yes, people could still create an edit of the same name as an existing edit, but a central database of edits would help with that.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

this drives me nuts, especially when an edit is very biased towards one type of play...

Some of these would work well, but how about... instead of being unable to lay figs or mines,
just make them ineffective? A person could lay 10000 figs, but all figs would be "transparent"
and other players could walk thru them unless there's a planet in the sector, or unless they
chose to attack them.

IGs and photons can already be disabled during a truce window.

If you limit things to DE only, you make bubble development difficult. Some sysops might
want to have a long term truce game, but that would make it impossible to develop in
bubbles. Being more flexible on that would give players more options.

I don't think an SS delay would help. I just don't think delays of any sort would do anything long-term.
Personally, I can think of several ways to walk around an SS delay.

Instead, I think time limits work pretty well to limit bot play. Yes, it's possible to still have bots in a
TL game, but with limited time online people are more likely to be at keys. We can already do a TL
game for those cases, we just need to get the TL bug fixed.

Wow, lots of great stuff to respond to here

"I don't think an SS delay would help. I just don't think delays of any sort would do anything long-term.
Personally, I can think of several ways to walk around an SS delay.

Instead, I think time limits work pretty well to limit bot play. Yes, it's possible to still have bots in a
TL game, but with limited time online people are more likely to be at keys. We can already do a TL
game for those cases, we just need to get the TL bug fixed."

Sing, I don't think I'm getting my point across about why I think the delays would be useful. Two things, really. One, because they're one way to control balance, so the strength of a ship can be offset by its speed, for example. But two, and this is the main thing, scripting is often so powerful because it carries out an operation faster than is humanly possible. People can do any tactic that a script can do, they just can't do it as fast (except hELLCAT). There should never be a speed advantage to running a script. And the question of whether the tactic should be permitted has nothing to do with whether or not it's being automated. If it's a damaging tactic, it should be disabled whether it's done manually or with a script.

BigD, thanks for the list of truce settings. It's looking like a bit of a project to do it right, but I think what would work well would be to have a set of truce settings so a gameop can define exactly what a truce will mean in a particular game, then allow the op to just toggle the truce state manually, or set a time delay for it, etc.

Promethius, that's a very good point. Something that would be easy to do would just be to allow an author to "sign" an edit. Then any change to the edit would cause it to be signed by the new author, not the original. Also, I think the idea of a repository of edits is good, and any kind of game list system (Eleq's or one that I create) should put an emphasis on edits that are running and would show who it is signed by.

More on signatures. I guess it could be signed to the name of the server that was used to create it. So maybe it could be "Signed by Space Ghost of EIS TradeWars Site". I'm sure people could forge these if they want, but really, why would anyone go to that much trouble?

Nod, I understand. I just think it's a bit simplistic. You assume that by adding back delays, you can prevent
scripts from giving people an advantage, that it's all about speed. It isn't, it's about gaining an edge.

One of those edges is speed, but there's thousands of places where a script can provide an edge on speed.
You can't add delays to them all, and even if you did it would just end up to favoring one side of play over
the other. For every "damaging tactic" there's a counter tactic. If you remove the original tactic, you let
the counter tactic run rampant. A person that wants the competitive advantage will go after it, regardless
of where it is. If you get into the tactic-counter tactic war, you'll spend the rest of your life trying to reach
a balance you can't achieve. Trust me, that sucks.

Yes you can "control the balance" via delays, but the end goal is not to just shift the balance... the end goal
is to provide a way for new and returning players to have a good game w/o a massive initial learning curve.
To that end, I don't think delays will achieve that goal. My view is that we need a way to separate competitive
players from non-competitive players. To do that we need to make competitive play difficult to impossible in
a subset of games. I don't subscribe to the "damaging tactic" view. I think if the game allows it, it's legal
unless the sysop has explicitly prohibited it. I do think that some tactics raise the initial learning curve, and
that's the real problem. When people return from a 10 year break, they can't be expected to learn everything
overnight and the lack of basic starter games chase people off. I think that problem can be solved.

Several years ago I wrote a tutorial on exactly this:
http://www.navhaz.com/dny_tw_tutorial.txt

Basically what we need is a way to create a "PvE" situation, so that there's a way to play against the
environment and not against other players.

If a sysop had a way to simply disable fig hit, limpet and mine messages, that would do about 80% of
this. If you then disabled attacking, that'd do another 10%. Give starter ships a holoscanner (as an
option) and that would take care of the rest. There's a lot of excellent suggestions in this thread,
tack in a few of those and I think we'd be good for a first round beta. While more elaborate ideas like
a full server-side route AI would be nice, I'm not convinced they're necessary. Cool, yes. Necessary?
Probably not. One of the fun things about old style play was the trading.

As for signing edits, why not just add a public key as part of our forum accounts? I could then sign
all of my edits and post the public key to my account. People could verify the edit easily. We have a
file section here, we could easily post edits there. If you want to make it easy, offer a way to easily
sign TWA exports with a designated key and add the signature info to the "game descriptions" area
on the main login menu.

One of the main benefits I see in what has been discussed would be settings that could configure different games for different levels and styles of play. The configuration would allow for turns games that are competitive or aimed more at the long term building game. Allowing truce settings would let the players concentrate on their building w/o worring about someone being a pitb and wiping them out.

Multiple game configurations can only enhance the user base by providing more of what fits a specific player's skill level and desire in a game. The current TWGS fits the needs of most of the competitive players already, but that is a fairly small group of people within TW. I really only know of a couple of people that I would consider "Elite" class (and no, I'm not one of them).

When the changes come to pass, I may have to put my server back online even with a truce game or two.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Sing, I think we're on the same track, even if we disagree on some of the details. I am also thinking about ways to create a subset of games specifically for more casual and old-school players, as opposed to trying to make modern players "play nice"

One idea that came up in the FB TradeWars page that really struck me as having a LOT of potential is having a game mode that's truly old-school, in that only one player (or perhaps team) can be in the game at any one time. The reality is, truly interactive TradeWars didn't come into vogue until the game population was already in decline ('94 for MBBS, then '97 for everyone else), and it has continued to decline. The largest number of players, historically, enjoyed this game when it was non-interactive. The original design, which really caught fire, was basically Risk, but where you could decide what order to play your moves in, instead of a linear progression. That freed people up to decide when they wanted to play, and for small, intimate games, there was plenty of time during the day to accomodate everyone. And the crowd that accepted this limited style of play is the same crowd we're talking about trying to support.

So, what if I simply add in a game mode where only a single player or corp can be in the game at one time? Add to that realtime delays that pace scripts enough to allow humans to be competative, and I think the scripting problem is greatly diminished. Even complex multiplayer bot scripts would be ok. It's just automation. As long as there isn't an advantage in how much you can achieve during your time limit, there isn't a problem with allowing them.

I can think of lots of ways to really modernize this so it doesn't feel so archaic. For example, I talked about allowing offline automated trading. Think about that in relation to this style of game. If you're in the game and you're the only one there, and you spend your turns setting up a trade pair, you might need to clear out all of the figs, mines, etc, so that you have a clear route. You might even set up your own defenses on that route so you have a better chance at the route finishing and bringing in the creds. Then you reach the end of your turns and you activate an offline trade operation so the ship you designate continues to trade that port pair after your turns are done. Now, the next guy comes in. Even if that guy can run scripts, there is no way that the trading ship is going to trigger those scripts, because that ship is focused on running a trade route in a clear lane. All you can do is go out hunting for those routes and try to disrupt them, a reasonable and fun part of the game. You can spend your turns that way, trying to hinder another player's ability to cash, or you can spend your turns by creating your own routes, building, etc, or somewhere in between, it's up to you. But the main thing is, even if you have ptorp and pdrop or whatever, they're useless in this kind of scenario.

And with all of these offline AI-driven trade activities, the game will feel more "alive" than it would if everyone was sitting dead in space.

What am I missing here?

most modern browser games dont have a time limit. when i played travian, we had multiple people running one account to have 24-7 coverage. but if you were afk, you lost your stuff(someone would get you who wasnt). im not saying thats the best way, but other games allow for unlimited play. whereas evony(civony if you will) or LWM(an awesome online version of heroes might magic3) allow you to play for however long you like but dont carry the threat of annihilation if you go afk for 15 hours a day.then you get facebook/myspace apps which dont really give a bonus to a guy who sits at the keys 20 hours a day(farmville and the like). the type of person playing these games are totally different. so my question is- what is your target audience? optimally, who are you looking to get to play? i think you should start there, then tailor any changes to cater to them. and identify where they are so we can advertise.

another issue i see- lets say we get 2000 new players. where will they all play? does our current noncentralized setup allow for an influx of newbies? and realize- 2000 is a tiny number. there are more people playing on the australian travian server than all tw2002 players combined, and thats a tiny server compared to say, the us server...

and i cant say enough how much i agree with your point about accessibility. getting telnet to work in vista, with twx and swath/zoc/attac/whatever, is not a short or easy process... then sometimes files get corrupt, or something which worked yesterday needs set up again to work today... to someone with only moderate computer skills tw is unplayable...