Only when my corp doesn't have a red.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Since the base chance of collision is about 10% for every planet over the sector maximum you should allow at least 10 over the sector maximum to get 100% chance of collision. You could add another 10 on top of that for good measure. So sector max + 20 planets should work without affecting the game dynamics too much.

Double digit numbers are not enough. I've had sectors w/ over 100 before, legitimately.

If you make it something low like 10 or 20, it won't get used. That interferes with legitimate
tactics.

Yes it is.

Sing, please explain the legit tactics that require hundreds of planets in a sector.

personally i don't think you need hundreds of planets in a sector. yes i've used this before, but in all reality it was a lame way to get rid of someones planet by colliding it with another. Yes overloading is part of the game, but i think a ceiling of 20 should be max per sector if 5 is allowed in a sector.

limiting would make buying out a little more difficult too since the person buying out would have to use more sectors.

you could also limit the number of unmanned ships per sector per corporation / player. that way you could still have ships at stardock for each corp. just a limitied amount.

just my thought. yes i've done buyout of ships too. it would make it more difficult to hold all ship records to cause the team to spread all the ships out.

Something like planet and ship buyouts may be acceptable ways to achieve a victory, but they're very ugly. They seem more like flaws in the game that are being exploited by a powerful team rather than a legitimate way to achieve a victory. It would be better to create some kind of victory condition that would be similar to the buyout. For example, instead of having the team do the buyout and lock down the game, suppose there was a victory condition that would trigger when a team reached a certain level of asset value. And while we're talking about victory conditions, there could be a number of interesting victory conditions, like capture the flag, king of the hill, kill count, etc. This was the main thing I wanted to do with the TradeWars Tournament project awhile back, before Sylien took it over. It might be worthwhile to implement a set of victory conditions for the current game. Of course the open-ended game would also be available, so introducing these victory conditions wouldn't force a change in gameplay, just open up some new possibilities.

If a sysop wants to set a 100 planet limit in their game, they should be free to do so.

And there are some edits that cash using large numbers of planets. Implementing an arbitrary forced
limit will affect those if the limit is too low. If you implement a limit, then do so in a way that gives the
sysop some control.

Next, you have to start considering how to handle mobiles with the limit. If the limit is 20, and you
consider mobiles in that list, then I can prevent you from bringing in support to your door by popping
planets. I can prevent you from coming into any sector by popping up to the limit every day after
extern. That would be the perfect way to secure a sector, the ultimate turtle. I can think of nothing
worse for the game than that.

Personally, I don't think it's necessary. There's no reason to update every single planet when landing.
If a planet has no colonists, it's not going to change any from the last landing. So you really only need
to update planets that have colonists, or before/after someone lands (or enters cit).

IMO, planets w/ colos should update on sector entry events. That would fix the old cannon bug, too.



Not at all. If you can't keep an enemy out of the sector then the sector isn't secure. You shouldn't
expect to keep your planets in an area you can't secure. Sector overloads help to make it harder
to turtle.

As for ships, that's a problem too. If I know there's a ship limit in a sector, say stardock, I'm going to
fill stardock w/ ships so you can't buy any. Or terra, so you can't bring one in for a dead corpie. Too
funny.

If a sysop wants an asset-based win, then he/she is free to enact this condition. I've been in games
where "he with the most figs in 30 days, wins" but that's not always the best kind of game. It promotes
passive play, where people turtle up and try to avoid combat. That is not always the best style of play.
We already have capture the flag games. Dupe chess is exactly that, we just held one of those.

If you want to prevent buyouts it's very easy... the sysop only needs to say "no buyouts." It is VERY
easy to prove a buyout, and the sysop is then free to do whatever he/she wants to the offenders.
Personally, I'd turn off all their cannons, IGs and remove all their figs from their base... then tell the
opposition to go have some fun. But that's just me.

What if the limit is on the number of planets or ships that a particular person or corp can own instead of a hard limit on the count in a sector.

I will definitely look at what causes the slowdown with hundreds of planets, but I also want to look at ways to limit these kinds of extremes. The limit on the number of ships and planets allowed in a game is an artificial limit. You say if there's a limit on the number in a sector, people will max out the sector in order to lock others out. Well, how's that different from the game-wide limits? There is a limit on the total in the game, and people max out so others are locked out. You say maxing out game planets or ships is good but maxing sector planets or ships would be bad. I think both are bad and I'd like to find a way to avoid these kinds of tactics.

And just because there are extreme cashing methods that rely on hundreds of planets doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of the game. Nothing about the game today is sacred, because the game just isn't fun for most people. But of course we're talking about settings, not hard rules, so that gameops who agree that certain tactics should be avoided will have the option of disabling those tactics. Right now, they don't have any option but to state and enforce rules of conduct, and that's difficult.

Game-wide limits are big. A 1000 ship limit in the game is very costly to do and move, and then there's a
huge security problem... how do you keep those ships secure? If they fall into enemy hands, you've just
given them a game-winning advantage. A 20 ship sector limit is not costly, easy to do, not hard to move,
but not worth the effort to cap and move. That's the difference. People do buyouts as an extreme measure,
and they can be a headache to everyone (even those w/ the buyout). They aren't very common for that
reason.

But, a 20 planet limit or a 30 ship limit... that's different. It's a lot easier to pop 20 planets or buy 30
scouts in a macro burst than it is to buy and move 1000 ships or pop 8000 planets. That's how it's
different. It takes a lot of turns to move 1000 ships from dock.

Buyouts do not happen very often. Why waste your time on that when the sysop is perfectly able to ban
those kind of practices should he/she choose? This thread did not start as a buyout or tactic discussion,
it started as a bug fix discussion. Prome is right, there's a planet-landing related bug. Actually, it happens
even on very small numbers of planets. I see it all the time, some guy runs a macro'd resource mover and
the core they're on goes from 2% CPU to 100% CPU for a few seconds. The more planets, the longer the
recovery time. Happens on big xport lists too, tho.



Yes, but these are not generic game settings. These are not the settings that everyone plays. These are
special settings that only a handful of ppl play, and that have a very specialized niche of play. This style
of play has nothing to do with old school play.



Some rules are difficult, some are not. Duping is easy to catch, but difficult to enforce. Cross-podding
is easy to catch, semi-difficult to enforce, but not worth it because it doesn't mean anything. Buyouts
are easy to catch, easy to enforce. Some things are not difficult, others are.

Yeh, ok so you make a player and corp based planet limit. But what would that limit be? Are you then
going to consider the personal planets of corped people to be corp planets? if not, then people will just
make stuff personal to bypass the limit. What about if we start cycling people in and out of the corp?
Bring in a player, have them make a bunch of planets personal, then drop corp. Repeat ad nauseum.

If people are determined to do a buyout, they're going to do it regardless of the technical limitations
imposed upon them. The ONLY way to enforce a buyout rule is for a human being to make a rule, and
to use his/her discretion to enforce it. Anything else is just a cheap trick.

If you REALLY want to make planet and ship buyouts impossible, or next to impossible, just make the
limits massive. 32767 or 65535 or whatever, that would certainly do it. Back in "the old days" there
wasn't enough ram for that. There is now. 65k planets... that's insane. Who's going to want to deal
with that? Doubly true if the sysop makes a rule about it.

If you want a sector by sector planet limit, just expand the current definition. Right now there's a
soft limit, make a hard limit too. That way the sysop can set both. The soft limit is cleared at extern,
the hard limit is determined when people make a planet (ignore pwarps, better that way). I wouldn't
waste my time with a ship limit, too easy to abuse and does nothing to solve buyouts.

Yeah, I definitely get that there are logistical differences between locking down a sector and locking down the game. I'm just saying that in principle they're the same, and I don't care for either tactic, however rare they may be. Like I said before, I'd much rather have well established and obvious victory conditions that would supersede any effort to lock down the game like this, whether it's by locking out StarDock or buying out all of the assets, etc. These things exist because this game doesn't have any established victory conditions, and they serve a purpose by allowing players to achieve victory. If the game itself fulfills that purpose, these tactic should go away. I think this is an example of players filling a gap left by the designer. I just wonder if there's a better way for a player/team to "win".

The best way for players to win is that everyone else on the CLV is ship destroyed and all of their planets taken; however, in a stalemate, you can resort to a scoring system provided everyone knows what it is. I wrote a script some time back that scores a game - Thrawn I believe is runnning it. It should be ran whenever a game is stalemated or however the op wants (at the end of a game). The values were setup on values I felt comfortable with, but are by no means the end all of a scoring system.

A common misconception that new players seem to have is that if their CLV is high, then they are "winning". Too many factors involved in the CLV to use that as a scoring mechanism to determine a game

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Yes we are running it. As a matter of fact, it was incorporated into our ScoreKeeper script thanks to your generosity. From our perspective, this script is used to determine our game's final scores. The nice thing is:

1) It does not rely on the CLV
2) Values can be changed per the SysOp's wishes. I've actually added extra code to your existing code, Promethius, that allows us to modify the values via a menu rather than having to edit the script. Your values were a good base to start from and are now set as "Default" values for the script.

This is a bug I have seen in time limited game when a player gets killed and for some reason at Midnight the TWGS does not reset players timers.

I have written a script that at midnight will reset All active players timers in that game.
The problem is that if my server is down or I forget to turn it on .. then a player or two will end up sending me a message they cant get back in.

If the TWGS only looked at games set with timer based games and at midnight .. reset all .. then the bug would be gone.

my 2¢

That would fix the cannon bug the only problem is that if someone runs an exit/enter script to clear limpets or drain cannons it's going to cause all the planets to update on every entry and that will probably create a cpu usage spike and lag. You'd have to come up with a way to prevent rapid exit/entry into the game. It seems to me that the exit/enter tactic goes against the game design anyway since it makes it possible to clear 255 limpets or drain a cannon without using any turns.