Several scripting friends are currently writing there own photon scripts.

Some things to ask yourself while writing.

1)Will my script photon base giving all your corpies the fine gift of a night off?

2)Will it fire at peeps retreating off of figs?

3)Will it fire at peeps playing silly buggers from dock/fed?

4)Will it run out of gas stranding the planet?

5)Will it protect itself from attack?

I'll take 2 please

Hopefully they have an ore limit to prevent that. Or at the
very least, a limited number of shots on the torper ship.



Good lord, sadly that happens on some of the older stuff.
It's so easy to fix tho.



Hehe. Yeh, a fedADJ check is nice.



Call that simple subroutine at the top of the script, then
check for $FEDadj before looking for adjacent figs. Problem
solved.



Hopefully people, at least by now, use a script with an ore
limit option.



That's a double edged sword tho. If you've got citkilla running,
and someone finds your planet, you could be handing it to them.
Even a photon script that automatically runs away if someone
moves in on you has a downside, ex: you lose slide-in kills.

I'd add two more tho. This was a bug in oz's torp, make sure you
know the difference between warps in and warps out. Used to
be it would look for adj figs on the warps out, so that if the sector
was a 1-way out, you'd try to torp the wrong way... the script
failed to trigger on that, and would hang.

Second, don't torp aliens. There's no point.

Most people use the "I want to die" photon supplied with Mombot which is mostly composed of Oz fast foton v3.0. I see the same subroutine names. Dny foton from the web site is also popular although people don't realize it is a scripting example and has no safeties to speak of other than return to start sector which is a gas burner. With some thought they can come up with scripts designed for level 4,5 and 6 planets. There are traffic patterns that can be used as well as other logic to improve results.

Good scripting

Actually, the qfot that most ppl have stems from a ver I passed out
a while back. The 2.x series has all sorts of features and logic to it.

It's relatively easy to keep a foton from running out planet gas, just
limit the number of torps. The problem is people don't pay enough
attention to ore.

Just took a look...much better than the first one but not a afk script

Runs fine afk. Pick a good staging location, 5 torps, you can run it
afk w/o a problem. It'll auto-return before there's trouble and you
won't run out of ore as long as you pay a tiny bit of attention to it.

Granted, it's easy to run those kindof things out of torps, but that's
true of all grid defense scripts. The only effective afk scripts are
those that know when to shut themselves off.

If you have good luck with it then great.
Personally id just retreat off the same fig next to dock 5 times and burn it out of fuel and torps.
Be all over for the grid defense in 30 seconds.
I do it every game to the mombot crowd. Be nice to see something different.

As per the code above, it doesn't torp adj to dock or fed. It
also has a fairly decent hit rate even on retreats, provided
the torper's ping is good enough.

Even if I add a repetition filter, that does nothing to prevent
someone from bouncing off two figs, pgridding, xporting, or
any number of other things to drain ore. The best afk defense
script is one that's smart enough to shut itself off when it
loses the initiative.

Easier said than done. I enjoy writing them and then finding a way to beat them.

A loaded array will be slightly faster than a parameter call...and more concentrated filters would also speed it up some..not much but a little. Torper ping means everything as the gridder macro only has his 250ms move delay and the torper has to respond to a message so ping+latency+script execution must be less than 250 to hit. Sorry Crusher but attack scripts are not all that hard to beat.I have come up with a few more twists on the same old hat and hope to see what others have come up with.