Why shouldn't an LV0 planet also be worth of the same
protections? Who's to say if a planet is or is not worth
protecting?

As a sysop I just get around that by making planets go level 1 in 0 days. The cit times in stock games are way too slow anyway. My usual stock style games are generally something like this: 0 days, 1 day, 1 day, 3 days, 3 days, 4 days for an L type planet. 12 days for the 1st L6 cit isn't quite so long and drawn out like the current stock cit times.
But that is fine, I can continue edit any ship with theolian odds to carry 0 gtorps. Not a big deal. That way theolian odds ships can't really be used for offensive purposes.

Any use of Sentinel for offense is a bug and I'd like to fix it.

I know that there are many things that can be done with Gold edits. I want to get the stock ship back into balance. Why expect every gameop to edit this ship to make it useful? If there's a consensus on what could be done to make it a more useful ship, why not make that the stock?

The point about having low level citadels in a sector with higher level Citadels, I'm not really sure I get that. Yeah, you'll be able to protect low level citadels at any stage in the game. But those Sentinels won't add strength to higher level Citadels, so when your base is more mature, their purpose will be diminished. If someone comes in and attacks your base, they need to hit the advanced Citadels, not the low level ones with Sentinel protection. If you knock someone back to only low level developing Citadels, that's a pretty big setback. So I don't see the Sentinel, acting in this way, as being a factor later in the game. If that's not the case, then it will become necessary to take further steps to make sure the ship is limited to its intended purpose.

OK, I guess I missed the whole using a Sentinal as an offensive bug thing.

The only other legitimate use for this ship in a stock game is to buy shields while your planet is parked on the 0 port.

I've never seen it used for offense.

By offense I was referring to using the theolian odds for other than base protection. Several senerios are:

1) Just before extern, you can fire a photon in a missile frigate, export to a ship with theolian odds, enter the sector under the torp, and pop several corp planets, and there's not much the opposing corp can do except sit there and hope that thier planets don't collide or use a bunch of fighters to try to kill the theolian.

2) If a grid ship has theolian bonus (many edits do), if they get photoned, they can just pop a corp planet and have instant protection from being killed.

This is the reason in all my later edits that I just make theolian odds ship carry 0 gtorps.

Actually, people don't use sentinels for offense.

What happens is that some times you have people
running offensive scripts called a "citkilla" and they
don't take in account gbonus. Basically citkilla just
waits for a warp in, scans the sector, builds the target
list, and fires a bunch of lift-attack-land-refill waves
at the target. So the sentinel guy goes in w/ a gbonus
ship, pops a planet, and lets them chew up their figs
before xporting out. Cheap way to burn someone's
figs if they aren't paying attention.

That's not really using it for offense, it's just using
it against lazy scripters. IMO, there should be some
risk to using automated kill scripts. There's no reason
to make the game more friendly to them by default.

My citkilla (which is public), which I've had out for
years now, has a file where people can add gbonus
ships to prevent this from happening.



Problem is if you change some behaviors, old tactics
no longer work. That's not always a bad thing, but in
cases like this it can be. All you really need to do is
bump up the default sentinel figs to 20k.

It would also be nice if a gbonus expiration date could
be set in the edit. That way, on day 5 after planets are
developed (or whenever), the gbonus goes poof.



A sentinel is just a ship sitting in space defending all
planets by being an obstacle. In order to get past it,
you have to destroy it or get it leave the sector or
land. Don't make them planet-specific, just make one
sentinel cover the sector by preventing people from
landing. That works great, is well understood, and well
balanced.

Right now, any planet, lv0 and beyond, enable the
gbonus as long as it's a corp planet and corp ship.
If I want to pop a bunch of H's instead of Ls, why
shouldn't I get protection for the first week while they
develop? Those things can take forever to go LV1.

The sysop should be the one to determine that. If the
edit doesn't have slow planets, then that's an easy
choice. But changing the behavior for all edits means
that slow planets are indefensible.



If you have 5 H's, what's it matter? Right now, any
sentinel would protect all of them some. You have to
take it out, then take out the planets you want.

But assuming that people have to take out the high
level cits is wrong. There's a lot of edits where you
get cheapo level 4 planets quickly, like a pirate's edit,
and there's not much sense in invading them. Spend
your resources on the lower level but bigger planets,
like the Os full of colos, and you'll get a better result.
Don't assume too much about the edit.

Even in a stock edit... That lv3 H that's about to go
LV4 is a much bigger threat than the lv5 L planet.
I'd rather take out the LV3 H first, since it takes much
longer to develop. Spend your resources where they
deny the most time.

Eliminating lv0 defense from a citkilla would destroy
alien cashing in subzero games. That would not be
a welcome change, it's a very popular edit. So much
so that if it's not atleast an option, it would be a
reason for people to not upgrade.

As I said, it's not a big deal. I'll just continue to make edits where the theolian bonus ships carry no gtorps. That fixes the problem fine.

The main offensive use of the gBonus is not with the stock ship, but in the edited versions of which little can be done as far as I know. The SZ Enterra has the gBonus and is also an attack ship with an IG to boot. Its has two main uses: capping aliens easily, and defending planets. However, you can add another use by attacking a player, popping a planet or better using a saveme call and letting the other player burn his figs up attacking. There are other attack methods that make the gBonus valuable.

The gBonus should not be active at dock, or in fed 1-10, and I believe it is.

[edit] Make that 2-10 [/edit]

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Nod. It really does in most cases. Someone can photon
in, tow a ship in, pop a bunch of planets, then xport to the
sentinel and sit tho. But if you've got someone torping from
the back sector, even in an unlim, you can prevent them
from leaving and kill them. Without a refiller, sentinels aren't
a major issue.

Just limit their fig capacities, eliminate gtorps, cut back
their xport range, all of which are edit details, and you can
take the guardian back to a passive player.

Edit: Prome, I agree, the gbonus should not be an option
at dock or fed. It currently is, that should be fixed.

Some people like gbonus tactics. IMO, those games are fun.
As JP said, his goal isn't to define the rules for edits but
rather to just make the stock edit sentinel more friendly.

For that, all it needs is bigger figs and the capacity for the
gbonus option to expire to prevent long-term stales.

I was proposing that the Sentinel be assigned directly to a planet rather than the way it currently works. Maybe to activate its guardian functionality, you'd have to land on the planet. Then only when landing on the planet would someone else have to engage the Sentinel. It would be acting like a special line of defense on a planet, as opposed to just a 4x ship in the sector. This would make it behave more like a Citadel planet defense.

Right, but why do that? That just makes it less useful than
it currently is. You wanted a way to defend a sector early
in the game, right? If you lock that function to a single
planet, you lose that ability. Nobody is going to risk being
killed over defending a single planet early on in a stock
edit game.

Right now the ship is a sector defender. I like that. It
has a tradeoff (being torped or killed), but the benefit
also sometimes makes it worth the risk.

Edit: Some edits disable the guardian's ability to land.
That would make it impossible to get the guardian effect.

The ship was designed to be a planet defender, not a sector defender. So what I'm talking about is looking at ways of restoring the ship to its intended purpose. The ship is supposed to provide protection for a planet until it has a combat computer. That's it.

Ok, there's a bit of a disconnect here between
the way the game is actually played and the
theoretical way it was designed.

A combat computer provides practically no
protection. It isn't until lv5 that a planet can
protect itself, even then it is very limited. We
are very good at invading planets. In order
for the sentinel to be of any use at all, it must
be able to protect a planet for as long as it
takes for the planet to be fueled, and no longer.

That varies from edit to edit. So you have a lot
of edits where there is no effective guardian
protection, or way too much protection.

Nobody is going to use a sentinel if it only
protects a single planet. It isn't worth it. If I
make a base of 5 planets, why risk being killed
to protect only a single L or H? They can just
take the other 4 for cheap or free. Not going to
be building much of a base with a single planet.

There's always going to be the risk of being
killed. If not, then it becomes way too powerful.
If so, then whatever you're protecting needs to
be worth the risk.

The edit will make or break the sentinel. The stock version just needs to be beefed up a bit as Sing said to make it a viable defender. The gBonus needs to be active for protecting all planets L0 on up.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

It doesn't matter a lot, because a sysop can edit the ships anyway, but I suggest the stock theolian hold 0 gtorps. No one will be using a theolian ship to initially build a base anyway.