quote="Oso"]Someone had brought up photons and how they were originally implemented as an invasion tool. JP mentioned the possibility of changing it so they wouldn't affect players. I had a thought of a way to compromise the current settings vs no affect vs users.

Right now photons are pretty deadly to users. Get popped, and you lose all your turns and are a sitting duck unless you have a corpie who is running saveme. The same applies to someone packing one and running into navhaz or mines or offensive figs.

My idea is this: Leave photons so that they affect users, but instead of taking their turns and leaving them dead, change it so that they lose one third of their turns and incur a movement delay penalty. This will allow them a chance to escape by either xporting, calling saveme, or making a run for it.
Getting hit my multiple photons will incur a greater penalty and take another third of their remaining turns. The movement penalty can go away after time or by xporting to another ship. However, if you xport back to the stricken ship, you should assume the penalty again. I don't know if JP can code it to affect only the ship and not the user, but that would be something he can answer.

Any thoughts? I'd really like to hear from Sing and KB as they seem to run the best offensive scripts out there, but I would love any feedback on this.[/quote]

I didn't want to reply in the "feature request" area, and hopefully Sing and KB will reply over here.

Photon's are used as offensive and defensive weapons. I would hate to see their effectivness watered down. We just, I think, got the unlim photon bug fixed and made it somewhat useful in those games. Photons are also intended to uncloak a cloaked player. I am not sure if that was the original intended use or not.

I lost one of my first played games when a player photoned me and my corp in our base of L1 or L2 planets - been too long ago. We were sitting ducks for the most part. I thought it was an excellent move and in my newbie state I wasn't able to escape.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Yes I will reply over here..lol


Is that really what there original intent was? I Personal don’t know that one.

Only in the turn games.
Personally I’m still against the changes as I don’t think the was a problem with the programming as it was other then a few needed bug fixes… we are well be on that with new bugs popping up in beta.

However I think out of all the Ideas for game play changes this is one of the few good ones, I still wouldn’t want it set in a game I was playing in.

I’d think there are still some kill scripts that would kill a player if the move delay was implemented on photon damage, but the X-port would give them an escape provided they had range.. still your dealing with being able to out type a computer, if scripts were allowed. With no scripts I think it’s great.. Who can type faster can you manually warp in a get me before I type X (pick a ship) and hit enter? So yeah good one for the 5 or 6 non-scripter’s out there.

Thanks, KB!

I appreciate your comments.
I was thinking that if photons were disabled against users, then anyone would be able to kill grids without much effort.
With this, you'd be able to slow them down and eventually kill them if they aren't running saveme or have a safe ship they can xport to.
The move delay would apply to the unlim games too.
It will give them some chance at survival, but also allow you defend your grid as well.

I'll only say this once, but mark my words, these players will be wanting this changed back to the way it was if it is implemented the wrong way. Without functional photons, anyone will be able to walk completely over your fighters in a short amount of time, thus they will find your base very quickly. This game favors the invaders and attackers and always has, so the builders will be at the mercy of the players that know how to data mine. Parrothead and Singularity are two players that have this down to an art, but there are many others that are good at it also including myself.
If it changed at all, I wouldn't change the functionality, maybe just give them an escape route to get away. Such as the ability to emergency xport to another ship once and hour even with 0 turns. Once used, they have to wait untill the top of the hour to get these emergency xports back along with thier turns. Basically each emergency xport would be worth 1 turn per hour.

Someone mentioned the possibility of photon shields. This could be an interesting concept. You can buy a shield or shields for your ship which nullify or reduce the effects of someone firing a photon at you. Of course, a photon blowing up in your own ship is such a strong hit and so close that no amount of shielding would help here.

To combat the photons blowing up problem, there could also be two types of photons. The cheaper ones are the ones we all know. If you hit even a tiny offensive/haz situation on your way to the target sector, the photon will blow and you're a sitting duck. On the other hand, there could also be a more expensive shielded photon. This would be a photon enclosed in a protective shield. These can take some damage (how much?) before the shield gives out. If you hit a few figs or mines here and there, the shield will absorb the damage. But if you hit a ton of offensive figs, or just keep bumping into figs, mines, haz, etc. eventually the shield will give up the ghost and the photon will blow.

Any change that allows them to keep thier turns after being photoned, is going to allow them to grid effectively with no way to stop them. The experienced gridder will grid you every hour anyway with the turns they regenerate. You'd be amazed on how fast a good data miner will find your base even at that rate. Allow them the means to never lose thier turns, and they will find you much quicker. Have you ever heard the term "Search both ends of the earth"? Well, the wrong changes in this area will make the earth much smaller.

Interestingly, there was a time when the game was weighted enough toward defense that Gary once admitted that he regretted having designed the game to favor the defensive position as much as he had. Things have definitely changed.

I would point out that any change like this would have to go along with changes aimed at limiting gridding and making it far more difficult to find a player's base. As usual, such things are more of a problem in unlim games than turns games, and the more turns, the more of an issue. Unlim turn games or even very high turns games are really outside the scope of this debate. Things work fine for those games.

If there is any hope of restoring the game to its roots, it will require addressing all of these issues. It's too easy to find and destroy a base, so fighter gridding is needed. The primary value of gridding is reactive attack scripts. For any player who isn't engaged in this particular style of play, the game has devolved into a very one-dimensional affair. Try to move, hit a fig, die. Go play Angry Birds. So I think it boils down to making it harder to locate a base, making it cost more to invade than to defend, making cost actually matter, making it a waste of credits to spread figs around the galaxy, and making it impossible to kill or incapacitate a player just for hitting a single fig. And really, all of these issues came out of one single change. Making the game interactive.

If you can't be online to defend your base when another player is invading, then there is no value in placing figs everywhere. Put all your figs into your base so you can hold out as long as possible. And if you can't use dynamically changing data to hunt players and locate their base, the only way to find them is limpets, Grimy or exploration. So that's the easiest solution, limited access. We're exploring that. But if there's any hope to break the interactive game out of this one-dimensional gameplay, it's going to take a lot of changes. And every change will need to be about restoring the "one-player-at-a-time" dynamic of the game. Take away realtime data mining, event-driven attack scripts, unlimited turns and time, etc. If these things are done, I don't know that Photons need to change.

Actually is possible to do that today. The problem is that players don't want to play that type of game. I can make an edit today that will favor the defender, and making it pretty much useless to grid except what's needed to cash and build. The inevitable result will be a stalemate with no winner. Which that isn't a bad thing if you have a point system set up to determine a winner, but that's something that Tradewars needs to come up with is a good and widely accepted points system.

I do agree with that. Having victory conditions that favor a variety of styles of play could have a strong impact.

Heh. Wow, you're right about that. Very low turn, single-player games are not my cup of tea. Of course back when I first got into TW that's all there was. If you were playing, nobody else could get in, they'd get a busy signal. And since you were using equipment and facilities shared with all other callers, time was limited. Of course if your base was being invaded you couldn't do anything about it until you logged back on later that day or the next day. Back in those days, if you self-destructed you were out for the rest of that day and the next day as well! So you didn't want to do that if you could avoide it at all!

Right. Going to an interactive engine improved the game in a lot of ways, but it also introduced all of the problems that the majority of players consider the downfall of the game. The trick is, how do you fix a game that was never designed to be interactive without going back to non-interactive play? When TW became interactive, nothing significant changed in terms of rules. But the gameplay possibilities increased by orders of magnitude. That's why I say TradeWars is incomplete. It was never properly balanced as a multiplayer game. It's not that players broke the game. It was broken the moment it went interactive. It just took players awhile for some players to figure out tactics that unbalance the game to the point that all but a few consider it unplayable. Is it possible to keep all of the positives that came from making the game interactive without having all of the negatives? I'm not sure.

I believe the easiest way to solve a lot of these problems is to limit the amount of information one can datamine. If you were to remove the ability for scripter's to log warp paths into a ztm, it would slow the game down immensely.

As impossible as it may be to implement, It would be effective.

Those Maps make it a lot easier for non-scripters too though.

I'm going to have to agree with Micro, we don't want to cripple the game so much to prevent certain tactics that it's no longer fun for anyone.

Why do you want to cripple the game at all?

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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