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 Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice? 
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Micro wrote:
Kavanagh wrote:
Wow, fidonet - years since I heard the name mentioned, brings back memories.

I got banned from the Fidonet TardeWars forum once... lol


How on Earth did you manage that?

Kav


Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:05 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
I remembered that twassist seems to have disappeared as of several years ago; for anyone interested, it is on the wayback m/c:

http://web.archive.org/web/200503060828 ... WAST23.ZIP

*** THIS LINK AUTOMATICALLY DOWNLOADS THE ZIPFILE ***


Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:10 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Quote:
I do use Swath for the graphic map, but ZTM with TWXProxy. TWXProxy will then take all the known ports and you can quickly pull up a report that tracks port activity, has it been traded, is it no longer reporting because there is an enemy fig over it now? ZTM's also give you your bubbles and dead-ends.


Every one of these features was available in various forms in the DOS days, at least as far back as 1994. A little less convenient than than the integrated helpers today, but the knowledge is nothing new. So that leaves the attack and lawnmower scripts. Back to my original premise, what changed was not so much our technology, but our choice of game settings.

I have an e-probing script much like what K describes, but it adjusts with every shot. Each shot, any sector passed through is removed from the list. The total number of plots required is usually about 55% of the universe size (each way). I do everything in SWATH. When I reentered the game the first time around '03 I used TWX with Cherokee's scripts along with SWATH, but the more Java I learned the more I just wanted to use SWATH. When I started playing again last year I rebuilt my old Windows 2000 machine but once I got SWATH to run on my Mac I never bothered to use it. I don't know the inner workings of TWX, but I'm pretty confident that one can write routines for SWATH that will at least match it in performance. Those SWATH "scripts" aren't merely that, they are compiled plug-ins and have the potential to run very fast. Not to mention the virtually unlimited programming environment of Java compared to the TWX language.

I'm sure I sound like somebody who's been in cryofreeze for the last 20 years, but I did enjoy playing this game and apparently still do. It's good to find at least a few people still at it.


Mon Jul 02, 2018 8:18 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Kavanagh wrote:
Micro wrote:
Kavanagh wrote:
Wow, fidonet - years since I heard the name mentioned, brings back memories.

I got banned from the Fidonet TardeWars forum once... lol


How on Earth did you manage that?

Kav

Cussed out a newb. We both got banned. I don't even remember what the argument was about. I had over 100 accounts on different telnet BBSs, so I just hopped on another BBS.

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Mon Jul 02, 2018 8:30 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
@Design, TWX Proxy is lightweight and fast. Most scripts use burst macros with little or no safeties. Swath's built in scripts are slow because they use safeties. For example, Swath checks to see of you made it to Terra before trying to land, and it checks to see if there are colos available before trying to take them. A speed colonizer in TWX Proxy doesn't do those checks. If anything goes wrong you are going to burn a lot of turns doing nothing, or get killed. If you turn on turbo mode in Swath, it uses a burst macro without safeties, but it still isn't as fast as TWX Proxy.

I have never written a Swath script, but I was looking at the docs, and it appears to have a very rich well written library and database. I just don't think it can match the raw speed of TWX Proxy.

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Mon Jul 02, 2018 8:46 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Micro wrote:
Kavanagh wrote:
Wow, fidonet - years since I heard the name mentioned, brings back memories.

I got banned from the Fidonet TardeWars forum once... lol


Me too, the moderator was an butt! LOL

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Mon Jul 02, 2018 8:50 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Was his name Oso?

H

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Tue Jul 03, 2018 2:05 am
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Helix wrote:
Was his name Oso?

H

I don't remember his name, but there were no aliases allowed on FidoNet.

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Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:02 am
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Stephen Whitis


Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:25 am
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
T0yman wrote:
Star Killer wrote:
Cruncher wrote:
I'll play you, your macros & scripts vs. TWXProxy scripts, even in a TL low turn game, they are no match.



LOL


sk

To keep it fair I'll assume she will only be using HER TWXScripts that she wrote? LOL

Q


:lol:

That would be an empty scripts directory.

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Tue Jul 10, 2018 12:49 am
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Micro wrote:
Deign wrote:
Now that is an interesting subject. I never hear it talked about anymore, so I figured it must be a lost art, but back in the mid-late 90s there was a lot of discussion on ztm and optimal e-probe exploration. I assumed all that made its way into the tools we have today, like TWX or SWATH, but from what I can see on SWATH all the mapping tools seem very simplistic. And I have no idea what sort of algorithms are used in any of the TWX packages, so I can't say. Does anyone know any of those details and would share some of them?

Swath is slow, and very incomplete when it comes to ZTM.
Mombot has a built-in ZTM, just use the "ZTM" self bot command.
I prefer ProZTM 4, which IMO has better algorithms.

There are probably a dozen or more of these ZTM scripts running around.
... and there are tons of probing scripts with different features as well.


I'll second that. ProZTM 4 is the best one that I've seen.

Mombot native ztm is, well, in order not to offend those who wrote in in case they are on here, I will refrain from comment.

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Tue Jul 10, 2018 12:52 am
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
SK, have a gander at these truce rules.

http://www.navhaz.com/twgs/

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Mon Jul 16, 2018 8:13 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Helix wrote:
SK, have a gander at these truce rules.

http://www.navhaz.com/twgs/



Yeah pretty standard. But as i said b4 alot of that stuff you can't enforce. interesting tho.

sk

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Mon Jul 16, 2018 11:32 pm
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Shadow wrote:
Kaus wrote:
Not sure where the no mega-corping/ honor among thieves thing originates from.

Mega-corping has been part of the game since original HHT and beyond. It's a fact of life, this entire thread reads as someone who needed a place to vent about losing.


This.

My philosophy is that any technique that is not in violation of the rules is and should be legal. And honor? The whole point is to mercilessly destroy your enemy. Blowing dock, haz in fedspace, buyouts, all of these things are perfectly acceptable if the game/server does not ban them - and all of them are used regularly, and have been used both by and against me (and most of us) many times.

Quote:
I still don't get why sysops choose to deploy games with truces, I get players flock to them because it lets builders build. But it's a false sense of security, makes it challenging to grid effectively and doesn't really offer any way for those players who need that blanket to get better.


It's not about allowing players to get better. I don't like truce games except for the fact that they allow skilled players to actually play against each other. In a non truce game, the first skilled player to log in after rebang will generally win it within 5-15 minutes. I'm not sure if you've played tradewars recently, but there are virtually no games anywhere that last longer than that without a truce. Someone gets in, ramps up, gets a super ship, and locks everyone else out while they capture all the resources. This can happen in as little as 3-5 minutes.

A truce means that you can have two or more skilled teams or players have a chance to get established and create a competitive game rather than a single player/single team game. The downside is that there are many ways to violate a truce, some of which are clear violations and others which are gray areas. Removing figs under someone who is twarp coloing is a favorite I've had used against me several times - "oops, I accidentally gridded in there, sorry!"

A truce relies on honor, and in this case, my team went out of our way to honor the truce - no cannons on anywhere despite the other team gridding in to our base at least twice during truce, and no tricks. We played the truce straight up. At the end, just hours before truce end, we started gridding, and accidentally gridded into someone's front door. What should have happened? Maybe they turn on IG, we get stuck there and xport out of the ship, lose a ship. Cannons on during truce is a CLEAR violation of the spirit of any truce game.

I don't care at this point because the game is over and my team won, but I find it ironic that I'm being lectured about honor.

Quote:
There should in my opinion, always, be a risk to a reward. That is what made this game so great in the 90's, dialing in over phone, knowing you may get smoked by a player with better latency as you traded hours of your life away.


This, 1000 times this. High risk, high reward is why I play tradewars, and it describes my style perfectly. I die a lot, and I have no problem with that, because I also win a lot. I'd rather die on my feet than lose sitting in a bubble running cannon setter scripts. We were presented with the latter scenario by an opponent, and took the appropriate steps, within the rules, to make sure that the game didn't end by attrition. Again, as stated before, I do not apologize for that.

By the way, Farley was the last on his team to go last night, and he died on his feet in a blaze of glory, not sitting in his bubble. It's no secret that he and I don't get along, but I have way more respect for him than I do for the guys in his group who cby'ed when things got tough, or for the guy who rage quit and then whined about it in a forum.


It's an honor thing. Only people who care more about winning than they do about the challenge of the game itself would resort to these tactics.
I wasn't whining about losing, Kane, because it's obvious I lost on purpose when I cby'd. I wouldn't whine about something that was my own doing. The game was nowhere near over, and if anyone was winning, it was my Corp.
If I'd cared that much about winning i would have started recruiting more corps instead of CBYing.


Mon Dec 23, 2019 9:16 am
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Unread post Re: Megacorping and outnumbering standard practice?
Astrochimp wrote:
I haven't been back long at all, have only played a handful of games, but more than once I've seen people winning games by simply outnumbering their opponents, on purpose.

My corp-mates and I were just playing against Shadow and his cronies, and the game was stalemated, even though two of our guys were wasting their turns offline so it was basically five against three or three and a half, we were still keeping them out.

When I used to play, whether twenty years ago or five years ago, mega-corping was almost never a problem, because the good players all knew each other, and if you mega-corped you were shunned. Not only that, but what's the fun in winning that way? There are no bragging rights, and that's normally the only prize for winning a game of trade wars. It wasn't against the rules in this game, but as far as I remember it never has been - people have always just been decent enough not to do it.

I'm pretty astonished, not really because Shadow chose to act in such a blatantly unsportsmanlike manner - I'd heard that's how he was so wasn't really surprised about it - what surprised me was that his corp went along with it, and presumably whoever he brought in to do the extra mothing, if it wasn't a dupe, went along with it as well. I won't name the ones I know, in case they didn't go along with it - there's a possibility Shadow was acting alone. I'm not saying they all cheated, but.... wtf? Nobody does this. It's like yelling at your golf opponent when they swing, or something like that. It's just not done.

Is this just standard practice now? If it is, you guys are really hammering the last nail into the coffin of this community. Why would anyone play if they always get outnumbered and thus never have any hope of winning?

2 years later and Shadow just did the exact same thing in 2019 Xmas tourney. He cheated and brought in 8 players from the very start to fight 2 teams of 4.

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