While discussing scripts and bots on the facebook page, a member suggested something that sparked an idea. What if you could have both zero delay ship movement and other actions when you're alone in space, but also enforce move/attack and other delays when you're in a sector (or entering a sector) with another player (online player in a ship or Citadel). This would force combat to use the relative pacing that it was designed to use, while still allowing you to move quickly in things like trade operations and moving colonists.

Suppose player A is in a Scout and player B is in an ISS. Player A is moving through space with 250 ms delay per hop. As he enters the sector of player B, relative delays become active, so player A can only move in 1 second (let's assume 1/2 sec/tpw, but this can be configured), but player B will take 2 seconds to attack, allowing player A to escape the sector or retreat if he chooses.

I believe this will be very easy to implement as an option. In the timing screen, I could have two possible sets of timings, one for isolated play and one for interactive play, where interactive play is defined as two non-affiliated players in the same sector. If the option is enabled, then the choice of which timing to use will depend on whether or not an online, unaffiliated player is located in your sector or the sector you're moving to. This is a pretty simple test.

As long as it optional, I don't think it matters. Scout vs ISS would generally only happen in some stock game or tourney.

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Just an example, Helix. Obviously the setting would have a major impact on interactions in the game, making it more playable for at-keys players against bots. It's pretty discouraging when you're podded before you even see that there's another player in the sector. Combat happens way too fast in the game for human players to have any chance. It has always been possible to have delays, but they are seldom used because of the downside, it takes too long to play your turns. This would be a good middle-ground, and perhaps restore some balance to combat.

On a related note, it might be helpful to give subspace messages (from fighters and such) a configurable delay. The delay could be fixed, or it could be based on the distance between the sender and the recipient. So if an online player's fighters are hit, they might not know it for several seconds, depending on the distance.

You could even explain it as SS radio traveling through warp space if the delay is based on distance, or through transwarp space if the delay is fixed.

Interesting idea.

Fantastic idea. I'm reading an awesome scifi series now called The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell. It deals with fleet warfare and the delay due to distances.

If you were able to program in 1ms delay for each sector bounce, that could make for some interesting issues. Granted, I think TW is assuming FTL communications are possible.

This is something that's been considered before. I think it could be done with the existing engine. One of the tricky parts would be dealing with a queue of aging messages when you log out. If you write them directly to the mail file, you could log back in and get them immediately. Getting them into the mail file in the right sequence with other realtime events will be tricky, especially when you leave the game with leftover fighter messages. If I can work that out cleanly, I could give it a try. It's an interesting idea.

Probably the best way to deal with this kind of thing would be to have a central controller that runs whenever a game is active and can manage such things whether the player is in the game or not. I've been wanting to create something like this to take on many of the extern tasks, but handle them in realtime, but it's just not something I've done. It would basically work exactly like a Gold alien server, so it's nothing new to the engine. I'd just need to code all of its tasks.

This whole discussion is awesome. I would love to see these options implemented - just so long as it is configurable.

Definitely, rg. At some point I will fork this game and once I do that, I'll start making many new features standard, though still configurable. But as long as anything is part of v3, it'll be optional and can be completely disabled. I see many of these ideas as prototypes for what may become standard for v4, though. In my mind, v4 will be a game that's less dominated by scripting, provides its own automation, and is a more casual experience.

Yeah, I think something has to be done about the way messages are processed in the game. In the HVS MBBS game, say I'm running a colonizing script and players are chatting on Fed com. The messages don't end up scrolling up the page, all of the Fed Com messages wait until I've completed my colonizing script then all come flooding to me at once. I've yet to see that in TWGS, but it is really nice to have.

The functionality is there. What about having a way to just say "view missed messages" rather than just bombarding the screen with a bunch of missed messages?

Would this be like the computer messaging system, we can abort now, read later and delete when we decide to?

Yeah. Lots of messages go to both, but not every message. It seems like the volume of messages today can be high enough that there needs to be a separate message manager.

Sounds good, but back to the topic - sorry my mind goes off on tangents that are somewhat related to the thread.

Still what I see as a big problem in messaging is the abort display function. I still don't understand why this is here at all, really. I've run macros in both Swath & Zoc extremely fast with displays on. So it does not seem to be a function of speeding up scripts, at least non that the human eye can comprehend. Does aborting display help lessen the load on the CPU? Why is it here?

I think a hybrid method of two opposing players or players & Aliens will benifit from some sort of delay when both in the same sector. #1 I'd like to see "XXX entered the sector" hard coded in to never be display aborted and then a reasonable pause here to allow a response from at key players.

Oddly, I agree with Cruncher on the "xxx warps into the sector" as not being abortable. I do believe a lot of text should be abortable, but some messages should not be. Limpet hits, fig hits, warping into and out of the sector, powering up, and the actual damage messages (figs, mines, and haz would be nice), should not be abortable.

A delay mode on move delays always needs to be equal to or less than the attack delay. Otherwise it becomes impossible to warp out from an attacker in enough time.

If you really want to give ppl better response time, just have separate attack and move delays. Make the attack delay huge, make the move delay small, and let people do the rest. It doesn't need to be that complicated.