Let the Happy Dance begin! Great way to start a Holiday Weekend!

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It's certainly possible to define messages as abortable and not abortable. Just need a consensus on a list.

Then everyone could just run away. The fundamental problem with using delays to even out combat is that either the attacker or the target will have the advantage, and then scripts will still have the advantage, because scripts will always be at least as fast as humans.

My original suggestion was that when two or more players are in a sector, process one command from each player each interval, and treat the actions as simultaneous. If the target flees, they would still get hit in the butt with some fighters. But if they survive that first wave and their ship is faster, they might be able to put some distance between themselves and the attacker. Or if they counterattack, it would be possible for two players to blow each other up!

Unless there's an IG involved, yes. There's no way to balance that, humans will always be slower at responding to things than machines are.

I didn't think that was the issue here tho. I thought the problem w/ not having a delay was...
1: Causing CPU load problems
2: Not giving people a chance to run away



And how would you resolve order? If I xport out in a scout (no figs) and you fire waves, does that mean I'm dead or did I xport out? You can't have both. If I did get out, then you eat corbo. Pretty big difference. Either way, the balance is shifted either to or from the attacker. You're not solving the problem, just shifting it around.

There could be a fixed order of operations - transport could happen before combat, for example. Or it could just be random.

I don't think it's shifting the problem at all. The problem is that the defender doesn't get a chance to make any decision to affect the outcome. My solution ensures they could make at least one.

Then a fixed order of operations would allow the exact same problem: People could either escape all the time, or escape never.

If random, that would be interesting, but I don't think the results would be that popular.



The way the game is now, the defender has a massive opportunity to change the outcome. I have scripts that pop a planet when someone warps in, works great for ships w/ gbonus. I have scripts that can xport me out upon trouble, again... works great. I have a script that even gets a plock to lock my sector, and runs a saveme land burst when someone warps in. The plock lands, I land safely on the planet, and the attacker gets toasted by citkilla.

One time, years ago, I ran a cap script after running myself out of turns on accident. Another player (he might even remember this, if he's still around), warped in and went to power up. He forgot to check the def odds on his ship, and didn't realize I could cap him with one wave. Before he could fire, he was already in a pod, and we had another free ship.

Heck, one of my favorite tricks is the 1 on 1 planet war. My macro is just slightly slower (on purpose) and on a 1-to-1 planet attack I'll get hit (but only once before I land). This forces their alignment to go the opposite direction, so that my attacks strengthen my alignment. Cheap align, w00t.

Another fav of mine is the "dumb reloader" thing. I basically hump a planet on a small timer (500ms, give or take) and take hits. If my defense odds don't suck, it drains their attack planet until they run away. So then someone else tries it, which is fun, and I've got a little pwarp adj and fire photon script (works great against gbonus ships, too).

Then there's the time I wanted to get someone away from stardock so I could run some stardock intensive scripts (I was blue but unfedsafe). I went to dock, sat for a second, waited for him to get cash... get a brand new ship, buy full figs, and fire 2 rounds at me before I re-docked. He was hugely red, I lift-twarped to safety, and he had to head off to base before we sent in someone to finish him. The rest of the day I could come and go with impunity, and he never tried that again.

The list goes on and on...

To say that a defender has no chance against an attacker is just plain retarded. Just because a player sucks and has no creativity doesn't mean the game is imbalanced against them.

As it stand right now, the standard procedure is for the defender to call saveme and hope that his corpie can get in there with a planet.

Realistically, when someone warps into a sector there is going to be enough distance between them and the ships that are already in sector for the ships in sector to be able to choose what to do before the fleets actually meet.
The Lost Fleet series that I am reading deals with that in detail. Assuming that ships in system cannot travel faster than light, then they will always been seen before they get anywhere near their opponents. So, the decision would have to be made for TW: do ships travel FTL in sector, and do they have something like an ansible (Ender's game)?

If they do, then we can leave messages as they are and no real change to communcation or movement. If they don't, then move delay, combat, and messaging can be changed to be more in tune with reality.

I actually have no issue with allowing anyone who wants to escape to escape a battle. My attitude is if you want to avoid battle, you can, but if you want to control any sectors, you can't avoid battle. If someone comes into a sector you want to control, you need to stay in there and fight. Otherwise, just flee and give it up. It makes the game more about territory control and less about ship to ship combat, as it was intended.

I will consider splitting move and attack delays into two separate settings.

Not every possible avenue of escape is as ambiguous for simultaneous resolution as transporting. And you don't always have another ship in range. But as JP said, if you want to transport out and abandon your ship, that's fine. As long as you have a chance to make that choice.




That kind of script works great if you have low ping and the attacker is not using a burst macro. If they are, the server will have processed their attack before you even receive the message that they entered the sector.

Anyway, this isn't about reactive scripts. This is about humans being able to respond to scripted attacks.

I did restore the 250 ms minimum move/attack delay. 25 ms moves really are too fast relative to the game's ability to send and receive messages. I hope there will be some improvement here just with the changes I made for this version. But I'll continue to look at it.

All it takes is one weak link to break a chain.



Actually, no. Before the beta, moves and attacks had a 250ms delay. The move in and attack took about 300ms, so if you could survive a single wave and had a reasonable average ping... you could always xport out (if you weren't torped). The rest is just building your xport network. This is because xports had very little delay.



I don't give 1 wit about humans being able to out-type a computer. People should do what they're good at and let computers do what they're good at. Only luddites try to beat a machine for speed. This is not about humans being able to derp better than machines, it's about people being smart enough to focus their efforts where they'll make the most difference.

I've been lawnmowing with a script in 2.07 and been hit with a bursted pdrop where *IN BETWEEN* echoing my response to the attack/retreat/surrender prompt and sending the prompt asking how many fighters to attack with, the game processed four discrete actions from my enemy: warping in a planet, lifting off, powering up, and podding me. It prompted me to attack with 0 fighters, and then said there was nothing to attack because I'd fled to another sector.

This is utterly ridiculous. This is not a playable game.




Then you are interested in playing a different game than is being discussed in this topic. When the IBM engineers designed Deep Blue, they were doing something interesting... but they were not playing chess. If you want to make your computer play Script Wars, I sincerely hope you have fun. But we're talking about people playing Trade Wars.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling....

I'l be hiding in my fallout shelter for a few hours just in case

I lawnmow a lot, and have never been hit with a direct pdrop like that. It's probably your script. Now someone can anticipate pdrop in your path, but pdrops aren't the same as being attacked. That said, if you had the right ship (one that could take a few hits) then you could xport out... I do that all the time. My unlim gridder has an auto-xport feature for exactly this reason.



Almost all of the topics today are by the same 5 people trying to push their anti-script agenda. So yea, I'm going to counter that when I can. The thing to remember is that scripts can never replace people where intelligence is concerned. If you play smart, you use scripts to supplement your speed and use your own brains to enhance everything else. That's really why people complain about scripts these days: they like to play w/o thinking and can't compete.

The options are in place to make it playable. Unfortunately, until I get a presets option in place, I have no way to plug in all of the delays and settings that are needed to allow a player to keep pace with a script. We're getting there.