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 Preset Fighter Placement 
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Unread post Preset Fighter Placement
Hi guys, Lawdog here.

I was laying in bed unable to sleep last night and was trying to think of ways to stall a game so that it isn't as easy and takes more effort to explore. A great idea came to mind, I'll litter 10% of space with 1-10 fighters pre-deployed by the ferengi so that the first player in the game can't just amass a large amount of money and turn on an ether-probe explore script while they go to their 9-5 job, come home and know where the alien home planets are via checking avoided sectors.

My question being this, I set 100 random figs in a 10k sector game just to test this, I sent the .TWA file to a buddy and had him host the edit. I played the game and there were no figs pre-deployed because that isn't included in the .TWA file. Does anyone know how to fix this so that with ever re-bang I won't have to re-deploy 300x sectors worth of single figs in a 30,000 sector game?

Now I know that this will upset/put off some traders but frankly the game is becoming way too easy with scripts and macros.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:18 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Without getting into the pros and cons of what you're doing (I personally think it's interesting), I would say that there is no reason the figs shouldn't be in there when you ran the TWA on your buddy's machine. A TWA is a snapshot of a game. The first intended use was for debugging purposes so people could send me a snapshot of their game and I could duplicate the exact conditions of a bug locally. The only way anything should change once you import a TWA is if you run Bigbang and reset it. Then you're banging with the same settings as the TWA, but the game's data is lost. It's no longer a snapshot. That's how most people use it these days.

I've actually been thinking about the idea of having ops grab TWAs for active games, right in the middle when the galaxy is full of activity, then send those TWAs to me so I could modify the player names to fictional names to protect the identity of the players in those games, then make those TWAs available for download for players who want to play at home in a private game, but would like to enter into an aged game and have the challenge of finding and invading existing bases. Maybe I could even allow AI to control the existing players so they're moving around and can attack you, etc.

I'm just looking for ways to make the game more fun for single players who don't want to play in competative games. But the basic idea of using a TWA to provide an aged game is the same with your proposal. It should work, and if it doesn't, it needs to be fixed.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:31 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
I've always liked the idea of random rogue/ferg/whatever figs. If X% of the uni was pre-gridded, it would definitely slow down early game probing.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:41 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
There is a chance that the host rebanged the game once he/she received the .TWA file.

My initial thought for littering space with random single figs is so that my Serenity edit would resemble the movie/show. As in the show or the movie, The Reavers are spread thin throughout the galaxy looking for more food/victims.

Edit:
There are certain aspects of the game that I like to try to "go back to the roots." In order to find the enemy/alien planets you better be ready to work for it, not download a script and have it do it for you.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:42 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Lawdog wrote:
There is a chance that the host rebanged the game once he/she received the .TWA file.

My initial thought for littering space with random single figs is so that my Serenity edit would resemble the movie/show. As in the show or the movie, The Reavers are spread thin throughout the galaxy looking for more food/victims.


Nod. There's a lot of fun things you can do with them. Like you could put up a bunch of toll figs and put a lot of cash in them, making early exploration worth enough money to get people red, etc, etc.

Hey JP, did you ever do the semi-randomizer thing for each bang? Where if you keep the same seed (import the TWA) it would still randomize the warps? Because this sort of customization is going to get more popular over time, but we still need a way to randomize the ports and warps and stuff each game.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:45 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Singularity wrote:
Nod. There's a lot of fun things you can do with them. Like you could put up a bunch of toll figs and put a lot of cash in them, making early exploration worth enough money to get people red, etc, etc.


Great idea, I'll set some as toll figs and the others as offensive. Reavers will be offensive seeing as how they are blood thirsty apes, and the positive alignment aliens will be on toll.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:48 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Lawdog wrote:
Singularity wrote:
Nod. There's a lot of fun things you can do with them. Like you could put up a bunch of toll figs and put a lot of cash in them, making early exploration worth enough money to get people red, etc, etc.


Great idea, I'll set some as toll figs and the others as offensive. Reavers will be offensive seeing as how they are blood thirsty apes, and the positive alignment aliens will be on toll.


The easy way would be to use a T-Edit script after the game is banged if you are wanting to do this on a regular basis. You could also drop mines and/or upgrade ports with product even though you will receive a "warning" on it.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 11:56 am
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Promethius wrote:
The easy way would be to use a T-Edit script after the game is banged if you are wanting to do this on a regular basis. You could also drop mines and/or upgrade ports with product even though you will receive a "warning" on it.


That's what I was looking to do, though I have no idea how to go about writing a T-edit script. Any input?

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:01 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
A lot of us use twxproxy for it. We have it telnet in as it would a normal game.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:03 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Would someone mind posting a quick example of what it would look like to do this from the sysops point of view?

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:08 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
Lawdog wrote:
Would someone mind posting a quick example of what it would look like to do this from the sysops point of view?


I would suggest you test it under controlled circumstances with the TWA backed up. I logged in through the admin port, and I really haven't tested completely.

Code:
# random fighters
# from admin - select T-edit - Select Game and run

# the list of figged sectors to look at after script run.
delete "figgedSectors.txt"

setVar $maxSectorsToFig 100
send "s"


setTextLineTrigger getSectors :getSectors "Sector number (0=Abort)  (0 to"
setDelayTrigger m :m 500

pause
:m
  send "0*"
  pause
:getSectors
getWord currentline $sectors 6
stripText $sectors ","
stripText $sectors ")"
getLength $sectors $maxSectorLen
setVar $i 1
while ($i <= $maxSectorsToFig)
   getRnd $rnd 11 $sectors
   if ($chk[$rnd] = 0)
      getlength $rnd $len
      if ($len < $maxSectorLen)
         send  "s" & $rnd & "*"
      else
         send "s" & $rnd
      end
      # setfig and assign to Ferr as defensive
      send "h1*5x"
      setVar $chk[$rnd] $rnd
      # edit - adding so you will have a list of sectors with figs added
      write "figgedSectors.txt" $rnd & "*"
      add $i 1
    end
    # slow it down so you can monitor it
    setDelayTrigger m1 :m1 2000
    pause
    :m1
end

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Last edited by Promethius on Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.



Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:30 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
One thing I did not do in that script is check for Stardock - it just might put a fighter, or try, there.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:37 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
I like the idea of pre-deployed figs.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:49 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
I love this aspect of scripting. So powerful.

Sing, I will get that in my todo list. An option to randomize sectors without modifying other data would be great. Although it wouldn't change the relative positions of sectors. Would that be an advantage to someone who has a map of an earlier version of the galaxy? Like if you played the same map twice, would have have an advantage in locating things like SD and class 0 ports in the second game?

In general, I want ops to be able to "cook" a game and then redistribute it for others to play without requiring a reset.

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Sun Sep 04, 2011 1:42 pm
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Unread post Re: Preset Fighter Placement
I'm playing an aged game on your server now JP that someone gridded all out and then bailed on. There are rogue figs everywhere. It does make the game navigation more difficult and completely eliminates the use of the e probes, even for more basic tasks like checking a path before you fly it.

I too think it would be a good addition.

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