I had a question, something I've been wondering about, but I may be under a mistaken impression here. From what I've read, my understanding is that the grid mowers have an advantage right now in the scripting, it's hard to stop them if they start mowing your grid with a good mowing script especially like a 2 player script. At least I believe I've read there are 2 player mowing scripts that make it very hard to stop them. Is this true?

It also seems from what I've read that the game has come down to a kind of grid wars kind of thing. Corp A mows Corp B's grid, while Corp B mows Corp A's grid, then Corp A tries to re-establish their grid and take back the mowed sectors in it, while Corp B is busy trying to do the same thing. Is that a fair summary of how it is in most games now, or am I just totally mistaken about that kind of thing? Thanks

Yeap, that's pretty much it. The corp who "owns" the grid can usually dominate, or force their opponent into their bubble never to venture out again without fear of getting killed with a pdrop script.

It's a battle of the grid makers and the grid defenders. Just when you think things are stalemated, someone comes up with a new more powerful script, then the race is on to counter that script.

There are very few script writers still playing today, most players are the "minions" of the script writers.

Interesting. So I'm thinking to stay competitive one needs to concentrate on grid defense scripts more right now, try to come up with something good.

Yes, and if you are on a v2 server, pay close attention to the delay settings. Latency, planet movement and ship movement delays do effect the gridding scripts.

Thanks for the tip Cruncher

I hate gridding altogether. If you get rid of the gridding, then you can get back to playing the game as it was intended.

I suppose another way to inhibit gridding is to make figs extremely expensive. I've been pondering that myself. With unlimited games and scripts that can generate billions of creds an hour, not sure setting the price up would have much effect...

Cruncher headed me in a direction that would sweep all the sectors every night just like the game does now for fedspace. Looking into it right now....

Although my server has been running nonstop for the last several years, I've been very AFK most of that time. I am so far behind the curve now I may never catch up

I have actually been considering a script that would delete all sector figs once an hour unless it had a minimum of 2 L4 planets. But then I remembered I don't play or host anymore and went back to watching TV

I hear ya Toyman, the grid has it's advantages and disadvantages in the game so it's kind of hard for me to make up my mind firmly on one side of the debate or the other. I started playing right around the turn of the century and the grids were there even then to an extent, so I guess I've never known the game any other way. Although I'm not sure if the fighter grid was something that was given quite so much attention back then.

I would think it was though, I can remember the first game I ever logged onto, was Memphis TW or one of the big sites at the time. I hit a grid fig and retreated just as whoever had that area around Fedspace gridded popped in to drop the hammer on me. It was right outside Fedspace so I guess it could have been part of an Amtrak in a game someone had locked down.

But I'm guessing it was probably pretty big then too, there were a lot of questions and stuff floating around on old twxproxy website support forums about data management scripts that seemed to be about figs, and I think some posts about scripts dealing with figs in various other ways. So I've pretty much seen fighter grids and other scripts the whole time I've been playing.

My older brother is the one that told me about the game, he had been playing for a while by hand on a bulletin board he got to with dial-up, but I think he was even running into either drop scripts or a guy on that board that had some good macros. So maybe he was in the game at a time before scripting became really widespread. Maybe

I hate grids, but I hate replacing fighters for cashing if you can't control a large bubble.

If you play with lots of aliens they will keep taking out your sector fighters until you have planets with quasars and even then I needed to periodically replace my fighters.

I end up gridding--with thousands of fighters per sector--just to keep aliens away from my upgraded ports.