I have a game set up with 40 Ferrengi, 50 gold Aliens (the Mucoids), and 2000 regular ships. Are the ship numbers completely independent of each other? What I am wondering is this: If I were to capture all 40 Ferrengi ships and all 50 Mucoids, does that mean there are no longer any ship numbers available for them to regenerate? Or do the Ferrengi and Alien ship numbers re-appear anyway, so that there are always 40 Ferrengi and 50 Mucoids?

That question leads to this speculation: What would happen if I were to eventually cap 2000 Mucoid and Ferrengi ships? This is assuming that there are always 40 Ferrengi and 50 Mucoid ships no matter how many are capped or destroyed. If I have 2000 capped ships in my Corp inventory, actually 1999 not including my own ISS, does that mean that there would be no ships available to purchase at StarDock, so that I would have effectively "shut out" all other players? I have enough planets producing figs, interest on deposits in Citadels, and fuel ore that I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but gunning down Ferrengi and Red Aliens in this game (it's been running almost 400 days). I have a script that is very effective at capping red aliens (about 80% of capping attempts are successful, the other 20% result in the alien ship being destroyed). Has anyone ever experienced a game in which StarDock could not sell you an extra ship because there were none available?

Aliens races IE Ferrengi, aliens traders or any gold alien ships do not count in the ship list until they are captured by a player then they are assigned a number. All the aliens will regen if you have them set to do so. Yes is possible in a game to take up all the ships. it is typically called a buy out. when this happens you cannot buy ships at SD and new players or players that are SD(ship destroyed) cannot enter the game. It can also be done with planets.

Most Game Ops I know but not all outlaw this as a practice in at least some of their games.

sk

You are right. I achieved that situation today: all 2000 ship numbers were in use as capped Alien ships. StarDock could not sell me an extra ship, and I could not create a new Player. I wondered if the game server would crash or give an error code, but I guess the programmers (GM and JP) anticipated this condition and accounted for it in the program. If there is a name for this, i.e. "buy out" as you say, I guess it's a strategy that has been tried many times, probably by Red Corps that cam make a lot of money early in the game with Rob/Steal scripts. Thanks for your quick response!