I've recently been playing around with colonizing, and I'm wondering which is faster as far as pulling colonists from terra goes. I use 2 max hold ships, twarp to terra with one in tow, grab colos on the first ship, xport to the second ship, grab colos on the second ship, tow the first ship and twarp back to home sector. Then I drop em off, refuel, and do it all over again. Is this faster than colonizing with just one ship, or are there too many steps involved?

It's not faster than a straight tpad (altho is probably about the same as a twarp colo), but it adds a step that makes it tough to get hit. Someone on here (no names, lol) has a multi-ship colonizer that tpads and xports all of them to terra rather than towing. The multi-ship xport-tpad method is very difficult to target, it refills figs on every loop and is not much slower than a straight tpad colo (altho that depends on CPC, server load and available bandwidth since there's additional overhead built into xport).

Towing a ship uses more turns than running in a single ship. Plus now you can't use the telepad to get to terra so your using extra turns getting to terra. In a low turn game you would be killing yourself wasting alot of turns. Can't say one is faster than the other since you can macro it but if timed I imagine your slower since it has alot more steps plus the wasted turns. I would just use ISS or any other large hold ship with twarp depending on the mod of the game.

Well, I'd be using 2 ships in an unlim games. Turns I obviously wouldn't use 2 ships. In unlims you're competing for colos more so than in turns games, so I'm trying to figure out the fastest way to get the most colonists.

Right, obviously this isn't a turns-based method.

Second per second, I don't think it's faster. I could be wrong on that, I've never actually tested it, but I suspect if you compare a macro'd tpad to a macro'd version of this, the tpad would eat it's lunch. Easy way to test it tho... have 2 ppl run their respective version and check how many cols you pulled in over a 20 minute test. You're basically comparing move delay and xport delay to 2 tpad loops. The only thing that would possibly balance things a bit would be that the 2 tpad loops would have 2 move delays out compared to the 1 for the twarp tow version.

Switch to a tpad-in, tow-out version tho and it's going to be comparing a move delay to multiple xport delays, which is all going to come down to the number of ships you have, the CPC and the server load. All of this assuming no ship delay, obviously.

I appreciate the input. I'll give it a try and see which is quicker. Thanks again, Sing.

I saw someone pull in 250k+ (I forget the exact number) colos in 7 minutes on sings server using the t-pad method (without checks and using a straight tpad/colo/xport/tpad/colo/twarp macro). 10-12minutes with additional check and additional safeties. The idea with a 2ship coloniser isnt the colos (though the extra 255 help) imo as much as the unhittability for a player with 1k+ xp in a solo unlim. Tested there is really very few ways for the average player to catch a well thought out 2ship coloniser.

Okay, so my next question is scripting vs. SWATH macros. Which is quicker? I've seen some scripts move pretty quick, such as some of the resource movers and stuff like that. Should I just stick to running SWATH macros, or should I attempt a script?

Depends on how it's done, but normally they're equal. A good script like that would be 90% macro anyway, and once it's sent to the server it really doesn't matter (provided you abort displays somehow). There are some aspects you just can't control.

IMO scripts provide a little more control and are easier to handle, but macros work just as well for times when scripts are too complex.



Nod, comparisons would have to be made on the same server under the same circumstance. Remember when we worked out the bandwidth comparisons? Consider what would happen if you had 30 ppl on a small pipe... the output would have to be buffered. Now I don't know if TWGS would buffer it after it did the processing, but I suspect there's some kind of basic IO checking to make sure the output buffer doesn't get too big... meaning actual processing time could be increased if the server was near capacity. Add in server load or the load from a large xport list... and the variables get complex. Would be important to compare apples to apples then.

Okay, that's good to know. Is there some sort of online resource that can explain the TWX scripting language a bit? I want to try to write some scripts, and this task seems simple enough to do.

Script reference...

http://www.navhaz.com/files/script.html

Also comes inside the twxproxy zip file.

Oh, hahaha. Thanks again Sing.