Yeah, different plans for different parts of the country. Sprint is probabably the worse for this area, AT&T the best for coverage.

I don't disagree, the mobile devices need at least some basic scripts. I'm just saying connectivilty isn't the same, phone plans aren't the same everywhere. It all depends upon how close you are to a main highway or large city, the topography and placement of the cell towers. G3 is not so great here yet... so until they give us more bandwidth, I'll stick to my dumb phone thank you!

Besides, my laptop is fully loaded with Swath, TWX and Zoc, so if I want to play mobile I just need to find a wi-fi hot spot so I don't have to look at a little 4.3" screen to play on the go.

I turn my Android phone into a mobile hotspot while driving around the city using 4G, I get decent enough pings to make it playable. Plus I can d/l faster using my phone than my home connection. In OKC I get 20M/s D and 8M/s U, beats the crap out of my 1.5 U/D at home
But a few prebuilt macros on a nice frontend could be an interesting little game and drag some players in that have never heard of or played before. $1.99 for a program doesn't sound like much until you get a lot of people playing.

Hey there young whippersnapper! Watch yer language around your .. well, LOL.

ATT and Verizon are now billing you for anything over 2GB a month according to Sprint's latest commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaZjiUA1Uco

If you have an ATT unlimited plan, I think you can keep using it until your contract expires.

I have ATT, grandfathered into a 1600 min nation wide for $60. When this old motorola dies, I'll be forced into one of the less minutes for more money plans. Unless I go cheap with Virgin Mobile. I used to have a statewide unlim for $50, but then I had to go and leave the state.

If you had unlimited on Verizon prior to July 8, 2011 you keep unlimited.

With sprint boasting a "True" unlimited plan, maybe the others will bring back their unlimited plans.

I didn't know we had 4G in OKC. Are you on sprint?

I am on Verizon, and OKC was one of the first to have it up and running. I get good signal in all the major areas around the city.

Can someone say hijacked?

Would any of you guys even want to play the game without the automation provided by SWARTH? After digging in last night for the first time in 15 years, it's obviously script kiddie versus script kiddie-- Automation is neat and all, but requiring the use of an automation tool is quite alienating to me...

:[nostalgia for TW2002 crushed by SWARTH]:

I can use a telnet program and move around, get colies and trade by hand now on my phone. If there is no type of simple script automation then "NOPE" I would not be interested.
Unless someone could explain what advantage there would be over what I can already do. If all your planning is to make an app that does exactly what I can do now just to promote TWGS then proceed full speed ahead. I thought you were going to make something that added a little automation to enhance what I can already do.....sorry for the derail.
NOTE: Derails are pretty common on here

A major focus of my efforts since returning to dev the game, and one of the reasons I'm so despised by some players today, is providing ways to have games where bot users can't spoil the fun of those who want to play the game "as it was intended to be played"**. But that said, I think some of the features of SWATH and other helpers are helpful and relieve some of the tedium of the game. In fact, basic automation has been around forever, using simple macros. Port pair trading automation doesn't break the game. But the level of automation has gone so far that it has created a situation where you must use certain tools to compete. And not all of that is the fault of scripts. Some tactics resulting from scripts are simply too powerful relative to "normal" tactics, and the game needs to adapt to rein those tactics in. I'm just beginning to do that.

Anyway, having you here is something like seeing a Unicorn prancing across my lawn, because I've been told over and over that players like you are simply a myth ;)

**EIS and anyone affiliated with EIS does not consider scripters evil, and fully supports their right to play the game as they choose to play it.

What? Phones were part of the original topic lol

Some aspects of the game are just too tedious to play by hand. There are very few if any that would want to play without at least PPT, SST, WSSM, and colonization scripts, etc... So scripting is a must for any mobile app.

A mobile app is also going to need to be able to handle intermittent connections. I think that the best way to handle this would be a desktop app that the mobile app connects to. The desktop app could handle the telnet connection, and send get/put style responses to the phone. It could even be configured to run various scripts when it can't connect to the mobile device.

Without trying to start a flame war-- For me, tradewars was about the American dream.. Starting small, traveling around, building an empire. The player that mentioned writing stuff down in a notebook.. that was me.

The advent and widespread (required) use of SWARTH to play TW has wrecked TW IMHO, and has culled the player pool down to a group of super nerds willing to write scripts to hack a 25yo game.

Great! You've figured out how to use a 4 GHZ computer and buttload of RAM to hack and take advantage of a 25 yr old game that would run on 4 MHZ and 4MB..

Some of the real 'advantages' that SWARTH has appear to be simply taking advantage of deficiencies in the design... i.e. The fact that your navigation 'computer' can plot courses all around the galaxy is taken advantage of by SWARTH, automating the parsing of thousands of points of data, and generating a map. If identifying 'bubbles' in 6 minutes was the original intention of the navigation 'computer', then there would have been a feature called 'bubble finder' since a navigation computer in the 21st+ century would surely be able to do the same thing.

I think the playing field should be leveled a little bit.. I agree, automating port-pair trading, colonization, and other tedious tasks is useful and adds to the game experience. What if your internal navigation computer couldn't predict all routes in the known universe.. requiring folks to travel around and 'train' their navigation computer.. I.e. the longer you travel the better your computer gets.

Back on topic of a smart phone app-- I think an app that returns to the core values and original intention of the game would be extremely well suited to a smart phone app.. I could fire up my phone for an hour, kill some turns, perhaps burn through a bunch of turns with integrated port-pair trading.
I'm not saying kill off all the script kiddie games, tools, and servers, but I suppose create a different subset of TWGS's for mobile, facebook, and/or web-client games that let tens of thousands of new, younger players ressurect TW as it was originally intended.. A thought provoking voyage into the future of space travel, entrepreneurship, intra galactic wars, partnerships, and carving out a chunk of the galaxy to start your own empire... [/end unicorn rant]