Re: Bug-The Blockading Of Stardock.
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unless you are there just after Banging a game and i do mean as soon as it opens up, you might as well not play if fedspace gets blockaded. 800 or so figs in every sector of fedspace starting out. game over. How did that require skill?
Uhm. You must be playing a lot of unlims. This isn't always the case. Just wait a few hours for extern to run and mow thru to dock. It'll be clear. Of course there's no guarantee that the universe will still be clear enough for you to run around.
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30 min. of time in anything over 4k turns anyone else who logs in is just Sol. I have been in a game that used the move SD next to fedspace as mentioned by someone who provided a useful comment.
4k turns is a lot of turns. Even if dock isn't blockaded, it's quite possible with 4k turns and a big enough time advantage to lay figs around the universe and mess up people's alignment. That's just for starters, if a person is seriously in the mood to lock down the game they can do so w/ random fig drops, ship drops, torps, pdrops, etc.
What I'm saying is that even if you clear out the area around dock every hour (and there are some sysop scripts that do this during a truce period), if someone is intent on locking it down... there are plenty of ways to do that other than dock blockades. You can't stop them all and still keep the game playable.
The solution to that is to play slower games, ie: lower turns. A 1k turns game and an alternate route to dock will get you in. Provided, of course, you get in within a day of the bang. Give someone a day or 2 advantage and they can make life more difficult, give a decent corp a full day advantage and you're probably not getting in.
That's just the nature of those type of games. One of the most important aspects of playing the game is knowing how to select the right kind of games, and knowing what games are already done.
There are, of course, some sysop-level things that can be done. Some games have a small truce period (ugh) in which blockades aren't legal. Other games (like my slow hand edit) just make blockades illegal during the "startup" period. Other games give ships strong starter odds, so it takes way too many figs to make a successful blockade. Others run clear scripts that clear adjacent to dock and fed, and paths down the MSLs. Others put the dock next to fed, so you can atleast get a scanner and wait for extern.
I guess my point is this: Strictly speaking, what you're asking for isn't going to help you. But those of us familiar with the startup problem have devised other ways (within reason) to make startup more plausable. And as such, you have numerous options to chose from... you just have to look around. Which, in the end, is what you need to do... choose games that best fit your personality, style of play, game habits and skill level.