It's not the stock settings that people won't play so much as some of the old school settings. Some of these problem areas are:
1) Cits take WAY too long to develop considering the modern ways to cash and map the universe.
2) Planet production is just not right for todays style of play. (Need at least 1 planet that produces equipment = to how the O type planet produces organics)
3) If you up planets you also must up ships slightly. (at least the moth ship)
4) Time limits and turn limits are almost a must in anything close to stock settings. (Hopefully the time thing will be fixed soon)

It would be really nice if the sysops were able to introduce new ships and planets on a time basis.

Examples:
1 tpw Grid ship = Available on day 2
Twarp Colt = Available on day 3
Red Starship = Available on day 7
Large Moth Ship = Available on day 14

Would also be nice if maybe we had these options to provide longer games and longer building time:
Photons = N/A until day 3
Eprobes = N/A until day 6

I agree that would be nice for the TWGS to be able to do it. We can already accomplish this with a script, but that is a kludge at best. Coding into the TWGS would allow for a nice standard method.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

There is currently no way to disable eprobes, is there?

There's no way to disable them currently. The only way I know how to make them unavailable is to make ships not carry them and if you want them later, you can edit the ships to carry them. That however is sysop intervention and takes time and effort. As a side note, I have ran a few successful RPG (less aggresive) games before, but adding in ships, planets, or editing them at certain times and at later dates is just not worth the effort for me. As Prom mention earlier, side scripts can be used, but then you have to include the script with the TWA and that can get complicated. There's also the issue that sysops have to run other programs on the side to accomplish the goal.

This seems like a new school edit. None of those options have ever been available. Just bang a default game, thats old school.

I once had a game that introduced new ships as the game progressed... it confused a lot of people.

It is possible to introduce new ships indirectly though gold aliens since you can set how many days until certain classes of ships are available. This doesn't always mean that a specific ship type will appear on a specific day but it gets close. The most common example would be Ferrengi that get Scorpions after so many days.

Another way to discourage probes is to make them very expensive. Not sure what is the cap for the max price, but I heard it was low enough that players would buy them anyways. I also heard for the beta that JP raised the max price for a single probe. So if a sysop can edit a probe cost to be like $100K, that can get expensive to fire several hundred probes.

I'm playing an edit where none of the ships hold eprobes.

And have it sit pretty much vacant with 2 players in the game and both get deleted because of inactivity after 30 days. LOL

Good to see we agree on whats 'old school'

H

Oh no, it’s not stock settings people who prefer Old School don’t like, it’s the deadly AFK photon killer scripts. Planets should never move faster than ships, period.

I must be ready to pass out from heat exhaustion but I tend to agree with Cruncher, I never understood the planet faster than ship thing... telepad YES entire planet NO.

Probably done for balance. If you add a planet delay, stopping gridders is near impossible.

There was no planet delay because none of these tactics existed back when that decision was made, and there really wasn't such a thing as "gridding". Most of the delay issues didn't really show up because of typical connection delays and latency. It's very clear now that planets moving instantaneously is a bad idea. And if that unbalances gridding, then that just means there are other issues that need to be addressed. But don't worry, I won't address them in general. I would like to have a mode where everything is paced relative to everything else, though. Sure, it will mean that the game can't be played the way it's played today. But it doesn't have to mean that the game won't be balanced or fun. Just different. You don't need to earn 50 billion credits per day to have fun. As long as nobody can earn 50 billion credits per day.

I would also say that it's not really "old school" to make an edit that works with modern tactics, because the point of "old school" is playing the way it was played "back in the day". Sure, nobody around here these days wants to play that kind of game, but maybe it's no coincidence that there's basically nobody around here these days, period.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I like the idea of having a timeline for introducing things like various ships and hardware. I'll have a look at that and see what I can do.