Someone had brought up photons and how they were originally implemented as an invasion tool. JP mentioned the possibility of changing it so they wouldn't affect players. I had a thought of a way to compromise the current settings vs no affect vs users.

Right now photons are pretty deadly to users. Get popped, and you lose all your turns and are a sitting duck unless you have a corpie who is running saveme. The same applies to someone packing one and running into navhaz or mines or offensive figs.

My idea is this: Leave photons so that they affect users, but instead of taking their turns and leaving them dead, change it so that they lose one third of their turns and incur a movement delay penalty. This will allow them a chance to escape by either xporting, calling saveme, or making a run for it.
Getting hit my multiple photons will incur a greater penalty and take another third of their remaining turns. The movement penalty can go away after time or by xporting to another ship. However, if you xport back to the stricken ship, you should assume the penalty again. I don't know if JP can code it to affect only the ship and not the user, but that would be something he can answer.

Any thoughts? I'd really like to hear from Sing and KB as they seem to run the best offensive scripts out there, but I would love any feedback on this.

It would be better to just add a new item to the hardware store. A photon shield.??

This would maintain the idea of using photons for invasions but would make it less secure for those using them. Someone might pop out of the photoned sector and blow ya ta bits!

lol

I think the critical thing to consider is how to limit the use of Photons without impacting other areas of the game. I think some kind of option for photons is definitely in order (unless we find that photon delays do the trick), but I hate to change how they function for base invasion.

Let's go back to the origin of the Photon. To say that they're not intended for player attack is not quite accurate. If a player came across you in space, of course, he could Photon you and you'd lose your turns. Next time you logged in, you would be dead in the water. But the way it's used now, that was never envisioned because when Photons were added to the game, interactive play wasn't allowed. If you wanted to avoid being Photoned, leave the game in FedSpace or in your base. So in practice, it was rare that someone got Photoned in deep space. Today, the Photon is used to disable a player in a ship-to-ship fight. And for all intents-and-purposes, fighters are armed with Photons, because if a player enters a sector with a single fig, they end up being Photoned. Explain how that ever happened before the game became interactive.

So any effort to limit aggressive attack scripts also may serve to limit this use of Photons without need for a specific Photon "fix". I'd say this is something to keep an eye on, but let's see if other planned options solve the problems that this is meant to solve.

MB's idea does meet my goals for a Photon "fix". But let's just sit on these ideas until we see if any of the other options impact the use of Photons in games that use them. Cruncher is experimenting with some settings to limit Photons in PvP.