Indeed. The problem is illustrated in my awesome hand-drawn graph without labels. Red income vs. blue income over time. Keep in mind that this is daily income. If it were cumulative income, the red line would keep going up steeply and it would be much longer before the lines would cross.

The area between the red and blue lines before they cross represents the credits red can spend hunting blue. If that amount exceeds a few tens of millions of credits, it's game over for the blues. Red can search the entire universe before blue's income catches up. And a few tens of millions is nothing in most games.

The problem is that red income and blue income are both multiplied by the number of turns. Multiplying stretches the graph vertically, increasing the area between the red and blue lines.

This is why even 1000 turns is insane with stock planets. With the default 250 turns, I think red still has the advantage but blue at least has a chance.

I think you said this, but I would like to reitate that modifying the planets to build quickly and/or produce more product can give blue an advantage much earlier in the game.

Correct. Higher port regen, higher planet production, and shorter citadel construction times all favor blue. But if you change those stats too much, you run into something else I don't like: an obligation to join the game on day one and play your turns every day. If a perfect balance exists, it must be very delicate.

There are so many settings that impact the relative strength between reds and blues. I think some of the suggestions here go beyond configuration and are really proposing a new game. I'm in favor of continuing to look at ways to allow gameops to find a balance that works well for them, but I don't want to change the game significantly, flaws or not.

Here are the settings that impact red/blue strength:

MegaRob toggle
Steal from Buy Port
Planetary Trade Offers
Clear Busts Days
Rob Factor
Steal Factor

Using these settings, isn't it possible to turn the tables and give the advantage to blue?

The bottom line is that Reds can make way too much cash early in the game. You can change this by modifying the edit, but then everyone plays blue, because blue has the long term advantade.

The purpose of this work is to keep an old, classic game alive. There are other plans for moving TW in new directions. For classic TW, I'm in favor of providing options to allow gameops to tweak the game to deal with trends in player tactics. But I don't want to turn THIS game into something else. All of the new tech is great, but it's also nice to have some perspective on what came before, and TW, and vinyl records, give us a window onto a different time.

Sure... turn off megarob and stealing from buy ports and there is no longer any reason at all to play red.

I think that by tweaking the other settings, and balancing them with the number of turns, it is possible to achieve a fine balance (for a given corp size) where red has approximately a 50% chance of annihilating blue before blue's income takes off. The challenges are: 1) finding that delicate balance, and 2) finding players who are willing to play a game where going red isn't an automatic "I win" button. The second part might be the hardest.

Forgive me for being ignorant..but I just have to put my $1.02 into this discussion.

Trade Wars has evolved to the point of corps vs corps these days. It is no longer reds vs blues. Mixed Corps and Megacorps are commonplace. I'm surprised discussions of who's better - reds or blues - still take place when really, the players themselves determine who wins a game, no matter what color they play.

Many games don't have enough players to form corps. But I do take corp size into account when I try to balance an edit. Red income scales more with teamwork than blue income does. An edit balanced for 1 vs. 1 would not be balanced for 3 vs. 3. It would strongly favor red corps. And when I say red corps, I mean mixed corps of red cashers and blue furbers.

One fairly easy way to balance Red/Blue is with planet edits that favor blues, rob delay, high steal factor, mbbs off. Give the blue a 1 TPW ship and make the best red ship 3-4 TPW. One edit I created sets the ship TPW for blues lower than the red ships, and slightly better in other areas for the blues. The best ships blue and red were CEOs only - might have been "The Legacy Continues" edit.

The problem with rob delay is that a lot of reds will not play because it is frustrating. I don't know if you can change the amount of delay in V2.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Yep this is from the Z menu option in T-Edit:

Game Timing Editor: (Q to quit) [Q] : 4

This option controls how Rob/Steal delay works in TradeWars. By
default, Rob/Steal delay is disabled. With the CONSTANT option,
the Rob/Steal delay is specified in the "Crime Delay" setting.

0=NONE, 1=CONSTANT

Default setting is NONE

Enter delay mode (0 to 1) [0] : 1

When Crime Delay Mode is set to CONSTANT, this setting specifies the
delay for robbing and stealing.

Default setting is 2 ms

Enter Delay Time in Milliseconds (2 to 5,000) [2,000] :

Thanks Toyman - that would make it very easy to set a delay without frustrating players. A delay equal to a SWATH/EP haggle would even things out a bit - just guessing maybe 1000-1250 ms. It would need to be played with to get it right. The red would still probably out cash using SST/SDT, but there needs to be some advantage to the red.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

As JP noted in another thread, there is no point to rob delay in a turns game. It's mainly useful to adjust red vs. blue cashing in unlims. And to create suspense when you steal.