I'm ending my hostilities on Cruncher's server. She wants it to be educational and friendly, and I'm afraid I'm discouraging my opponents too much. There aren't many players there to begin with, and I want to help cultivate a community of players who enjoy classic turn-limited games. I've played three or four games since coming back, and I feel sufficiently refreshed in my skills to stop beating up newbies. Plus, I want to spend less time playing and more time working on my own helper.

I want to salute Atlas & Prometheus for putting up a good fight in game D. I thought I had that game locked down, and they snuck in and came within 1 day of getting a L4 before I wrecked them.

Also, apologies to Liberator in game B. Should've accepted my offer to team up.

Peace out.

No . . . .

That's the misconception. I don't want truce games. I want players to come play full-on with whatever "tools" they have.

They are only limited by turns, time and the delay settings I use.

This is how they learn.

Asking for the abort display toggle will enable me to offer at least one game that may be TWX free.

If you want trade-hugs as some call it, come into my private game. There I maintain assets enough to dispose of sharks in my guppy pond. I run my turns 1 - 3 times a week. I will never attack players in that game, if they want to practice invading I will more than happily set something up for them.

FYI - Darkman timed out, there's quite a bit of rouge assets in this game now. Game P - come get some!

Mongoose - Thanks for playing, and best luck to you and your helper.

(edit) I don't expect players to stick around once they are "warmed-up" they are free to look for more competition natually. As it should be.

I may not be doing anything wrong from your perspective, Cruncher, but I still don't like the effect I'm having on your games. Everyone I've killed has simply quit until the next rebang. I don't like to see that.

And I'm not even doing anything particularly sophisticated. I have a script that probes unexplored sectors, another one that probes dead ends based on how long ago SWATH updated the sector, the ZTM script I published, and some crude scripts that list blocked ports and likely locations of class 0s, which I then tediously go through and check by hand. I only consider myself an intermediate player, and I'm totally dominating. It's not right, and it's not fun. I want to see these other players enjoy the game as well.

The TW community as a whole is in a precarious position. There are very few active players, and the few who enjoy classic games are in danger of being driven away. It's great that JP is adding options to enable classic-style games, and it's great that you're running a server that takes advantage of those options. I want to see classic games become popular again. It's the least I can do to stop picking on the newbies and returners.

And if there's one thing I'd like to tell them, it's to stop building their planets in dead ends!

Fair enough, which games in your opinion need reset? Or do you think they may start playing again if you CBY out?

In game D, Atlas is just sitting in the Scout he came back in, and Prom is still #SD#. It remains to be seen if there's any fight left in them. They do still have some assets.

Game B just banged a few days ago. Liberator was the only other player gridding and probing, and now he's #SD#. I know Comet is no scrub, but he doesn't seem to be doing much. Nobody else seems to be playing.

Which reminds me... don't park over your planets, people. Not even in your citadels until they're level 5. Cloak in Fed or in a random DE without any figs in the sector. This is no deep insight on my part... it's all on NavHaz. Read it!

Not sure who the Prometheus is, bit it ain't me.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

I was wondering if that was you that got spanked, or maybe you were hiding under your alias so no one would know it was you.

Game B isn't over with You still have competition!

All right, then. Game on!

Now I just need to learn turn management LOL!

Alls that will do is give MORE incentive to script, adding a mandatory display will not prevent twx. If your really dead set on preventing twx, run a webpage only front end doors version of the game.

Yeah, I don't understand that idea, either. Maybe because I don't use TWX. But I don't see how disallowing display aborts would do anything except slow it down a tiny bit. Probably below the threshold of human perception.

Twx would still respond faster than a human or swath, regardless of display settings. I acknowledge her intent and don't fight the possible toggle. But IMO its energy best spent fixing bugs or implementing other features the "care bears" want like truce mode.

This is actually a pretty fundamental problem. The best that can be achieved through artificial delays is to make human and script reaction times equal. But at least that's something. From that starting point, humans may be able to leverage their only real advantages: creativity and flexibility.

Actually, creativity and flexibility is the scripter's forte'

H