I posted this request on Facebook, but I'd also love to hear from some of you in here. Though I am actually looking for feedback from the more casual TradeWars players that tend to follow the facebook page, I would also very much appreciate the expertise that the serious players and gameops on this forum possess. Even if you focus your time on unlimited turn games and bot-wars today, you may remember a time when the game was very different, and I'd like to hear what it was that originally drew you in.

Ok, here's my request:


I'm working on a proposal for a TradeWars remake. One of the things I need to do is present a walk-through of gameplay for those who don't really understand the game. Obviously I can walk through the basics of how the game is played, but I think the real strength of this game is the fact that it can be different for every player. So I thought it would be a useful exercise to ask the community for your input on how you play (or more likely, played) the game, what you enjoy most about the game, and what you consider the most important part of the game that must be included in a remake, whether it's a mobile version, facebook version, or anything else. If you'd be willing to do this, please email me at jpritch at eisonline.com and try to keep it under a couple of pages ;)

I'm actually more interested in hearing from those who played the game back in the 90s, before scripting and automation became such an integral part of the game, or who play managed games today where heavy scripting and bot-use is not allowed. A remake will provide whatever automation is necessary to avoid tedious gameplay, so that particular aspect of the game will not be relevant. I'm more interested in hearing about your experience in the various phases of the game; start-up, middle-game and end-game, as well as what you most enjoyed, whether it be combat, exploration, building and management, etc. Ideally, I'd like to provide a number of different perspectives demonstrating the very different kinds of players who have enjoyed this game over the years.

For anyone willing to give me their insights into what made TradeWars special, I really appreciate it!

Back in those days, I played mostly solo. I derived great joy in the early days building up planets and creating my own empire. I rarely attacked anyone else. I was just about building. I guess it harkens back to my business mentality. As I progressed in the TW timeline, I began to really enjoy making friends with other players and playing games together. That sense of fraternity.

I really love the discovery of the little details, even after all these years I can still learn something new about this game. When I first became "addicted" I used to run spreadsheets to manage and organize my assets. I love the whole experience the game offers. Exploring for the "perfect" building spot, exploring to locate everyone else, trading... before helpers I would manually calculate every trade to get the highest profits. Going nuts trying to figure out how to keep colonists from dying off. The excitement of getting teammates organized together for invasions. It's still an adrenaline rush, even after all these years. The only thing I was never fast enough at was the 1-2-1 warfare. So, I learned how to make large sums of credits to outfit teammates who were good at that type of play. And probably most important thing about this game, has nothing at all to do with code, it's the R/L friendships that evolve. I'd say we're over-due for a TWCon, or have the next one to celebrate the next evolution of this game.

The game was originally requested by my user base on RiverCity because several of them played it, but the time limits in force back then didn't allow them to get their full fix.

I started playing and enjoyed the haggling and combat - either ship-to-ship or invasions. I played solo back then also. The things I enjoyed really didn't change with the advent of scripting - just faster and a greater challenge.

The users seemed to enjoy the BBS board for trash talking each other - very, very mild compared to what we see today. Maybe it is because we controlled the situation, and verified every user by voice back then. Today's FedCom is now used much in the same way as our BBS board was used.

Some players felt a completely explored universe was their main goal with notebooks of sector information and warps plotted by hand. Builders seemed to be a lot more common on our board than attackers so they were the "baby seals" of today - they didn't want combat.

The nice thing about today's version, mainly because of the Internet, is that you sometimes meet people from all over the world. Most have played on Vid's server, and we played on an Australian board (great people) a few years ago - it was interesting to talk to the people there.

When I ran my server with v1.03, I liked the fact that I could create a game that I thought would be fun. Some were, some weren't. The number of .TWAs out allow players different types of games so there can be something for everyone from killfests to builders to alien hunters. If players want turn management, they can have it or they can have unlims where it is time management. The flexibility of game design is a double edged sword - it allows very good games for everyone, and it allows really bad games.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

Hum. That's a fun request. What did I like?

I liked that TW2002 had an extra level of complexity. Most of the door games were dirt simple. So simple you could play them while you were asleep.

It was the first online game which gave you multiple ways to win. What with bots and the basic rules being known so well, that is long lost, but back with V0.96 we just didn't know all of the details, and it was an adventure trying to figure out what worked. And then when 0.98 came out, we had to figure it all out again, because you couldn't run an evil ISS anymore.

I could play, and have my turns finished in 1/2 hour. Of course in those days very few boards had more than one line, so you couldn't play directly against another player.

Oh, and it was damned easy to hack. Of course that hasn't changed, I just don't have time to hack anymore!

Wayne

My son started me playing 1989, 1 node, 1k sectors, local diallup. I enjoyed playing but can't remember why, I think it was because I used Ashton Tate's (?) dBaseIII to analyse the capfile for data mining - I remember one of the players (red, about which I knew zip apart from the fact that he had a lot more stuff than I) started smoking the PPT pairs and I wrote code to find twarp pairs in dBase with at least one of the ports selling gas.

Restarted '95 or so, when son told me it was now multiplayer and on telnet. I played mostly at Eclipse.ultranet.com. I got my head handed to me on a plate a few times, got annoyed and read whatever docs I could find about the game; "slice's" stuff, "someguy"'s, etc (the in-game help is not great, suggest links to informative pages, or to the tw museum which should have such). I started with Zoc and twassist as a database. Found twassist and the game fascinating, particularly the mapping and data mining possibilities.

Zoobar (Hatter's bro in law) got me started on Telix whilst at the same time adding vastly to my game knowledge - he had us megarobbing back in '96 I think, Hat probably remembers. I really liked (and continue to like) writing Telix scripts, almost as much as I like playing the game. I found that I could use the twassist automode with Telix to effectively turn an offline database into a live online helper. Most of my stuff perished un-backed up several hard drive crashes ago, but its' fun to write stuff again if I need it.

Another factor with me was Space Ghost. Met him on dreamsys.com in '96 I think, he cleaned my clock. Then we corped on Eclipse and were great friends from then on. He told me of his idea for a permanent group of players forming a corporation, now known as a permacorp, and SG, Medusa, Nightraven and I formed the first TW permacorp. As best I can remember it was in 1998. Booinc.com is no longer around, but the wayback shows it existed in December '98. So I guess an important part of the game for me is that I made friends with many great people playing TW, too numerous to mention, some of them still around from the 90's - Hat, Cruncher, Wookie, Adomma, Cowboy; have seen Tweety online here now and then, he was the 5th person to join Boo shortly after it first started up.

Summary for me:

Send the above to a Psychiatrist for any meaningful reasons as to why I like TW, grin.

To add to my list, I think the big reason I fell in love with TW was the people. I met and played with some wonderful and interesting people over the years. Silver Dragon. killer pig and sweetlittlegirl. Bounty Hunter. Silence. phillip davey (forgot his game name). jhereg. snow white. hekate/phoe6e. rammar. wildstar. That's just the ones I can recall. So many good friends in this game.

TW was the only game I ever played that straight out captured my imagination, it still does.

H

I think the main thing that I always loved about TW was how it was simple to learn, but hard to master. The tactics are simple, but the strategies are deep.

And this may not be the kind of thing you want to hear, but I've always loved scripting. TW was what originally piqued my interest in programming. Today, it's one of the very few multiplayer games where scripting is accepted, or even allowed at all.

I remember being a total noob on the dial-up board I mainly used to call (which Comet remembers!) I was in a corp with my cousin and the sysop's daughter. I don't remember what I was doing... probably exploring by moving around. I have no idea how my cousin spent his turns. The sysop's daughter just liked to ferry colos... by regular warp... in a T'Khasi Orion. Then one day I stole all the corp's assets. My cousin still hasn't forgiven me for that.

It's not that I don't want to hear about whether or not scripting is an appealing part of the game, it's just a reality that scripting won't be part of a remake. I have game designs I hope to implement that focus on scripting as a central part of gameplay, because I think it's very interesting. But the proposed TW remake is going to provide internal automation where needed, and not support the kind of external automated control that the classic game has supported.

Logic dictates that a Starship with a computer should be programmable. I should be able to set up the programming so that if I'm not online, the ship will react to stimuli like an enemy entering the sector the ship is in. It should be flexible enough that the owner can set it to react according to a wide range of information, such as

1) Number of fighters on the other ship
2) Entering ship type
3) Entering ship owner
4) Entering ship corporation
5) how many other ships there are
6) whether there is support in sector (L3 or greater planet)
7) ship systems (T-warp, photon, interdictor)
places the ship can go (i.e. can the ship generate a lock)
9) other sectors with personal or corporate L4 or greater planets that could be brought to this sector for defense
10) Density scans of adjoining sectors every so many seconds
11) Holo scans of sectors if density changes taking into account who is currently online (this assumes that an online cloaking device isn't in use, which would be a great toy for attackers to use) and what ships they are in
12) regular scans of online users
13) attacks against personal/corporate fighters

There are a lot of other things the ship owner would want to take into account of course, I listed the above to try and show the sort of flexibility that a shipboard computer should have. If you decide to add built in programming like this JP, it will make the game a lot more complex to program. I know that I've missed a lot of things that would be needed, I haven't been playing a lot recently, so I'm a bit rusty.

But it would be useful to have this built into the game. Almost all of the helpers are designed for Windows users. I gave up on Windows five years ago, all of my machines run Mac OS X or Linux (cuts down on the problems - the computers just work). So for guys like myself (and Mac OS X holds close to 30% of the personal computer market in Canada at present so there is a lot of us), well, we just aren't competitive against Windows users. That's one reason I haven't been playing.

Then you've got to consider Android and IOS. I'd play Tradewars from my iPad if I could. I know a couple of people who would probably play from their Android devices. Just think - you are at the mall with your wife/girlfriend and she is trying on clothes. Why not play Tradewars from your phone? Be a heck of a lot more fun than Solitaire. Or Angry Birds...

Wayne

And you have to consider not hijacking the thread.

H

Plain English:

"Open Discussions

Talk about anything on your mind, TradeWars or not. But please, post game playing/hosting questions in the appropriate forum, and keep the discussion civil."

Helix, Usenet threads drift. Always. No different here.

If you do not like the above rule posted by the Owner for this Forum and the posts that result therefrom, perhaps it might suit you to desist from reading Open Discussion posts.

Kavanagh.

I agree that there should be automation, but the question is, will it be "anything goes", or will it be controlled. Only a small subset of people who are interested in a game like TradeWars are interested in programming their ships, so it's more likely that the new game will try to provide uniform automation and not allow players to dominate the game by being better at creating tools to play. So it won't be what tools you have available to you, but how you use the tools that are available to everyone, that defines a winner.