The reality is, it's very hard to make a truly balanced game. Every edit favors either red or blue. That's why most teams run a split corp, they get the best of both styles.

Hourly penalties for split corps...
... and blue's penalty is INCREASED experience

Or, just revert to the original pre TWGS:

Mixed corp, every corpie went to zero exp at extern. Big problem before L4 , and especially before megarob bug known.

Back then, we had megacorps - a red corp and a blue corp allied. Since TWGS, megacorp is not PC.

Yeah, back then it was more of a strategy game and less of a scripting game. Fun times!

I see you're still operating under the false assumption that scripts somehow free you from having to develop a strategy. It's actually quite the opposite - the more advanced the scripts you and your opponents are using, the more time you should be spending thinking about your strategy and discussing it with your corpies.

For instance, it's quite a bit easier to best the cashing of someone doing manual PPT than it is to beat the cashing of someone merching thousands of gridded sectors.

It's quite a bit easier to counter an attack from someone taking 10 seconds to fire a photon, waltz into a base, land and attack figs and shields, and xport out, than it is to counter the same attack from someone doing it in 0.1 seconds.

Scripts force people to *sharpen* their strategic skills, not abandon them.

No, it just forces you to keep updating your scripts until they are better than your opponents scripts.

This is a very old argument but I'll just reiterate this one point again: give a chimp an AK-47 and he'll be just as likely to shoot himself as someone else.

The power of scripting doesn't come from updates or changes but from finding new and creative strategies for using those tools. Most of the best strategies - yes, strategies, not scripts - that I use were thought up in response to a strategy someone else cooked up to utilize their scripts.

If you can't understand the distinction, I'm not sure what to tell you, other than I'll be happy to stay off your lawn...

My point is that if you don't have an AK-47 your enemy is likely to laugh at you... and then go back to their beer...

no wait, that wasn't my point... The "public" scripts that are available, were given away just for that reason, so that you can shoot yourself with them...

Exactly! Today's competitive games are so script heavy that you are basically just a bot on the team. Your bot masters are the ones doing all the "heavy lifting", everyone else sits back and drinks beer while watching their screen scroll. Their only responsibility is to make sure they are connected and the bot is on.

The "Mega corps" that Kav was referring to were much more challenging to manage assets. The Mega Rob bug killed that.

Yeah, reminds me of it. Redsafe and Bluesafe sectors behind the door, switching between them, demilitarising for the switches, yuck. Biggest issue I can remember was L5+.

I can still remember a game '96 or so with overall CEO Sonic Boom electronically screaming in frustration "scan b4 u move" for intersector warping in the bbls with hot defenses : )

That would really suck, getting killed by your own defenses.... lol