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Posted: 11/05/03 5:30 PM Well, so long team. We could have done better, but then again, we could have done much worse. The official time of death was 06:15:09 PM, server time (T+ 5 Days, 18:15:08). The invasion was the result of my death (while gridding), which left us unable to monitor and effectively move our planets. Through aggressive search tactics, Doctor Who [1] eventually located us and captured our planet. We were able to drain colos and ore before it happened, leaving C1 with a mostly useless planet. I am most displeased that some people did not show. But everyone that did show gave it their all, and I can't ask any more than that. It's not likely that I'll participate as captain in another one of these games anytime soon-- way too much stress for me. This website may be put up for public perusal but probably not. The plan contained herein was "a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure" (Reloaded). Well, I won't bore you with anymore long eulogies about the way it could have gone. I do hope everyone learned something from this experience, myself included. Company, dismissed. This is Cbs228 sending, End Transmission.
Posted: 11/02/03 11:56 PM Effective immediately: Switch SubSpace channel to [deleted].
Posted: 11/1/03 2:36 AM Today I discovered a wonderful flaw in the edits that I thought we could use to our advantage. The Imperial StarShip in this game is not actually based on the "ImpSta" game class. What class it is based on I cannot remember, and it is not important. The point is, "Allow players to swap ships" (TEDIT Gold Editor 1, Settings, Option <N>) was not off by default as it is with the normal ISS-class ship. And since it seems to have been forgotten about by the game's editor... Yes, that's right, the ISS can be swapped. The thing about swapping is that it doesn't actually check and see if you can command the ship (restrictions include CEO only, Commish, and Commish with Exp). People under 1000 exp can citadel exchange into Imperial StarShips. Before you start celebrating, however, don't do it! Further testing has revealed that Zyrain will kill people who drop under 1024 exp. So if you are under 1024 exp and see the ISS in your Exchange Ships prompt, do not select it. Posted: 10/31/03 4:48 PM Updated: 10/31/03 6:56 PM Please disregard this post. The bug in question has been fixed. End Update. My helper developer has broken my bot with his latest update (that happens a lot). Auto reconnect is not working properly. It seems that whenever the connection is closed with a script running, a TCP/IP error (-3155 kOTOutState) is displayed. This interrupts my auto reconnect process. I should have a fix within 24 hours. However, if at any time I am not in the game for a period longer than 1 minute, I ask that someone press the big red button. Posted: 10/31/03 1:53 PM Well, that was a rough start, to say the least. But remember, C3 did worse, and Kemper is now vulnerable. And, like Morpheus would say, we are still here. Our original startup plan remains mostly unchanged. I want to get everyone a commish by the end of the day today so we can reclaim that money by killing River Rat. We also need as many Developers as we have money, and who are willing, to bust up to ISS exp. A colonists edge is crucial. We are really low on ore. We need to recharge our planet or we'll soon find ourselves stuck. The game map and 2-man scripts have been posted to the files section. That is all. Posted: 10/31/03 9:38 PM Because Hatter's server is down, we must change the location of our pregame meeting. The new server is as follows:
WARNING: This test game is not set for HHT. Do not assume any setting in this game will also be active in HHT. I encourage those of you who are able to download ivisit and set it up. Contact me by entering [deleted] into the Address Book, and accessing the Chat room. We will have live voice communication. One last instruction: Unless otherwise instructed, DO NOT MOVE! STAY PUT! I don't need anyone wandering around in a starter ship please. Posted: 10/29/03 11:16 PM Just a few odd tidbits of information here. I have added an HHT Game Start countdown clock. Look down at your status bar (the area where page loading status is displayed) and you should see it. If not, my scripting is either buggy or you have JavaScript disabled. Ghost, one of our alternates, is a mac user. He will be running a copy of my bot, with AEvac set to take over if my bot does not respond. This will cut our probability of bot failure in half. When addressing one bot or the other, you may use...
An hour or two before HHT starts, I want to get together in our test game. If you do not have the information for our test game, it is included below. I will probably be there after T- 1 hour (10 PM CST). I have college classes on Thursday night, so don't expect me before [deleted] or so. (I've always wanted to say this...) This is Mission Control, St. Louis, we are at T- 23 hours, 41 minutes... and counting.
Posted: 10/26/03 10:35 PM The HHT start date looms closer and closer. The game starts at 12:00:01 AM EST on October 31. That means you should be sitting down at your computer late Thursday night to start HHT. For your convenience, a time conversion table (for U.S. time zones) is listed below:
All users, please note (as if you do not have enough to keep track of already) that the SubSpace radio (cn4 setting) will be set to [deleted] at game start. Please configure SubSpace radio immediately so we have in-game communication. The corporate password will be set to [deleted]. If you have not read the Day 1 Plan (see below), please do so. It is important that we get things right the first time, there'll be no second chances and very little margin for error. Tacticians also note: your section has been updated.
Posted: 10/19/03 10:10 PM False alarm, Jerry is staying. However, one of the other team Captains, Cherokee, has decided to resign over the whole Res Judicata issue. Fortunately, this has no effect on us. Expect HHT to continue as planned.
Posted: 10/18/03 4:53 PM We may have hosting problems. Jerry is considering closing down Coastgames, the host for HHT 2003. The key issue at hand has been posted to the Fugitives From Fate website. I will let you know what happens with this.
Posted: 10/16/03 10:30 PM By consent of all Captains, the HHT Universe has been increased to 10k sectors. This has no impact on our operational plan at the time, but it does make it easier for us to execute it. I am currently working with [deleted] to obtain a compatible 2-man fig gridding script we can use for our Tactical division. Rest assured I will have something before HHT begins. A friend of mine with experience in POTS phone network installations is coming by this weekend-- either Saturday or Sunday-- to fix up my wiring and improve my DSL speeds. Be warned, this may result in several hours of downtime.
Posted: 10/12/03 10:35 PM Ovid pointed out an error in the plan to me. The maximum number of planets/sector is 3. This sucks. The plan below has been changed.
Posted: 10/12/03 6:15 PM I realized that I have not mapped out our starting plan to my satisfaction. Here's what will happen in the first moments of the game:
Notes: [cost] indicates money spent on this action. [conflict] indicates there is a conflict with previously given instructions, and those instructions have been changed.
Posted: 10/11/03 6:33 PM Don't forget, there will be a test game tonight (with HHT settings). The primary purpose of this test game is to familiarize yourself with the settings, learn bot operations, and learn how to bust up over dock and fig grid.
Posted: 9/19/03 10:23 PM
Greetings, As you no doubt have guessed, I am Cbs228. I have established this website as part of our HHT 2003 team in order to better communicate with everyone. This section of the website will contain messages intended for all team members. The Tasks section will contain a list of pending tasks. The Developers section will contain messages intended for the Developer Divison, and the Tacticians section contains messages intended for the Tactical Divison. (More on that in a moment). The files section contains a list of downloadable files pertinent to the game. The Emergency section contains emergency contact procedures (along with the infamous Big Red Button). Oh, it would be a very bad idea to give the address of this site out to anyone else. I'll get in to what all of the above actually means a bit later. First, some general information. I try to make myself available at all times. Obviously I cannot be at keys all the time. Here is my general schedule:
For our newer players: Please remember that the game does indeed hinge on your commitment and your dedication-- victory or defeat, we all play an equal role. Please try to take the initiative whenever possible. If you see something that needs to be done, and you can do it, then please go ahead and do it. If you aren't sure, ask someone. I would much rather (if I had to choose) tell someone they have too much initiative, as opposed to too little. In my absence there are several people who I know for certain will know what is going on: LokI, Sir Lancelot, River Rat, Kavanagh and The Mad Hatter. My profound apologies if I have left anyone out. I intend to subdivide this team into two distinct groups of responsibility, which I will call Divisions. The first such group is the Developer division. The Developers will be primarily responsible for... yup, you guessed it, colonizing planets. This will be no small task, considering the sheer number of planets that will be involved. Please read the Developers section for more information. The Tacticial division will be primarily responsible for maintaining our fighter grid and dealing with (or preparing for) other combat situations. Again, messages specifically for the Tactician group will be in the Tacticians section. Also note the keyword: primarily. Subgroups are neither fixed or static, and there is some overlap and shared tasks. Groups are merely a clarification of an individual's tasks, and not an absolute limit on them. Players will be assigned to one of the subgroups based on their experience with TradeWars. Assignments are listed in the Tasks section. In situations of complete panic, please note the bright red "Emergency" button at the top of the page. It contains a link to emergency contact information and procedures. It is a good idea to review this information before an actual emergency. One more thing: Please try to remember, I am only human. I do make the occasional mistake. If you see anything wrong with anything I say or tell you to do, please let me know and I will double check everything. I am not a Res Judicata, and will not try to make the team do something nonproductive. Now that all of that is out of the way, let's turn our attention to the game itself. The settings for Chess v2, which the HHT settings follow almost exactly, can be found here. Please read them and familiarize yourself with them. Also make sure to read the HHT rules and settings pages. And if that's not enough bathroom reading material for the next year or so, you can always brush up on TradeWars strategy information at TW-Cabal. First and foremost: Never put the KING in danger. The enemy will try to cap it, and if they cap it (at all, even if we cap it back), the gig is up. When it is necessary to put the KING in danger, it is a good idea to have someone orbiting it in a ThoSen/Castle Wall class ship. This will prevent enemies from landing on the planet and simply staying there, tracking us while the rest of their team whittles away at the planet. That is a bad scenario, and it is to be avoided at all costs. I have a defensive bot which will help us keep our planets safe. It is capable of moving planets out of the way, wherever they are, when it senses the approach of an enemy. It is also capable of acting as a reloader bot, but as reloaders aren't as powerful in this game I am not planning on utilizing that function. The bot will also act as a remotely-operated SAVE ME script, keeping players out of danger. Basic operation instructions are included in the Emergency section. A word about SubSpace Comms: NEVER send sector numbers on SubSpace. Channel sniffing is possible. Always use "My TA" in place of your current location, and look up your teammates' locations via the Corporate Menu using the TA command. I will assign names to bases in place of sector numbers ("Alpha Base," etc). Please use those names instead of sector numbers, or use a "censored" form of the sector number (such as "base in 4xxx"). Also, since there are 15 of us, please try to keep the chatter to a minimum when there are a lot of people in the game. I want everyone to have the following macro permanently bound to a convenient command key or F key. I won't insist that you paint the key yellow: [deleted] As you might have guessed, this is a very important bot command. I have seen way too many people DIE HORRIBLY because help was slow in arriving. Simply shouting obscenities on subspace won't do, we'll just stare at you strangely looking for more information. [deleted] is the universal "distress call" because it triggers my bot's save me command (that's a no-brainer). My bot will react a lot faster than I possibly could, and will react even if I am AFK. If I am busy running my turns and the bot is not active, someone else should know to save you. Another macro which you may elect to use is: [deleted]
That is the login command for the bot. Logging in allows you to use the higher level commands. More bot operations are discussed in the Emergency section.
Let the wars begin.
Posted: 9/19/03 10:23 PM Everyone assigned to the Developer group must bust up planets and obtain 1024 exp. This procedure is absolutely necessary in order for you to use the Imperial StarShip ("King"). WARNING: This will make you unfedsafe! The King ship is the best colonizer: it clocks in at 37 holds/turn, whereas its closest competitor, the HGS, can only do 25 holds/turn (Assumption: Citadel Transporter used. ISS is still more efficient than the HGS when TransWarp only is used). The difference between winning and losing means having our Colonizers at ISS experience as soon as possible. Given this importance, a total of 7,920,000 cr of our 20M cash has been allocated for exp/align for our Developers. Everyone must obtain +1 pt of align by upgrading our ore port 20 units. WARNING: bad things will happen if you don't do this. You will be towed to dock in an HGS, where you will post 500,000 cr on our evil and obtain your commish at the fed police station. You will then be directed to one of our base locations, where you will bust a total of 14 planets. You will have to go to dock for refills, so be careful NOT TO DIE!!! If you cannot go to dock while unfedsafe to refill, someone will fill your ship up for you. An ISS costs a total of 3,210,000 cr with TWarp 2, Holo Scanner (full holds included). Your group has been allocated a total of [deleted] and ONLY [deleted] ISS-class StarShips (total cost: [deleted]). You will have to share these ships for now. The Temporary Evil will upgrade the port over our King planet and buy down ore. After he is done you will move the planet to our "forward position" near Terra that the Tacticians will find and secure. It should be no more than [deleted] hops FROM terra. Buy a citadel transporter for the planet. Make sure that someone has photons handy to defend the planet with. Colonize most of your turns, but be sure to save some to get the planet upgrading to L5. We will soon fill up our KING planet with colonists. There is a 250k (ore) optimal production limit on the KING planet, and no other category is efficient at production. (FYI the planet produces 1:1 ore, and 1:1 (subjective) figs.) Assuming 8 blues use 500 (of their 700) turns colonizing at 5 hops from terra with a Citadel Transporter, we could (theoretically) net 140,000 holds of colos per day (herein referred to as just "colos" -- 1000 colos can fit in one hold, but the game almost always reports values for colonists as holds of colos). At that rate, we could fill up the KING in less than 2 days. I am interested in developing the following kinds of planets:
Using these same values, our team could net a total of 4.2 M colos over a 30 day period. That could fill 21 Castle Mote or Castle planets. There is no way, however, that we're going to be able to develop that many Castle planets. The gridding will simply be too intense for that-- the entire universe can be covered in a matter of days, and 12 days is much too long to expect (many) Castle Planets to survive. Therefore, I want to develop the equivalent number of Draw Bridge Planets. Assuming a loss rate of 50% or greater-- meaning half of them get found before L4-- we need to develop [deleted] planets in [deleted] bases. To make developing that many planets easier, we must load each sector to the max (3 planets). True, we will lose more planets when a base is found, but (simultaneously) the odds of the enemy finding a base at all are lowered, and the sheer number of bases we're developing will eliminate the "eggs-in-one-basket" syndrome. I want a total of [deleted] Draw Bridge, [deleted] Castle (distribute evenly among bases!), and [deleted] Castle Mote planets started ASAP. Name all planets "." in order to confuse the enemy-- we can swap them out without them knowing. To avoid confusion, each player will be assigned [deleted] bases to keep track of and upgrade. That's a total of [deleted] planets/person. If your base(s) gets capped, we can start another to replace it.
Posted: 10/26/03 10:35 PM [deleted] has been kind enough to loan us his 2-man fig killing script for the team to use. Unfortunately, it has been encrypted for HHT-usage only, and is only compatible with TWX. But it's better than nothing, and it will interface with my bot (for driving), and my gridder script will interface with it. Anyone in the Tactical division who does not have TWX: please contact me immediately. The script will become available in the Downloads section after HHT starts. We will not need it for several days. I will also make sure that access in our test game (on Hatter's server) is allowed so we can test it out there. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of the script, especially after [deleted] modified it to be more like mine (it is safer than it was).
Posted: 10/12/03 3:45 PM A point arose during our test game yesterday that everyone should know: While random exploring it is imperative that you HOLO SCAN densities of 100. The enemy may drop traps of 20 figs to fool dscanners, and as a result one of you may blunder into enemy figs. Given the response time of pwarp photon, it is likely that you would end up dead in such an event (unless a save me is handy). We are in desperate need of a 2-man fig clearing script that can be shared with the rest of the Tacticians. Contact Cbs if you have one.
Posted: 9/19/03 10:23 PM We will not survive this game if we cannot keep a big grid, plain and simple. This game will be decided by which team has the best base location tactics, coupled with the most effective base positioning tactics. The more enemy planets we can find, the worse off the enemy will be. The more planets we have that aren't found, the better of we'll be. One of the best defenses is the grid itself. If we own 25% of the universe, that is 1250 sectors we could be in. If we only own 5%, that's 250 sectors. 250 sectors is a lot easier to search than 1250, believe me. If we only have 250 sectors, we're dead. If we have [deleted] bases (and we will), that's 1 every [deleted] sectors the enemy hits. Big Ouch. To prevent the Big Ouch from happening, we must have a big grid. First of all, one of you should go one point evil. That player will be 1 point evil for the rest of the day. The rest of the team will all post their bounties on that player. At the end of the day, that player must be #SD#'d by a teammate (AFTER running down their turns that is). The killing player can then go claim the reward. That way we get a grand total of 6,000,000 cr back (from the entire team). Free money is always good. When that player comes back from the dead, they can upgrade a port and go blue. We can do this because there is no deathlimit. Your division has been allocated [deleted] HGS ships, and [deleted] White Knight class ships (total cost: [deleted]). Share the ships please! We won't be able to get many commishes for the Tactical team on the first day. After making sure our King is secure, scout out a forward base no more than 5 hops from Terra. Make sure it has been secured with limpets. We will move the planet there only when colonizing. Make sure one of the Developers is on hand with an ISS and a PHOTON when the planet is there. We need a total of [deleted]different bases. Do not use the dead-end base positioning tactic for more than [deleted] bases or so-- chances are those will be found very quickly, but on the other hand the enemy might not bother searching them. Locate these bases using your ZTM map, and fig them up while you are out exploring/fig dropping. The White Knight gets 1 tpw, but does not have TransWarp. [deleted] After we get our money back from killing our evil, we can also bust a few Tacticians up to ISS exp so they can be used for kills. Once we get additional planets to L4, we are going to have to decide: Massed defense (1 base sector), or independent bases (many base sectors). Massed bases would make finding us difficult, and getting into the sector nearly impossible. Sentinel defense (as dangerous as it is) could serve as a supplement to quasars and figs. Massed defense could result in a pin maneuver, however. In the event of base discovery, the enemy may watch us and try to hit us as we withdraw. And we can't just sit there forever-- the planets must be moved out at extern. And if we miss extern... bad things happen. Independent bases would be discovered more often, but Planet Saver could (probably) keep things covered. This would allow us to avoid action, but depends on the uptime of my bot, and if it does not AEvac the planets in time, we stand to lose them much easier than if they were massed. Advantages and disadvantages. At this point in time I am leaning towards [deleted], but I have not decided either way.
This section is pretty self-explainatory. Take what you need.
Trader Under Attack: If you need a rescue, drop corporate figs and send [deleted] on SubSpace. The bot will attempt to save you. You will have approximately [deleted] seconds after you give the command to get figs down, during which time the planet will be constantly attempting to reach you. When the planet arrives, immediately land on the number specified. You only have [deleted] seconds to complete this before the bot gives up. If a valid Limpet ScrapePoint is found, the planet will be moved there so you can delimpet. After you have delimpeted, [deleted] will return the planet to base. (Don't worry-- just follow the online prompts and you'll be okay.) Base Invaded: The bot should respond by moving the planets out to an EvacPoint. This should occur if the enemy is detected at [deleted] hops away or less. If the bot is not responding properly, get the planets out! If the base is where the KING is, get that out first! In cases of bot malfunction, immediately contact Cbs228. If this machine is operating, the Big Red Button will be sufficient for that purpose (see above). Other Emergencies: For any situation that requires my immediate and personal attention, send [deleted]. An audible alarm will sound, and I will hear it if I am at home. Please note my bot's Away message-- If I am Away, there will be a delay in my responding. If my away message starts with "[Extended]," then I am not at home (and consequently, cannot respond) and the audible alert tone will not sound. If the bot is not working, send me an ICQ or a phone call. Please do not call after 11:00 PM CDT.
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