------------------------------------------------------------------------ Singularity's little "Welcome back to TradeWars" primer thing. October, 2006 - By Singularity (Dnyarri) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TradeWars 2002 has been around, in one form or another, since the 80s. It's one of the oldest games that people still play. Very few new players really come into the game, most people are just returning players that played years ago and are curious if it's still fun. It is. But a lot has changed. The biggest changes happened around 2002, 2003 (ironically) when automated "scripts" began widespread use. This is designed to be a little overview of current TW techniques and script types. What to watch out for, and what you may want to start doing. Note - if you need a refresher on terminology I suggest: http://tw-cabal.navhaz.com/glossary.html That is a glossary of terms for TradeWars. Anyway, the biggest change is automation, i.e.: scripts. Most of the more mundane, redundant or complex tasks have been scripted. This tends to give people with the latest tools the biggest advantage. It all started when the old BBS door game began evolving into a telnet game. TWGS, a front end telnet server for the DOS game, allows multiple people to be on at once without the expense of added phone lines or modems. Because of this, a sysop can afford to have you sit online for as long as you want and since TWGS allows you to have up to 100 people on the system at once, the only concerns are bandwidth and CPU (both being fairly cheap) usage. And so people these days tend to stay on for longer. Some people still come on, run their turns, and log out. But serious players will stay online 24/7. Running "keepalive" scripts that keep their connection to the server from timing out. This means they can monitor in-game activity or set alarms for certain conditions. In essence people can now run certain scripts, even if they're not "at keys." These go from simple alerts, alarms and monitoring scripts to cashing scripts, automatic bots, and even full fledged attack and kill scripts. And this is what a lot of returning players have a hard time adjusting to. So lets go thru each of these... Alarms - An alarm script is a very basic, passive approach to monitoring the game. It listens for any given event and alerts the user. Anything can trigger this, from someone hitting a fighter or a limpet, to someone warping into the same sector you're in, to someone trying to attack you or take a planet to even something as mundane as a new user in the game. All of these of course have their purposes. If someone starts attacking my fighters I know that they're moving around. They might even be coming to invade. If I play a sound anytime someone hits one I have the opportunity to come to keys and stop them, even if I'm in the other room watching TV. In tournament games this is one of my favorite uses of scripting. Unless I'm out of the house, I'm going to hear the alarm and come to stop you. This allows me to turn on other scripts or at least figure out what you're doing and where you're going. It gives me a chance to actively try to stop you. This can be more passive though. You might not care about individual fighter hits, but you probably do care about someone trying to invade your base. If someone gets within, say, 2 hops of your base, you could set an alarm to play and give you a better chance of defending your assets. Imagine a script that sees that someone is within 2 hops of your base, twarps from where-ever you are and turns on a series of defense and evacuation scripts. It's possible and it happens in tournament play all the time. Cashing - Unlims... Cashing scripts are most popular in "unlimited" move games. Unlimited move games are games where you have an infinite number of turns. Tip: As a returning player I recommend against getting started in unlim games. They have their place of course, but they teach you to be sloppy with your resources and make it too easy to be reckless. In unlimited move games people tend to combine gridding, exploring and cashing. They run "world trade" or "world SSM" or "world SST" scripts that take ships, move around the universe, find ports and cash at them. If you try to get into an unlim without these you'll be easily overwhelmed by those that do have them. A simple world PPT script can make 50m an hour. A decent world SSM can make 100m, yes 100 million credits, in an hour... and that's just for starters. World SST scripts regularly make 200m credits per hour (depending on the edit, but it's not unusual). Naturally this kind of income changes the scope of a game. 200m credits is enough to buy the best ship in the game and fill it with fighters, then go out and start killing everyone you see. This is, usually, what happens in an unlimited move game. They rarely last more than a few hours and almost always finished within a day. If you get into an unlim that's a few days old realize that you're going to be up against people that are much more developed than you... and while it's not impossible to win, it's very difficult to even get a decent game if the opposition is serious about keeping you out. Turn games... In turn games cashing takes on a different role. You can't just run around the universe, you have to plan all of your moves ahead of time. Cashing starts with PPT of course. Paired port trading. Usually you head out to some sector between 5 and 10 hops from your current location and start scanning looking for 2 ports adjacent to each other with complementary buy/sells. You then sell your load, buy another, go to the adj port and repeat. At some point the port will run out, but then you just find another one. Modern helpers have made this process much easier. In the old days you had to write these down on a piece of paper. Now they're all stored automatically in a database, making it much easier to keep track of them. PPT is such a common script to write that every helper available has a script to automate it. Most can even automate the haggling process, giving you better results by doing the port math behind the scenes... buying cheaper and selling for more. SSM, SST, SDT scripts exist too. CK's SST+jet and SDT are probably still the most common. You'll notice that most scripts are referred to by what they do and who wrote them, as in "CK's SST+Jet." Anyway, they all use various steal techniques and are fairly turn efficient depending on the situation. Again, if you need help with the terminology go: http://tw-cabal.navhaz.com/glossary.html The problem with these scripts is that when you bust you have to move elsewhere. You can have someone else run the same ports and "clear" your bust... but that's time consuming and prone to human error. Furbing. As a red you are going to bust. You need to keep your holds as high as possible if you plan to make actual money, however. So... a furb script is a script that is ran by a player with over 1000 alignment (referred to as "blue") that automates the process of delivering ships for you to "furb" with or one that comes and picks up your ship, refills it at dock (or terra) and redelivers it. Naturally this takes a lot of the repetition out of the process and makes the whole thing much less prone to error. Team cashing scripts exist too. Combine all of the above into one script or set of scripts. You have a set of ports and run between them. When you bust someone comes and refurbs your ship. Then another red trades between a complementary set of ports with the goal of "clearing" your bust. Note: Only 1 trader can be listed as "Busted" on a port. So if someone else busts there you are now free to run that port again. They have "cleared" your bust. All of this makes a lot of money. 2 reds and 1 blue can make 40mil in 1k turns with "Team SDT." Infact, sometimes more, depending on the settings and scripts. Obviously if you're a solo player in a game where the competition is doing this... you are going to get profoundly outcashed. Why is that important? Because cash buys ether probes and cash buys fighters. So if you're sitting around waiting for your planets to build figs while the other team is buying them faster then you will end up getting your base found and won't have the resources to fend them off. You will probably come back to the game to find that you're #Ship Destroyed# and forced to start from scratch. Obviously that's what we're trying to avoid here. Planet negotiate scripts just lift from a planet and haggle with a port to give you cash. A buydown script simply lifts, buys full holds of a product, lands on a planet and dumps the product on the planet. Repeat until the port is empty of that product or you're out of turns. Most people do this with ore and equipment. Equipment being sold off later for cash, ore being used to move a planet and keep it's cannons strong. Combine the above with megarobs in an MBBS game and you get a lot of free product ready to be sold off. All you need to do is find the right port and get it ready. It's not uncommon for a team to make 75m to 100m a day doing megarobs on a 1k turns game once everything is setup. Clearly it doesn't take much of this to overwhelm less-prepared players. Planet trading comes next. There are a few planet trading scripts out there. Basically they look into a database of ports, find one, take a mobile planet there and then sell to it. Repeat until everything is sold off. This can be used if your planets are producing product from colonists or can be used to sell off from megarobs. If you're hitting only upgraded ports with a good "MCIC" then you'll find this is usually the most turn efficient form of cashing there is. It produces insane amounts of money. See here: http://tw-cabal.navhaz.com/strategy/economy1.html for more information on MCIC. By now you should start getting some idea as to how much things have changed. The basic game is still the same, but the automation has reduced human error and made it easy for even the most basic of players to run the most advanced techniques. Bots - Bots are automatic scripts that a player loads that allows another player to make them do stuff. This can be anything, although usually it's mundane tasks such as a buydown. Most bots also offer a "page" feature that allows other users to page the person running the bot. They typically use a 2 part authentication system. You send a "use" request over private hail or subspace, then reply to a number the bot gives you on the other. This logs you in and you can access the bot by using it's "name" over subspace. Some bots can do more than basic mundane tasks, for instance they can have you move product, run a macro, lay mines, send a holoscan over subspace, or even load attack and defense scripts. The benefit to a bot is that even if you're not at keys your corpies can make use of your bot. Sometimes to run your turns, other times just to provide basic bot services like a saveme rescue. If you're in a corp game it's probably a good idea to run one, if for no other reason than one of your corpmates can warp you to safety if someone comes knocking. Mapping - Mapping scripts are nothing new. They've been around for nearly 10 years now. But some people still fail to consider how powerful they are. A ZTM, or zero turn map, is a script that uses course plots to determine the shape of the universe. It can find dead ends, tunnels, whatever you're looking for... with amazing accuracy all without spending a single turn or credit. It can't tell you if there's a port there or if there's enemy figs there, but it can tell how far away a sector is and what sectors are next to it. ZTM scripts these days store their information into a database. This way any script that wants can look up which sectors are adjacent to any given sector, whether you've explored it, and sometimes even if you have a fig there. It can tell you if that sector you're planning to build in is only a few hops from terra, or more appropriately... you can run a search for certain sectors within certain distances from terra and dock. This can be used to build a base... or used to hunt for someone else's base. Rescue scripts - One of the advantages to having corpies online is that they can do certain things if you get into trouble. "Saveme" is the most common name for these scripts. A saveme script will either come and tow you off or, more often, bring in a planet for you to land on. Rather than getting hit with a photon and sitting there until they come kill you, you can be picked up and saved by a corpie. Of course playing solo makes this impossible... but you can start to see how strong corp cooperation can make your team very tough to kill. Conversely if your competition is doing this while you're not then you're going to be in for an uphill battle. Grid!!! Grid is the biggest change. There have been telemate macros and Twar scripts for years that can do some of the above. Maybe not to the extent that it's done now, but... the form was there. The biggest change is grid. Gridding is the act of dropping figs in space. Why would you do this? Area of denial - That's area your enemy can't be in. You can't build a base on top of someone's fig (well you can, but you won't be able to colonize it). Anytime someone runs into a fig you get a message about it: Deployed Fighters Report Sector 1234: So and So's BigShip has entered sector. It tells you the sector number. It tells you what ship they're in. It tells you who it is. That's powerful stuff. If someone is switching between a scout and a battleship you might want to wait till they're in the scout before you try to kill them. You might not want to target one person but only target another. You also get the most important part... the sector number. Remember earlier from "mapping" we also said you can store adjacent sectors? Well combine this with grid defense scripts such as planet drop or photon launching scripts and you have a powerful way to limit people's movement. If every time someone moves they risk losing their turns or getting killed they are going to think twice before moving. This goes double for solo players where nobody can save them if they get torped. Grid offers a different perspective of the game than the old style of play. When you grid it's because you don't want your "enemy" doing things on your grid. You don't want them probing thru your figs, you don't want them finding you as easily, you don't want them getting close to your base, you don't want them messing with your stuff. They are "the enemy" and you are out to kill them... or atleast keep them from killing you. There are several ways people defend their grid: Ship drop - Drops a ship where you expect they'll be (or where they are, if they're moving slowly enough). Once dropped on you can be held in sector by an IG, by them dropping a lot of fighters or by them just powering up and blasting you into a pod. Planet drop - Drops a planet either on them, or in their path. You can hold someone with a planet IG, you can blast them with a cannon, you can lift and kill. Lots of options there too. Easy kill, just push a few buttons and wait. Photon missile (ptorp) - Photons take away someone's turns. Photons have no delay, either, so you have to be pretty fast to avoid them. Someone manually moving around the universe is a sitting duck for a photon script. They can twarp or tpad (citadel transporter pad) next to you, fire a torp and return back home with only minimal risk to themselves. They can also use a planet, pwarp adjacent, fire the torp and return home before you even have a chance to return fire (before you even see the message that you've been hit by a photon, infact). The point here is that you're now turnless. You can't hit any more figs. If nobody can come rescue the poor torpee then odds are you're going to get killed. Even if nobody kills you you're still turnless... unable to trade or do anything until the hour. And even then what you can do will be pretty limited as you won't have the turns to do much. It really stinks getting torped with a full day of turns. So, how do you avoid being a victim of this? Well truth is, the war between gridders and grid defenders is an ongoing one. It's one of my favorite areas of focus. A sophisticated grid defender will still hit you at some point, but you can take precautions to make getting hit that much more difficult. Lawnmowing - Lawnmowers are scripts that hit figs very fast. You give the script the sector you want to travel to and it computes the path and automatically moves you there, faster than ewarp, killing any figs it can in it's path. Lawnmowers move in a straight line, so they're easy to predict, but since most people will be running "direct" torping you can usually move faster than they can torp. Just be sure your end sector is secure (don't mow to your base tho, you'll just give away it's location) or they might be able to hit you on your last sector. When in doubt, lawnmow. Yes it's beatable, but a person has to know that you're going to be mowing around in order to catch you. You might not be able to grid the universe this way but you definitely can get from dock to a PPT port this way. Just be careful not to leave a trail of fighters behind you... someone might come following along. Twarp gridding - Twarp gridding is using a ship w/ twarp to twarp next to an unfigged area, grid towards a point and then twarp out. It's fairly easy to hit, but different patterns can make it tougher. It's as fast as a lawnmow (and about as hard to hit as one, too) so it offers some protection against torps and drops. Ship based torping methods will be very challenged to hit a twarp gridder. Planet based methods (pwarp torp, pdrop) make it a lot easier to hit, but obviously that requires the time to develop mobile planets giving you more time to develop. 2 ship gridding - A few scripts exist for this. Because transporting from your ship has no delay (moves do), you can get out of your ship before they have a chance to torp you. Basically you hit a fig then xport out in a macro. Then wait a little bit, xport back in and check stuff out. Of course this might cost you the ship (and there's quite a bit more complexity involved to make this safe), but if you know they're not paying attention (like torping afk) then you've got a clear bill of health from there on out. Planet gridding - Usually this requires a corpie, but it's perhaps the hardest to hit. The idea is that you call for a planet ahead of you, move, kill the fig, then land all in a burst. As of this text Rammar has a public planet gridder available on grimytrader.com. Planet gridding is very tough to hit... requires a very fast script and a very fast ping to hit. Hit-retreat - You hit the fig and retreat in a burst. This is very tough to hit and a good way to test who's torping. If you do get torped it's usually after you've sent the retreat command, putting you back 1 sector from the hit sector. That gives you a extra few seconds to get a rescue. Have a rescue plan - Is someone running saveme? What happens if you do get torped, how are you going to handle it? Twarp everywhere - If you have a fig there, use twarp. Twarp is a whole lot safer and more turn efficient. This is perhaps one of the biggest advantages to having a grid... you can twarp where you want to go instead of having to burn turns warping around. Turn management - Preplan your moves. Instead of randomly gridding, trade down your turns to a smaller percentage of your overall turns (like afew hundred) first. Grid with those. Now if you get torped you don't lose your whole day. If you have a corpie... then they can come pick you up. Cost? Very little. Risk? Very little. Potential for gain? Quite a bit. It's always a good idea to grid the last bunch of your turns when you can. Test beforehand - If you're not sure if someone is torping, hit a few figs in the safest way you can then check the logs and see if anyone fired. At least this way you know who your competition is. And that's the basic overview of today's gridding techniques. Some things will inevitably change. Gridding is the most competitive part of the game so expect things to evolve. But with just a lawnmower and a little thought you can survive long enough to make an impact even against the most aggressive grid defenders. This brings us to the "attitudes" in play. In the olden days most people would let new players do their own thing, and just focus on the big enemy corp when necessary. I've been in games where, despite a lot of activity... nobody ever tried to kill each other. Well that's different now. Today it's hard to find a game where people don't want you #SD#. Not because they have anything against you, but because they either want "the kill" or they just don't you mucking up their grid. Well this isn't entirely true, there are BBSes out there today that play slower games still... but on a growing number of servers you'll find things are speeding up. This is different than a lot of other games. In most games you have an environment to play against. These could be AI-generated players, quests, things to do and other non-players to fight. In TradeWars you used to have aliens that fit this role, and while you still do... aliens themselves have not kept up with the advancements in the game. The AI is still relatively weak. This means that most games are "PvP" or "Player versus player" rather than building, alien killing, "player versus environment" games. Keep in mind that in many games your biggest challenge will be the other players. If you're a newly minted returnee you might want to focus on slower games with fewer players. Give yourself a chance to get re-familiar with the menus and the concepts before throwing yourself into the fray. Look at the logs and the scores and see if they have any big corps, if they're all blue or red or mixed, if there's much activity, etc. Look at the "V" (hit V from the command prompt) and see how many fighters, mines and citadels are in the game. As you get started see what the enemy grids are like. If there's a lot of figs out there then the game is probably on "lockdown" and you're going to be more actively hunted than in a game where there isn't very many deployed figs. Tournament games are a different breed of game all together. Some people hate them. They definitely bring out the most aggressively competitive spirit. I routinely develop new scripts and methods for tourney games, while I often just log out from less active games. If you're going to be on a developed corp with experienced players this can be a great way to get into the latest and greatest stuff. If you're trying to go solo... well, then it's not going to be all that fun of a game for you. Odds are you will be aggressively hunted for doing nothing more than logging in. Unless you're prepared for that level of competition you might want to wait a bit. Choose your games with a little discretion and you'll get more play time... and inevitably a chance to become a better player. Today (2006) you can find scripts here: http://www.grimytrader.com http://www.navhaz.com This list will change over time, no site stays up forever. So if you're reading this a few years after I've written it then you might want to ask around and find what the newest, hottest script sites are. The best scripts are generally private. Why? Well, public scripts take a lot of time to write and debug. Most of the best scripts are written under highly competitive circumstances, and also have a lot of little bugs in them. Private scripts should usually not be passed around. If you get a copy of one, keep it to yourself. If you want the latest, greatest, private stuff then you need to corp with script writers. People used to establish long term "only corp with these guys" type corps called "permacorps." Permas are pretty much dead these days and you won't see many of them around. Those few that do "exist" do so in name only. That's where most private stuff came from, one or 2 of the perma members would be script writers and the rest would contribute their experience and ideas to future developments. If you want access to this level of scripting then you need to become a regular corp member of a scripter's team. That's generally the only regular way. Over time you'll become part of their in-game debugging team... meaning you'll have access to pretty much whatever you need (even though it might get you killed). Of course you can always write your own. In theory you can script in any language you want. If you want to write your own helper you can write a script in anything. But most people don't want to go to those extremes. People these days use Zoc, Swath, Attac and TWX proxy. Those are "helpers" in one sense or another. Although TWX proxy is not really a helper in strictest sense, it's a proxy that sits between a helper (or term program) and the server. It provides a database (automatically saves things it sees) and a scripting engine. Swath, available at http://swath.net/ is a helper you can buy. It's demoware, meaning there's a version for free that offers some functionality. It's primary language is Java, meaning that if you can write java then you can code in it. Attac uses Rexx scripting. Rexx is the language supported by Zoc, too. Rexx scripts are very flexible and have been around for a long time. Zoc is a term program. It's similar to any kind of term program, but people in the TW world like it because of it's rexx support and it's macro capabilities. Still, there's no reason why you couldn't use secureCRT or any other term program you like. TWX proxy is the most popular scripting engine today. TWX proxy was written by Xide several years ago. It was released requiring a registration, however about a year and a half ago Xide retired from the game and made it freeware. ElderProphet took over the project after that and maintains it today. You can get TWX proxy 2.03 from: http://twxproxy.com/ The newest version is 2.04 (although there are several side versions, like 2.11, that have been developed by other authors) is available at http://www.grimytrader.com/ http://www.navhaz.com TWX proxy scripting is very easy compared to most programming languages. It's designed specifically for TW, meaning that it's constructs fit the game very well. Lastly... finding corpies. Corpies are where the game gets real. Solo play can be fun, but the best advancements happen when you're with a good corp. The easiest way to find corpies is to interact with other players. Talk on fedcom, introduce yourself, talk on the forums, etc. This will give you a chance to meet people and maybe request some help on a game. As you get a little further along you'll find that most people in the community are available via IM. ICQ seems to be the most popular, with Yahoo coming up a 2nd. Swap IM info with as many people as you can... then if you need help, ask. Over time you'll find that you corp better with some people than others and that play is just "more natural" with some corpies. And that's how "corps" these days are formed. Most people go into a game with their corp already selected. We know who's who, who does what, their strengths and weaknesses. This gives us a huge advantage over those that haven't worked all of that out yet. Find a corp. Well... I hope this helps. At least provides some perspective on the way things are done today. The rest is up to you. Find what you need and make things work. Don't be afraid to test stuff out, it might get you killed... or it might keep you safe. You'll never know if you don't try.