Archive-Name: games/netrek/suggestions/part1 Last-Updated: 30 Apr 1995 Note: This was written by Andy McFadden but is now being maintained by me along with the other FAQ lists. Many thanks to Andy for compiling it (in addition to his other contributions to the netrek world). It needs some fairly major revisions but they'll have to wait until I have time. The same ideas get proposed over and over by people trying to enhance the game, and the same discussions come up again and again. This file is an attempt to stem the flow by presenting old discussions and arguments against the ideas. This assumes you are familiar with the game itself and some of the vocabulary (argot) involved (e.g. scum, ogg, LPS, Iggy). This is NOT intended to be a capsule summary of rec.games.netrek discussions; it is intended to help people trying to enhance the game understand why many of the obvious improvements won't work or won't be accepted by the Netrek community. As such, it contains one-sided and occasionally opinionated material. I welcome improvements and stronger arguments, but if you want to debate the value of something I will probably ignore you. [ This file has been evolving since September of 1992. Some of the info may have become outdated as Netrek evolved. ] REMEMBER: Netrek is not Star Trek. Netrek is not reality. Star Trek is not reality. Netrek is not Nintendo. DO NOT suggest modifications purely to make the game "more realistic". ONLY consider ideas that will improve game play. CONTENTS: 1) How about team DI? 2) How about no DI at all (+ changes in general)? 3) All ships shouldn't fire 8 torps. 4) Let's make cloakers blind. 5) Let's allow cloakers to fire. 6) The DD needs to be improved. 7) Here's a neat idea for a new ship. 8) How about a ship design system? 9) Remove the kill restriction on army carrying. 10) Remove the kill restriction on plasma torps. 11) Get rid of LPSs. 12) Get rid of Iggy! 13) Combine all of the server processes into one. 14) Put the number of armies next to the planet. 15) Highlight ships with kills. 16) Prevent bombing/taking out of T-mode. 17) Stop 3rd race scumming. 18) Just have a two-race galaxy. 19) Add incentives for scout bombing. 20) Protect ships that are fully lagged. 21) Credit kills appropriately. 22) Get rid of borgs! 23) Change the names of the races or the planets. 24) Add ship collisions. 25) Give planets gravity or motion. 26) Show the list of players or a "rank weighting" on entry. 27) Set up an invitation-only clue server. 28) Allow ships to drop mines. 29) Have the client update the torps instead of the server. 30) Have ships come in at the starbase instead of a planet. 31) Ships should auto-repair at warp 0. 32) Change the way the wait queue works. 33) Add steering keys. 34) Prevent butt-torping. A1) Appendix: Sturgeon II changes A2) Appendix: Sturgeon II kill credit rules A3) Appendix: Extreme Netrek A4) Appendix: How to propose a change You can skip straight to the one you're interested in (say, chapter 2) by searching for the regular expression "^2)". 1) How about team DI? Problem: Too many rank scums out there for themselves. Need to add an incentive for team play, so that they will get more DI if their team does better. Proposal: Change the DI structure so that you get points for stuff your teammates do. Alternatively, change it so that you get points for different "team stuff", like taking strategically placed planets or killing carriers. Why not: Most "team DI" schemes will cause people to switch to the team that's winning, because that's where the points are. It is possible right now to see the players on each team before making the initial team selection; this would make unfair teams the rule. Changing the individual values of things is difficult when you consider how the current DI scheme works. "DI" is simply the sum of offense, bombing, and planet ranks, multiplied by the number of hours you have been playing, and then adjusted according to the global average. There are no fixed DI values for doing certain things; just your relationship to the rest of the people on the server. If you try to reward players on teams that are doing well, people will quit when their team starts to lose, creating a steamroll effect (all the clued people join the winning side, all the non-clues stay on the losing side). Keeping track of planets won/lost during a game is a nice idea, but will lead to a lot of quit-scumming when the other team is taking a planet or two. Rank scums will always be scums; you can change the rules but they will always find annoying ways of working around them. Killing people with armies gives you (5*armies) bombing credit, and taking core planets is worth more than other planets, so the incentives exist; people are simply unaware of them or feel it is easier to do things the scum way. Incidentally, DI works like this: - There are three factors: bombing (the number of armies you have, bombed), offense (the number of enemies you have killed), and planets (the number of planets you have taken). There's also defense (number of times you have been killed), but most servers have done away with the defense criteria since ogging became popular. - The server takes these values, considers how long it took you to get them, and then compares that against the server average. From this you get "ratings", where having a 1.0 bombing rating means you bomb as many armies per unit time as the average player, 2.0 ratings mean you bomb twice as many, and so on. - The bombing, planet, and offense ratings are added. This gives your total ratings. An average player would have 3.0 ratings. - The ratings are multiplied by the number of hours you have spent in t-mode on that server. This is your DI. Hitting 'U' (shift-u) while playing brings up a chart showing what ratings and how many hours you need to make a particular rank. You can also promote if you don't have the ratings but have twice the DI, or if you're ratings are two points down and you have four times the DI. You can't be demoted. Many players are under the misconception that you "get DI" for doing a particular action. You don't. 2) How about no DI at all? Problem: DI is a mistake. It is the reason for scumming. Proposal: Toss it. At least toss all the ranks above Captain. Why not: Many people like to advance in rank. DI was developed because the original Xtrek had nothing but win/loss stats, so ratio scumming was the only way to look impressive (you think DI is bad... heh). There are a large number of Admirals who like having their rank (hey, it took them a long time to get there), and some of them run servers. DI is like the USA's electoral voting system: it's not great, and the country might be better without it, but it's not going away without a major fight. Besides which, it's a good way to attract [scum] players to new servers. Any change to DI is simply going to shift scumming one way or the other. Most arcade games are centered around the accumulation of points; the object is to do certain things, for which you rewarded. The idea of Netrek, however, is to win the game; rank should be just an incidental feature. However, there will always be those who see the accumulation of points, rank, or whatever as the driving goal. The Holy Grail of DI changing is a system that rewards only non-scum activities. However, telling scumming from teamwork requires human intervention or artificial intelligence in most cases. Jean-Marc Tanzi writes: >I believe that any team game, like netrek, where a machine could >really compute how well you play cannot be that good. Other interesting ideas: - Have players promote each other. Once you get to a certain rank, you can promote those beneath you. This has a chicken & egg problem which can be solved by importing a database or with some active administration at first. Note this is open to abuses (demoting people you don't like, promoting really lame players to embarass them, etc), and tends to trivialize rank. Tried on b62150.student.cwru.edu. - Shift planet credit so that you get partial credit for making it neutral and partial credit for taking it. This is accomplished by (for example) multiplying everybody's planet rating by 3 and then awarding 1 for neuting and 2 for taking. Since the global average is also multiplied by 3, player ratings don't change, so DI is constant. Tried on bigbang.astro.indiana.edu. 3) All ships shouldn't fire 8 torps. Problem: The game is unbalanced. SBs should be able to shoot more torps than others. Maybe SCs shouldn't be able to shoot as many. Proposal: Increase SB torps to 12, or scale all others accordingly. Why not: Going to 12 torps requires mods to both client and server. This will increase CPU time slightly, and will increase network usage. You can't just switch on the ship type, either, because a SB could fire 12 torps and then refit. Scaling all ships down (so that an SC would fire, say, three torps total) has been tried on Sturgeon; see appendix A1. Any change to the ship characteristics is going to be met with a great deal of resistance. The game is very carefully balanced, and any changes can result in drastic changes in the way it's played. 4) Let's make cloakers blind. Problem: Cloaking is too powerful. Ogging is getting out of hand. Proposal: Remove certain items from the tac display of a cloaked ship, like enemy ships, planets, torps, etc. Why not: Been done. Not very popular. Removing planets makes them hard to take (you just sit there watching your 'O' flag, hoping that nobody will kill you because they KNOW you are coming straight in). Removing torps is bad for the same reason. Removing other players to make ogging harder is bad because most players LIKE ogging. It's fun, and it's part of the game. 5) Let's allow cloakers to fire. Problem: Now that Star Trek VI is out, cloakers (esp. Kli) should be able to fire. Proposal: Allow ships to fire when cloaked, possibly with a higher fuel or wtemp cost. Why not: Gimme a break. Ogging would become trivial without changes to other parts of the game. See the Sturgeon changes in Appendix A1. 6) The DD needs to be improved. Problem: The DD is weak. It can't take bomb as well as an SC, and it can't fight as well as CA. Proposal: Give the DD bigger shields, or bigger torps (30 is too small), or more powerful phasers, and perhaps a bigger fuel tank. Why not: As Tom Holub put it (paraphrased), "The CA is weak. It can't bomb as well as a DD, and it can't fight as well as a BB." All ships have their place, it's just a question of finding the right niche. DDs can carry 5 armies, making them more of a threat to planets than the SC. Several discussions have raged over rec.games.netrek about what the One True Use of the DD is. None have been found. They can't be used as a big SC nor as a small CA; they require a different perspective. I won't offer them here, but will instead relegate it to the thrice-revised DD Players Guide. As a side note, the cooling rate on DDs was changed from 6 to 7, allowing them to go great distances without overheating. Many players who previously thought the DD fully worthless now consider it to be valuable in certain circumstances. For those of you who are beginning to think that I'm totally anti-change, let it be known that I sent private e-mail to about ten different server deities asking them to make this change, and campaigned long and hard on rec.games.netrek. I detest the phrase, "Ship of Lose." It doesn't even make sense. Stop it. Newer, alternative proposals: - make the CA weaker, by reducing phaser strength or manuverability (but then the SC gets correspondingly stronger) - have a reentry delay based on ship size (again, the SC gets stronger) - give the DD mondo plasmas, making it a special-purpose ship - remove the DD entirely so people stop whining 7) Here's a neat idea for a new ship. Problem: There's a gap in Netrek that really needs to be filled. Proposal: I want a new ship X that can do Y and Z. Why not: KSU-Galaxy/Chaos servers are a prime example of ship design run amok. The GA had huge torps, fast phasers, an incredible refueling rate, and eventually they even boosted the manuverability on some servers. As a result, nobody played anything but GA (there were some DD holdouts, but once you could turn in GA at a reasonable warp most of those switched over). You may think your new design will fit perfectly into Netrek. You're probably wrong. Some examples from the past: - mini-starbase. Like your normal SB, but less filling. You'd get a couple on a team, or maybe just have them more often. Two of these together, pressoring each other out of danger, would be damn near invincible when guarding a repair planet. It's basically a Super Planet Defender, like a BB on steroids, and it really wouldn't add anything new to the game, since it's easier to ogg than an SB and slower than a BB. - fighters. SBs would launch these, perhaps they'd be robot-controlled. Again, neat idea, but so what? They would either have to occupy a player slot (reducing the number of other robots you can have) or require modifications to both client and server (which is a Bad Thing). Again, what do they add? Are they any different from plasma torps with a high tracking setting? See the Sturgeon changes, which implemented them as slow-moving tracking torps, which SBs could fire instead of normal torps. - floating fuel platform. Another pseudo-SB, which looks like an AS but has fuel like an SB. Easy ogg target; what good is it if you have to keep it sitting behind your home planet? One BB can off the thing, so it's not even valuable as a distraction. - ogger ship. Maybe it uncloaks fast (a la the old Calvin scheme), or it does 200 points of damage when it explodes, or it has small torps but a big phaser, or whatever. Anybody who thinks they need this has never been ogged by somebody in a CA who knows what they're doing. This would just make Ogging by Idiots that much easier. - super scout ship. Strip off most offensive weaponry, make it real fast. What's the point? Try stopping a good SC player, and THEN see if you really want to propose this. - big fat starbase. This one has the actual size increased, making it easier to hit, but is given better shields to compensate. So what's the point...? It would involve changing a lot of code in the server and client to special case the various options, plus new bitmaps (for shield/cloak as well), etc, etc. Many suggestions like these come from people trying to compensate for inadequacies in the ships (sounds vaguely Freudian, doesn't it?) It takes time and a lot of practice to become a really effective player; even the lowly SC can be a marvelous dogfighting ship when it's flown by a skilled player (with no lag). The "paradise" server introduced a number of new ships, but it also changed a LOT of other game features, and required a new client to play. One was the "jump ship", which could carry 4 players and go warp 30, but had only 25 shields and 25 damage. (Paradise continues to be refined, so I'm not going to try and describe their setup.) 8) How about a ship design system? Problem: Other games (e.g. xtank) allow you to change the way your ship is set up. I want to be able to adjust my ship characteristics according to the way I play. Proposal: Allow ship characteristics to be adjusted by the player. Why not: This was implemented in a version of the original Xtrek game. The tendency was to do things like strip all torpedos, most of the hull, half of the engines, and all of the cloaking ability from the ship and get phasers that could do 40 points of damage to ships outside of visual range (but had to be orbiting a fuel planet to fire more than twice). Games quickly became ridiculous. Either your planets were being taken by someone completely invisible, or you were getting destroyed by ships you couldn't see. Nobody bothered dodging, because nobody fired torps. Any implementation will require carefully balanced limits and a lot of play time before it would become widespread. Anyone who wishes to try this will likely have to set up their own server and then try very hard to attract players to it. As a side note, Sturgeon has a feature somewhat like this: predefined ship upgrades after you get kills. Unfortunately this can (and does) encourage ratio scumming and runner scumming, because nobody with a nice big fat ship wants to die. (It also introduced "upgrade scumming" to the world: repeatedly killing a second login to get lots of upgrades.) 9) Remove the kill restriction on army carrying. Problem: Imposing a restriction based on kills is unrealistic and silly. Proposal: Allow any player to carry armies. Why not: If you allow this, you remove a big part of the challenge of the game. Getting a kill and staying alive while trying to move armies around is one of primary challenges in Netrek. If anybody can carry armies, then every player is a potential planet taker, and it's impossible to focus the defense of your space. You will also increase the instances of Ensign Fubar scampering about, picking up armies and dying with them. This is a Very Bad Thing when your team is low on armies. If a player can't get a kill, he probably doesn't have the skill or experience to take a planet without getting nailed. (People who need practice taking planets need to practice staying alive first!) For those who insist on reality, it can be argued that Star Fleet Command doesn't like to entrust armies with commanders who haven't proven themselves in battle (especially Kli!) It has also been suggested that the captains use the hull fragments of the enemy starships to build crew accommodations for the armies. 10) Remove the kill restriction on plasma torps. Problem: Requiring kills for plasmas is silly. Proposal: Allow plasmas for one and all. Why Not: While this is a trivial server change (quick alteration to .sysdef), it's there for a reason, namely that having 8 battleships with plasma torps makes taking planets impossible. LPSs would never end. Chaos servers allowed infinite plasmas, and plasma-wars became rather common. So did plasma- muggings (you can't shoot three incoming plasmas!) The ping-pong plasmas made life interesting, but then there's not much point in taking planets on a Chaos server anyway. The way things are now, players with 2+ kills can be ogged, which prevents them from firing more plasmas. While it's true that the rich become richer (or perhaps the deadly become more deadly), there's nothing wrong with elitism in Netrek. It's just a game. Deal with it. 11) Get rid of LPSs. Problem: LPSs suck. They're boring and they make my stats hurt. Proposal: Various ideas. A small sampling: - have a 5 second delay before players can reenter - have a delay inversely proportional to the number of planets your team has - enter moving away at maxwarp - have the presence of enemy ships force new ships to appear farther away (a la Plato Empire) - enter without fuel (this is also used as an anti-psycho-ogging "fix") - use the random entry planet selection stuff, extended to work on planets that the team doesn't own - allow a certain number of construction points per minute; big ships use more construction points; once exceeded, you have to wait for it to climb back up - genocide happens when only one planet remains - allow a ship with 5 or 10 kills to carry a MondoBomb; when it reaches the planet it obliterates it - turn an SC with 3 kills into Super Ogger, doing several hundred points of damage with its explosion Why Not: The Last Planet Stand is one of the few things in Netrek that absolutely REQUIRES teamwork. It is nearly impossible to break an LPS unless the attackers are organized or the defenders are largely clueless. A reasonable solution to the Indefinite LPS (one that drags on and on because all the clued players on the attacking side bailed) is the Bronco LPS timer. The attackers get 45 minutes to break it, at which point the galaxy resets. There are players who dislike the timer because it encourages the attackers to slack off ("oh, we'll just wait for the timer, we'll never break through), but it's proven to be a reasonable compromise. LPSs are here to stay. It is possible to come back from one, just as it is possible to genocide a race. If you are concerned about the damage to your stats, then set up your own server, scum your way to admiral, and get on with your life. There are some ideas floating around about encouraging teams to go for the genocide, such as resetting the galaxy afterward instead of leaving a 20 planet vs 10 planet setup (whether that's a punishment or a reward depends on your point of view). Side note: LPSs with homeworld agris are monumentally unpopular. You can hold off against a fleet with greater numbers without too much difficulty. Many servers explicitly prevent the home world from being agri; if your favorite server doesn't, tell the server admin. (The other side of the coin is that, once taken, it's harder for the home team to retake. I don't think this balances the pain of taking it in the first place, however.) 12) Get rid of Iggy! Problem: Iggy is nothing but a pain. Proposal: Lose him. Why Not: Iggy is a Bronco server feature that adds a bit more randomness to the game. Opinions on Iggy are rather divided, but most everybody seems to have one (at this point I will plead neutrality so as not to start ANOTHER flame war). If you really dislike Iggy, either: - kill him as soon as he shows up, - ask the server god to remove him, or - play on servers that don't have him. Some people will argue that Iggy is "terrain", i.e. a part of the game like planets (only a bit more aggressive). A common phrase is, "if you're fighting Iggy, you don't understand him." Some servers have banned Iggy during t-mode; you might request this. It should be left to the individual admins however. Some servers (e.g. Calvin) have snakes instead, which don't really do much but get in your way (they look cool though). 13) Combine all of the server processes into one. Problem: My workstation can't handle all the context switches. Proposal: Merge all the ntserv processes into one, and maybe even combine them with daemonII, so instead of the Server Union we'd have the Unified Process. Why Not: A few people have tried this. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this, not the least of which is that it requires a complete rewrite of the server, a partial to full rewrite of the client, and will work best as a strictly UDP implementation (which requires a whole new protocol). Among the disadvantages are the possible loss of the shared memory segment (which kills the traditional tool interface), the need to bring the server down whenever changes are made, the inability to simply restart failed components (ex: restartable daemon), changes in CPU load possibly resulting in lower UNIX process priorities (and thus worse real-time performance), changes in the way the kernel sees Netrek (e.g. waiting for I/O), poorer performance on MP machines, the larger executable will be more likely to be swapped out under BSD, loss of memory firewalls between components, possibility of security breaches in a UDP-only setup, etc, etc. There are a number of advantages, but this file is meant to discourage you, not entice you. A reading of the process scheduling chapter in _The Design and Implementation of 4.3BSD UNIX_ should be required for anyone contemplating this. And if you don't believe me, here's a note from somebody who once tried it: ----- Article 11256 of rec.games.netrek: From: jrichard@cs.cs (John 'MacGyver' Richardson) Date: 30 Dec 92 05:31:11 GMT [...] Ok, not to beat a dead dog, but I've been working on this for a while now. It was pretty easy to come up with multiplexed I/O for logging in. HOWEVER, the big problems are: o scheduling becomes a disaster! However, I'm trying reading one packet from whoever's ready and going on to the next slot. Updates taken care of by the daemon now get taken care of by a signal handler. o reading and writing becomes a disaster! If you use TCP you have to deal with partial reads and writes of packets because you have to use nonblocking I/O. If you want to write code, you have to have states for everything in the universe (so to speak). The solution? Use UDP only. But that requires a TCP like protocol to get those packets that absolutely have to get there (like a login name). Feel like re-inventing the wheel? I sure feel like I am now. :) [...] ----- 14) Put the number of armies next to the planet. Problem: It's annoying to have to hit 'i' all the time to get army counts. Proposal: Put the number of armies on each planet next to the planet's bitmap on the galactic map. Why Not: This is the first step down the path to "Netrek for Morons(tm)". You can see when a planet pops by watching the galactic map; having ever-increasing army counts staring you in the face is like having a compass attached to your nose. It's true that the information is accessible, if somewhat inconvenient. However, players who aren't paying attention won't see the new army numbers, and are less likely to react to an army bitmap on the display than they are to seeing "15" next to Sir. If you aren't paying attention to armies, you lose. There are several places in Netrek where this is the case. Netrek rewards vigilance and a keen eye as well as intelligence and fast reflexes. Being constantly aware of everything around you is a challenge beyond the goals of the game itself; it requires the player to improve himself, and rewards experience. Doing all but say, "do this next" will make things too simple, and reduce the sense of accomplishment acquired from mastery of the game. Knowing exactly where the armies are and how many requires as much skill as holding a phaser lock, which is as it should be. There are those who think otherwise. I'm not presenting their opinions here, because if you are about to propose this then you share those opinions already. Suffice it to say that there is enough disagreement to keep this from becoming a standard feature of Netrek. 15) Highlight ships with kills. Problem: It's too annoying to have to look down at the player list, and relate that to the people flying around. Proposal: Mark players with kills somehow. Why Not: This is yet another stepping stone on the path to ButtHeadTrek. This would essentially stick a big "Ogg Me" sign on the engines of anybody with a kill. You don't even have to pay attention to the game to know what you should do when you encounter a ship with kills. While this is in the same vein as the army counts, it isn't really controversial, possibly because the guys who like the army counts also like to take planets and don't want to get swamped by "stupid oggers." 16) Prevent bombing/taking out of T-mode. Problem: Many players either don't know Netrek-etiquette about not messing with planets outside of T-mode, or they choose to ignore it. Proposal: Make the server enforce it. Why Not: Actually, I kind of like this one. Sickdog had a mod where trying to bomb or drop armies out of t-mode caused you to explode. The main problem with it is that sometimes its okay to bomb out of t-mode. If you've got a 2-on-2 "training" session and just want to practice trading planets, it's annoying to have it blocked. Making this policy work without getting in the way generally requires human intervention. You could do something fancy, counting how much time has elapsed since t-mode was lost and take into consideration #of players on a team, etc, etc, but you'd have to lean on a server deity to get this to happen. Another problem is that simple "nuke" implementations don't give you enough warning (one minute you're dropping, the next BOOM!). Some recent servers simply prevent it by treating the planet as friendly. This can be a bit confusing, because the message they display (usually the bronco "no Pearl Harbor" message) doesn't really tell you what's going on. Any such implementation should also prevent beaming down on planets of a different race, INCLUDING independents. 17) Stop 3rd race scumming. Problem: When players are unable to break an LPS, or they just want more armies, they may go over to a race with no players and take some planets. This happens often when a 20-on-10 game has slowed to an impenetrable impasse, and the team with 20 planets decides to reset the galaxy by capturing a 3rd race. It's also used to draw LPS defenders away from the planet, and make them try to defend 3rd race space. Proposal: Don't allow 3rd race planets to be taken over. Why Not: I really hate 3rd-space scumming, but I'll bite my tongue (ouch!) and try to give some reasons not to propose this. First of all, it's already been discussed several times, so unless you plan to undertake a direct-mail campaign to server deities, forget it. It's been a part of Netrek for quite some time, and there are some dedicated 3rd-space scummers out there. It's also a viable (if cowardly) alternative to the genocide timer, especially on servers that don't have the timer. However, as one slightly opinionated player put it: >From: tom@soda.berkeley.edu (Tom Holub) >Subject: Re: 3rd space planet taking >Date: 11 Aug 92 07:49:12 GMT > >People are for it because they are fuckin' WEENIES who don't want to >play the game. > -Mojo If you propose it, you will have support, but you won't get anywhere unless you're willing to put your back into it. Some ideas from the past (other than "just don't allow it"): - Make war status permanent. - Force players to be peaceful against all races except their t-mode opponent. - Make more intelligent/stronger guardians (go after people with kills, etc). Unfortunately, a team which is about to perish will likely bomb the 3rd race to bring in a super-guardian to help defend their new territory after the genocide (this can be fixed, of course). - Have robot appear when hostile player ENTERS 3rd space, not just when he attacks it (presume guilt). - Make undefended planets do more damage to attackers. - The neutral race gets ticked, and some planets join the non-offending team for protection (interesting, but it's actually worse). - Add robots which actually attack the attacker's space (bombing/taking). The large number of armies on 3rd race planets makes this attractive. - Leave it legal for servers without a timer, but simply ban it from servers with an LPS timer. - Have a two-race galaxy (see next item). 18) Just have a two-race galaxy. Problem: Netrek is a descendant of Empire, which had four warring races. However, Netrek games typically have only two races fighting each other, so the rest of the planets are just worthless junk. This increases network/CPU overhead, and leads to 3rd-race scumming. Proposal: Remove two of the races. Leave Fed/Rom, or Rom/Kli (with a reorg of KLI space). Why Not: The other planets serve a variety of uses. They can be used by scout bombers and planet takers for refueling and repair, and allow cloaking near hostile space. It also allows 3rd-space scumming, but that's a different issue. Most importantly, the size of the galaxy increases the area which needs to be defended. If you reduce the galaxy to a two-way, it will be impossible to attack from or retreat to neutral space. All offensive actions will take place in a single corridor, making starbases and large ships much more important. Bombing and deep planet taking will become more difficult because there is a single path of attack. Whether you think this is a good idea or not, there's no denying that it will dramatically change game strategies. It is unlikely that such a proposal will be popular. 19) Add incentives for scout bombing. Problem: Very few people are willing to SC-bomb because of the drain on stats (too much time away from taking planets). Bombing 2 or 3 armies at a time doesn't really help the bombing stats much; ogging carriers may do more. Proposal: Change the amount of bombing credit based on the number of armies sitting on the planet when bombing began. So you'd get massive credit for bombing the last three armies, but not nearly as much for bombing it from 60 to 55. Alternate proposal: Start all planets out at 5 or 6 armies. Why Not: Both proposals suffer from the fact that average bombing stats have already been computed on most servers based on the "one army, one vote" scheme with 30 initial armies on each planet. Changing the setup mid-stream would make it nearly impossible to get a 1.0 bombing rating. It's also highly unlikely that anybody really concerned about rank is going to do much scout bombing anyway. Advancing bombing at the expense of offense and planets is not a good way to scum up to Admiral. The alternate proposal also affects the ability of a starbase to fill up with 25 armies at the start of a game. Overall, the second proposal will likely have a dramatic impact on the way the first few minutes of a game are played - something that isn't likely to go over too well with the "old timers." 20) Protect ships that are fully lagged. Problem: When a client becomes seriously lagged, the player usually ends up getting snuffed by the first bozo who comes within visual range. Proposal: Make a server mod so that ghostbusted players are invulnerable until the connection gets reestablished. Why Not: >From: jch+@cs.cmu.edu (Jonathan Hardwick) >Subject: Re: Playing with lag >Date: 11 Aug 92 01:24:29 GMT > >Last time it came up, one objection I remember is that it would become >trivial to abuse. Want to take that last planet? Lock on, cloak, max >warp, and then yank the ethernet connector out of your machine. Wait >30 seconds while the defenders waste all their fuel on you, and then >finally realize that you're in Protected Mode. Stick the ethernet >connector back in, beam down your armies, genocide the galaxy. > >Or if you're worth less when in Protected Mode, just yank the ethernet >connector whenever death seems inevitable. Depending on the implementation, you might be able to just hit ^Z and suspend your process. When the client host's buffers fill up it'll look just like a network storm to the server host. If all you want to handle is fully severed clients then you won't be solving the problem; the only time my client has been severed is when the server goes down (I can't do the "automatic reconnect" because I'm running through a firewall machine, so I *know* when I get completely dropped). 21) Credit kills appropriately. Problem: The person who causes deaths doesn't always get the credit (e.g. F1 fires torps at R2; R2 dets; F0 dies from the detted torps. Credit should go to R2 who did the detting, but currently goes to F1 who fired the torps.) Proposal: Implement some fixes to make it work out right. Why Not: This is actually a pretty good idea. It won't affect the game much, and it makes things fair. However... It will change the game. There were be situations where people who would have had kills will not got them, and vice versa. Exact impact on the game needs to be better understood. A similar idea is to have "kills" and "wins" be the same, for statistical purposes. So killing a ship with 5 armies would get you 1.5 wins as well as 1.5 kills. I don't know that this really does anything useful though. Sturgeon II has some new rules implemented; see appendix A2. If you would like to take it upon yourself to define a clear-cut set of rules AND modify a server, test it, AND THEN provide diffs for the rest of the world, you will probably see this change happen. However, it's probably more than your average server deity wants to deal with. 22) Get rid of borgs! Problem: Cyborgs are evil! They're for loser weenies! Proposal: Fully ban them. Why Not: Well, this isn't really a "clever suggestion", but it appears so frequently that I figured I ought to mumble a few words of pseudo-wisdom. Borgs are neat. You can sit back and watch them destroy everything around you without moving a finger. This is far more satisfying if the borg you are using is one that you have written yourself; you're testing your programming skills and algorithmic cleverness against others. The ultimate is to write a fully automated android, like SFOP. Some servers have "borg hours" so that people who want to use them can, and so that the authors can test them in battle. If you don't like playing against borgs, find out which servers support them and when, and don't play during those times. Generally speaking, people who use cyborgs are atrophying their own skills. Playing a borg and playing a regular client are two very different things; after a while you become accustomed to firing without aiming, and to having oggers snuffed by your auto-pressor and auto-phaser. Going back to being stricly human can be a difficult experience. For this reason, most experienced players don't use them. They do make for an interesting change of pace, and it can be fun to sign on to a clueless server and munch newbies without breaking a sweat. "Borgtrek" is also amusing from time to time (100% borg games). Cyborgs only become a problem when people sneak blessed borgs into human-only hours. Usually they'll turn most of the offensive weaponry off, but they usually leave on special features like the ability to determine which players are carrying armies or special highlights on players with kills. This gives them an advantage, as they can fight, fly, and be fully aware of what the other team is doing all at the same time (in some cases they can get information unavailable to the standard client). If you really dislike borgs, go play somewhere else, consoling yourself with the fact that, if they try to play a standard client, they will fare far worse for their cyborg experience. 23) Change the names of the races or the planets. Problem: Feds never fight Klingons, and who are these Orions, anyway? The names are outdated and don't reflect Trek stuff. Solution: Use Ferengi, Cardassians, or some other "real life" hostile races. Change the names of some of the planets to reflect Star Trek stuff, i.e. use names like "Farpoint" and "Vulcan". Why Not: The names of the races and the planets are ingrained into Netrek players. If somebody says "clear org", experienced players know where to go without even looking at the map. Races are the same way. Everyone who has played for a while is used to Rom being top left, Orion being lower right, etc. People don't write, "K3 is scumming in lower-left space". It's Fed space, and it always should be. Sure, people would get used to it after a while, but I don't think most people WANT to get used to it. In a few situations it can be a real pain, such as when the first letter changes. If you want to send a message to the other team, you have to use a different key. It's also used in a lot of places in the code, so it'd be a pain to change (and if you didn't change the code, but rather just the external appearance, it'd be very confusing for people prying into the source code). Remember what this document says up top: Netrek is not Star Trek, Netrek is not Real Life. It's a game, with names chosen as convenient points of reference. If you want to set up a server with California city names or campus buildings instead of star systems, feel free. 24) Add ship collisions. Problem: It would be neat to have ships collide. Proposal: Have ships either damage each other on collision or bounce off in some elastic manner. Why Not: Bouncing ships would be, well, weird. Crunching ships in a BB by rolling over them would be amusing, but probably wouldn't add much to the game. However, there are more serious considerations. First, consider what happens if you are cloaked ogging somebody, and collisions do damage. Now you don't even need to uncloak to kill the other guy; just run into him. Makes avoiding oggs nearly impossible, especially since you can't pressor the attacker away. Second, suppose you are cloaked taking a planet. As it is the defenders have to locate you and hit you with enough torps/phaser hits to blow you up. Escorts can det torps to keep their takers safe. Collisions make it far easier to defend planets: whether the collisions bounce or do damage, planet defenders can simply cloak and fly over the planet and have a good chance of destroying you or at least knocking you off. They don't even have to uncloak anymore, making it harder for the escorts to do something useful. And if collisions bounce, you can just knock the escorts into the planet takers. Heck, if you want to defend a planet, just sit right in the middle, and nobody else can orbit. This last issue is a strong reason for disallowing collisions between friendly players: you could never have more than about four people in orbit at once, and getting more than two in orbit would require a minor feat of coordination. 25) Give planets gravity or motion. Problem: Planets are boring. Proposal: Give planets a gravitational attraction. Also, make them move around, perhaps in some sort of localized circular pattern. Why Not: Gravity is really sort of silly. It won't do anything but make it harder to get away from a planet. Might be useful for dodging sideways or running, but you either need to make it too weak to be interesting or too strong to be playable. Moving planets is harder than it seems. The client wasn't designed to allow planets to move. You will also increase the amount of network traffic (by quite a bit, since planet positions are currently only sent right after you log on) and the CPU load, which are Bad Things. It really isn't all that exciting anyway. It can change the galaxy around making Kli or Ori space more "fair", but any serious amount of movement will have to be carefully tested so you don't end up with cluster-galaxies and huge neutral zones. 26) Show the list of players or a "rank weighting" on entry. Problem: Teams are often unbalanced, because people must blindly choose which team to join. Proposal: Display the list of players, or at least some sort of rank distribution, to players entering the game. That way they can choose teams to even them out.