Tradewars 2002 HINTS!

[Jim Semkiw]

�Area: Fidonet: Trade Wars
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Msg#: 193 Date: 08 Mar 95
12:59:00
From: John A Elson Read: Yes
Replied: No
To: ALL
Mark:
Subj: tips 1/6
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Note:
This is my regular tips posting. Since this text file is now 45K long
and my mailer breaks it up into 6 or 7 parts anyway, future additions
will be in a second file which will be posted seperately but in the
same packet. It will be viewed as a continuation of this list so the
first topic will be #24.

Bugs/Observations about TW2002 V2 Beta by John Alan Elson

#1 Phantom Class 0 ports
Bigbang has a habbit of creating class 0 ports with blank names that
turn out to be class 7 ports when you port there. This is really
nothing more than an annoyance. In case you get the idea of getting
rid of this annoyance by blowing them up, forget it! These ports
pack the same wallop as normal class 0 ports, trying to destroy them
is pointless, and don't bother trying to upgrade them either!

#2 Bye Bye Terra!
If you ring fedspace with fighters you can create planets in
fedspace, including sector one, by making new player accounts. After
several hundered accounts you can overload sector one and have a 1/3
chance of destroying Terra through a planetary collision. If Terra is
destroyed the very next planet created will fill slot number one.
Although this new planet (which you can put anywhere you would
normally put a planet) looks perfectly normal, when you land on it
you get the normal landing on Terra routine. This new "Terra" starts
out with a population of zero but reproduces at the normal rate after
that. This only works when the sysop allows you to make multiple
accounts.

#3 32,000+ turns!

Needed:

1. A corporate partner (not actually required but makes it safer)
2. Two mountainous planets with full fuel ore and level 6 citadels
(or some combination of level 6 citadels with about 400,00
units of fuel ore)
3. Two interdictor cruisers
4. A terminal program which can use macros (not absolutely required
but it sure makes it easier!).
5. A home sector with only corporate defenses and no navhazzard.

How to do it:

This is based on the interdictor rollover bug and the ability to
use turns by escaping from the interdictor until the fuel ore is
exhausted.
First put the two interdictor cruisers in the sector. Have
your corporate partner turn off the sector qcannon on one of the
mountainous planets (important!), turn on the Interdictor
Generator, and claim the planet personal. Once this is done get
into one of the ICs and use it to tow the other IC. The reason
for this is that this uses up the most turns (45) per move. Type
M and you'll notice that you have 45 less turns. Activate a macro
to conintually press M. Soon you will have over 60,000 turns! If
you break the macro you can xport out of the sector to another
ship but you won't be able to move because the game sees this as
a negative number. You need to lose enough turns so that you have
less than 32768. Keep pressing M or let the macro do it (you'll
be doing it about 700 times).
In five minutes to 15 minutes (depending on computer and
modem speed) you will drain the the fuel ore from the first
planet. You still will have more than 32767 turns but
considerably less than 65,000. Now have your partner undo what he
did to the first planet and do the same thing to the second
planet. Having accomplished that, keep trying to escape the IG
in one IC while towing the other. By the time you drain the ore
from the second planet you will be down to less than 32767 turns.
The turns you have now are real turns which can be used for
anything normal turns can be used for.

If you don't have a corporate partner or don't have time to wait
for your partner there is another method which can be done "solo".
Claim all corporate fighters and mines everywhere as personal. Claim
all planets personal except for the the first lvl 6 citadel. Claim
the first level 6 as corporate, turn off the qcannon (both atmosphere
and sector!), and quit the corp. Proceed from there as outlined above
until you drain the fuel ore. Xport to another ship and reclaim the
1st level 6 as personal. Land on the 2nd planet and claim it
corporate. Turn the qcannon off and the IG on and quit the corp. Again
proceed as outlined above. Obviously, there are a lot of things that
can go wrong with this method if you don't do it right but I have used
it successfully.

The big surprise:
When you log in the next day YOU WILL STILL HAVE THE EXTRA TURNS!
This makes this bug very useful indeed because by the time you
use up all these turns the planets will probably be back up to
full fuel ore again and you can repeat the process as necessary.
THE BIG WARNING:
As long as you have more turns than the game is set for the date
that you last entered the game will not be reset! This means that
you could get deleted even though you've been on every day! To
avoid this take note of the number of days till inactive players
are deleted (the default is 21) and make sure you use up the
turns before that happens. If necessary, get a photon and a
cloaking device and deliberately take damage by running into
navhazzard attacking a port or whatever. This resets your turns
to zero and will cause the date you were last on to be reset. If
you log out, log back in, log out and log back in again you will
not only be told you were on "today" but you'll get back the
normal number of turns per day!

This all seems very strange from a players point of view but it
actually makes perfect sense from a programmer's point of view.
If you don't understand this then ask a programmer or just take
my word for it, it is too complicated to go into here!

#4 TWARP Towing
The game is designed to not allow towing via TWARP. In my opinion
this is a mistake. Fortunately, there is a bug that lets you get
around it.
#1 Enter your destination sector. Type Y to TWARP but N
to engaging.
#2 Type C to activate your computer then U and N to
"disable" TWARP. Quit the computer.
#3 Type W to engage the tractor beam and toW the
player/ship.
#4 Enter your destination sector again. Answer Y to
engage.
#5 Arrive at your destination sector with the ship you
are towing using only the turns needed to tow it one
sector!

#5 Planetary Collisions
In 1.0x you have to TWARP a planet in to overload a sector and cause
a collision. In V2 you can overload any sector (except sector one) by
just shooting off gtorps. I personally think this is a good thing
because if forces players to put up sector defenses instead of
relying on planetary defenses alone. Unfortunately, photons disable
sector defenses allowing players to shoot off gtorps without
defeating the sector defenses. This is one of several reasons why
photon missiles should *always* be disabled in V2 Beta.

#6 Photons
Aside from the consideration mentioned above, when a photon is
launched into a sector where a player is staying in a citadel they
lose their turns for the rest of the day. Neither ship nor planetary
shields offer any protection against this. Sysops can deal
effectively with this by leaving photons disabled.
>>> Continued to next message

* SLMR 2.1a * BBSs don't last long because most sysops have AIDES!

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