Space Tyrant for Dummies

With Space Tyrant now online, I hope that more people will try it out. But before people get into it, there are a few hints that can help you. First off, there is one thing you need to know over all others. Upgrades / Ship Customization are PERMANENT. When you launch your ship, you may find yourself in an unfamiliar type of galaxy. The main galaxy is an Elliptical galaxy. I can best describe it as a 1-way with direction. If this were a physical object, it would resemble a young child’s attempt to cut a strip of paper. The exit numbers are random in legnth, but always go up or down. With the only way to play in telnet, Ray decided to make it even simpler than the other telnet interfaces. Each exit has a corresponding number, and by typing in that number, you can travel to that sector. Becuase S.T. is in real-time, the autopilot had to be reconfigured. To use the auto-pilot, type 0, then enter your destination. The next thing you need to do is upgrade your ship. Trading posts are located at sector 1, then 2001, 4001 etc.. The trading posts have a large neutral fig cover, so they are great early on for hiding. Uprading is one of the most important parts of the game, as this action is irreversable, and will decide how you play the game. Buy you holds last, for if you have empty spaces that could be filled by devices, they will instead be filled with holds if you are not careful. There are 5 spaces for devices and 95 spaces for holds, if you have more than 135 holds, then the extra holds will be taken from you device space. Hard-core traders will want to buy 5 Tractor Devices. With one and two tractor devices, you can nudge only ports. When you get 3, you can warp planets. With 4 tractor devices, you can nudge ports and planets into nebulas, and with 5 you nudge ports and planets out of nebulas. Combat computers give you a .1 and .2 defensive bonus with 1 and 2 of the uprades respectively. When you hit 3, you get a .3 defensive AND offensive bonus. With 4 and 5 Combat Computers, you get a .4 and a .5 bonus in offensive and defensive. The next feature is truly original. Ship scanners are just what they sound like: they automatically scan for nearby ships. Unfair? Well, they made the decision to get them and you didnt πŸ˜› With only 1 or 2 of these devices, they are useless. If you get 3 of them, they can search the nearest 600 sectors, 300 in each direction for nearby ships. With 4, that number jumps to 1200 sectors, or 600 in each way. The ultimate scout has 5 of these devices, which allows that person to search 1800 sectors for ships, 900 in each direction. Doing this action takes up about 2.5 kg of fuel. To make it fair, Ray made it not fully efficient, so it is MUCH more difficult to find someone with scanners under neutral fig cover or a starbase. Which brings me to hiding. Starbase prices are always changed to confuse us, but this time, they also decided to make a #1 starbase have a defensive power of 25. The starting price for a #1 sb is 9375. (See the starbase chart at the end of this post) To get starbases and fighters, you can’t “make” them, you buy them, which takes away the need for hardware and iron. Grafitti beacons have been eliminated as well. On to making money. Sure the main galaxy is good, but there’s much more to be done than the elliptical. If you explore enough, you find out that there are other galaxies. You can find out what sectors have galaxies in them because they have a ‘~’ next to the sector #. To travel to that galaxy, type the button ‘t’. There is one seperate galaxy every 2000 sectors, with a size of 8000 sectors! The galaxy types are not always corresponding to the ones in TLF. A bar galaxy is the same as a bar in TLF (that appears to be the most common type.) Giant Globular is like a giant cube galaxy. The cubes are 100 sectors. The Dense Clusters are the same as back in TLF, but not as dense. The biggest change is the Open Clusters. These galaxies are the same as 6-ways in the main game. This is by far the best type of galaxy. The reason is the simplicity. Just type in ‘x’ to find the nearest planet, then ‘/’ to travel there, then ‘x’ to scoop the planet, then ‘/’ to go to a random neighboring sector. The last thing is productivity. Always, when in a seperate galaxy than the main one, check the productivity of the galaxy. It ranges from 700%-1000%, compared to the 500% of the elliptical. I was lucky enough to find a 959% Open Cluster. Watch your productivity per kg of fuel, a good amount would be 2000 and a great amount will be around 2400. Fuel is abundant, with 1kg being issued every minute! Other hints: Access the player statistics by pressing ‘p’ you don’t need a stastics module. Locate a planet with ‘l’ or ‘x’ Type in ‘?’ to view the other commands. So take a look around…What’s to loose?

Starbase Costs
(These costs are from scratch, to find the upgrade cost, just use the previous cost)
#1 – 9375
#2 – 18750
#3 – 37500
#4 – 75000
#5 – 150000
#6 – 300000
#7 – 600000
#8 – 1200000
#9 – 2400000
#10 – 4800000
#11 – 9600000
#12 – 19200000
#13 – 38400000
#14 – 76800000
#15 – 153600000
#16 – 307200000
#17 – 614400000 (Ray told me it’s been done before)

I hope to see you playing. My ship’s name is Conquest and has the top spot πŸ˜‰
~Mirari~

Three Cardinal Rules

Isn’t the web great? I decided to bounce around Ray’s site a bit after writing that last post, and for a laugh I thought I might visit Kirelli’s old website.

Out of curiosity (and a bit of nostalgia) I had a quick look at the manual and came across the following gem!


Three Cardinal Rules:

We have only three simple rules

  1. Play only your character, only the number of aliases explicitly permitted, and never, ever share accounts! The current limit is 16 players per person. This means that each person can play under 16 different names here. If a popup hint claims a different number, it is incorrect.
  2. Use no profanity or personal verbal obnoxiousness anywhere here — including the radio, the message base, and graffiti.
  3. Violate no applicable law in your use of this system.

n

How many of the SST cardinal rules have you broken?
View Results

Note: The TLR code base changes the ship limit to be only 4 ships!

New Poll!

After the overwhelming positive vote in the last poll, I’ve finally decided on what the next poll should be!


What's your preferred way to connect to TLR/TLF/ELF?
View Results

That’s right, it’s time to answer that age old question, which method do people use to play?

  • Telnet – The original interface… brings back memories of the good old BBS days
  • Web – The easiest way to play… minimal typing skills required πŸ™‚
  • Client – Favoured by the DIY programmers… introduced by Ray in May 2001

Now it’s time for a quick response to THE anonymous voter in the last poll… if you don’t like the site, go elsewhere… ballot stuffing in a web poll is really not something to be proud of!

Enjoy!
KRY

TLF Newsflash! Team KRY devastated!

It started off like any other day… kids making way too much noise, and the wife telling me to get out of bed and play with the kids.

Imagine my surprise when I found out half of my ships had been destroyed overnight! With KC taking the credit for it too?

Message: 11555  Sat Mar 10 21:04:06 2007  (Public)
To:      ALL                     
From:    JDOG427                 
Subject: bad bad boy                                                     

Evil KRY,
 
I don't know how long everyone else was planning to sit there and watch 
your dishonest ways but today was my limit. The way you trash these startup 
players and teams (verbally and with your large military force) is pathetic. 
If you run every small person and team out of the game then its going 
to be the same old stale game thats been going on for the last 3 years. 
You have to let them grow. Seeing you guys hunt down and kill poor Nimrod 
yet again today was the last straw. Come on, does the poor guy even have 
25k figs compared to your millions that I found in your bunkers. Have 
you ever noticed their team score is 1/3rd yours and you have half as 
many ships? 
        
I don't think I need to even go into the topic of you and the ship stealing. 
Thats affected at least one member of this team quite directly. 
Well anyway I've sent a few of your ships to the hospital to have a time 
out and think about their bad behavior. And if we're lucky you'll spend 
your future farm income on rebuilding your millions of figs or picking 
on my team (a team that is at least remotely built up compared to you!) 
and then you can leave these startups alone for a while. That or you'll 
wuss out again and get your buddies in to do all your dirty work for you 
once again. Either way it should add a little excitement to this game.

Once again I’m being accused of being in the wrong, and like every other time I’m guilty until proven innocent! However that’s part of the problem, I can’t prove my innocence because there’s actually no evidence that I’m guilty, it’s all just heresay and rumours.

I’m surprised at who initiated the attack, despite his stolen ships being used against my team in the past, KC has succumbed to the rumour that I’m the infamous ship stealer. Honestly, I’m barely able to run the 16 ships I have on team KRY, and now that the IP limit has been reapplied to TLF, the two scout ships I had access to aren’t readily available anymore.

As for the Nimrod attack… I guess the fact that Bestark has been reading this blog and deciding to return to TLF is actually my fault! But I had nothing to do with his recent attacks on MSS ships, AFAIK Bestark is taking back his farmlands which MSS had been raiding.

Now for the interesting bit, I have on many occasions reaffirmed with the captain of MSS that there was to be a non-aggression pact between our teams… I’ve also been approached quite a few times to disband KRY and join MSS. But why would I join a team that so obviously has members who don’t respect the orders of their captain?

I have to take some of the responsibility for the devastation of my ships… I had 7 of them parked next to each other in bunkers!!! I had noticed that JUDICATOR had located the bunkers, but I arrogantly thought I had another day or two to relocate them (again).

One final thing… when I first started playing SST, there was this great community of people who helped shape the universe that we all shared. One of the most important commodities back then was respect, you had to earn it by interacting with other players and teams! These days all it takes is an unfounded rumour, and suddenly a team that has done nothing but trade peacefully becomes the target of everyone’s prejudice. If I was the #1 ranked team I could understand the unwanted attention, but the best I ever got to was #5.

That’s all for now, I have a team to rebuild… the next page is the event log of the attacks on my bunkers (for those of you who are interested).

SpaceTyrant.com now online

It’s finally happened! Ray has been talking about setting up the spacetyrant.com domain for some time. When the project was started, he registered the domain name. The site has been up for a few days now, and contains a few articles describing the game. The actual game is still being served on port 9999 at ioresort.com Anyone interested in playing the game or programming the game should check it out!

TLF-20070301 Rankings

There’s been a lot of activity in the endless game (TLF) over the last couple of months, and I felt it was time to start capturing the TLF rankings as well.

Part of my reasons for doing this is a bit self serving… I’m quite pleased with the progress of my ships.

I was a newbie when my first ship (MAGELITE) entered the TLF universe. Several months later I got 3 of the KR***Y ships promoted, and once I got the hang of running 4 ships, I began working on getting the next 3 KR***Y ships through the entry games.

I’ve survived being on DBD’s ‘hated list’, and eventually became a member of the ANS/MPE/DBD alliance. That was when control of the ROBOTTT ships was handed to me. (ROBOTTT10 was also given to me, but the ship limiter prevented me from utilising it… DBD borrowed this ship during his fall from grace)

So as I stated before, my progress through the ranks has been very satisfying πŸ™‚

KRY

______Player_Name_______ ____Title+Level____Team  Rank Ship __Score__ _Region_ 
BLAH                     What - Me Worry?   [TCW]   1* HFr 1420280064  480001s 
JUME                     Who May?           [TCW]   2* HFr 1393986042       1s 
LIQUOR                   Dont even know her![TCW]   3* HFr 1379619756  400001s 
DRAGELET                 Fake Retired Too   [TCW]   4* HFr 1377145019  960001s 
KRAZY                    +Overlord+         [KRY]   5* HFr 1375054196 1000001s 
MAGELITE                 I'm not a torch!   [KRY]   6* HFr 1372281114 1000001s 
KREAKY                   +Overlord+         [KRY]   7* HFr 1369819437 1000001s 
TAR                      Nicotine           [TCW]   8* HFr 1358821078  480001s 
KRANKY                   +Overlord+         [KRY]   9* HFr 1349747452 1000001s 
KRISPY                   +Overlord+         [KRY]  10* HFr 1336359871 1000001s 

______________Team_Name________________  Abbrev.  Rank   Score (1000s) 
The Commonwealth                          [TCW]      1      43939979 
Blood Money                               [B.M]      2      41055945 
The Void's Devourers                      [TVD]      3      35124425 
The Varangian Guard                       [TVG]      4      27131934 
Freedom                                   [KRY]      5      21733059 

TLR-20070226-6W

Better late than never… I missed the reset, so had to wait until the next round started before I could get the rankings.

What a quiet round!
Shadows took out the number one position, and his team was also the highest ranked (pretty easy if there’s no other teams!)

______Player_Name_______ ____Title+Level____Gang  Rank Pack __Score__ _Region_ 
SHADOWS                  Commander+9        [SOP]   1  HDe   46808787  176001s 
MIR                      Lieutenant+4       [SOP]   2  HFr   44163483   32001s 
QUIETLY                  +Czar+             [---]   3  JGa   32291472       Io 
AYRADYSS                 +Czar+             [---]   4  HLi   26897789       1s 
PANZERIV                  (in hospital)     [---]   5  SLi   17213958  192001s 
GESTALT                  +Czar+             [---]   6  Lin   14279790  304001s 
WHITEFIRE                +Czar+             [---]   7  CPr   13269671       Io 
GOLDENTIDE               +Czar+             [---]   8  SLi   12773168   64001s 
KRAZY                    +Czar+             [---]   9  HFr    9266573   48001s 
RAVEN                    +Overlord+         [---]  10  Tra    8699059  224001s

And here’s the Team rankings from this round

______________Gang_Name________________  Abbrev.  Rank   Score (1000s) 
Shadows of the Past                       [SOP]      1         90971

For the full listings click here

Tech problems!

This is starting to look bad for me… maybe Dragelet, Sivart & friends are correct about my technical skills πŸ™

Basically, I managed to kill the LVM partition of my linux server.Β  I noticed one of the TLR tarballs had a corrupt inode, so I attempted to do a FSCK of the file system.

Big mistake!Β  The FSCK killed the ext3 journal, and blatted the root inode… everything now existed in the lost+found directory.

Not a problem I thought, I have a backup… of the database from 4 weeks ago… no file backup of the website though.Β  πŸ™

Β Time for a bit of lateral thinking… the data I need is still on the LVM, it’s just been orphaned… so all I need to do is copy the important file structures off onto a new system.

Bingo, rename the existing LVM partition (so I don’t accidently blat it!) and create a new XEN linux server.Β  Mount the LVM partition within the XEN host, and selectively copy what I need over.

The tricky parts were:- 1) Remembering what packages I needed & 2) Importing the raw MySQL database files (otherwise 4 weeks of content was gone!)

Less than three hours later, this site is back up and running!

Tomorrow I’m gonna start looking into setting up a scheduled remote backup πŸ˜‰

Maybe I should also chase up another HDD and set-up a RAID1 mirror… so many possibilities!

P.S.Β  The recent update to WordPress 2.1.1 appears to have eliminated all the Apache seg faults, another week of testing to confirm it’s gone, and I may be able to go back to my preferred theme!

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