PlanetsCentral

Hi,

the Tequila War / Cactus scoring system has been proposed a few times already. As promised, I built an adapted version while waiting for Santa Claus DHL to deliver presents, and my oven to spit out cookies.

Initial player documentation

(although entirely new code, the behaviour is 99% the same as the original, with some added logic to fit into the PlanetsCentral host.)

Now, there are some points to debate and I'd like your input.

Configuration: the most prominent configuration questions are KeepCactus=Yes or No, RebuildCactus=Yes or No? Is there a proven good configuration? Should the voting feature actually be used to end games, or do we keep playing with PlanetsCentral's standard settings?

Scanning: By default, you do not know whether a foreign planet has a cactus. If you want to play aggressively, wouldn't it make sense to target planets the enemy considers important? A possible rule could be:

• Freighters can scan for enemy cactuses using the Sensor Sweep mission. It needs to be a freighter, and it cannot be cloaked at the same time, because the smell of tequila does not penetrate shields.
• Open questions would be the range of the scanner, and whether it scans everything or only with a given probability (probability = score of target, so low at start of game, high at end?)

Friendly Codes: Would it make sense to have a friendly code to build a cactus? Right now, this version uses a command for PHost's command processor ("cactus: build XXX"), the original sort-of abused command messages to achieve a similar effect.

--Stefan