jfoobar

A co-worker just started his own Trade Wars server and asked me to play with his group of friends. At first I was resistant as I knew how much that game hurt my grades in college, but I finally relented. Man is it still fun and addictive, and they have made some noteworthy changes since I played back in the BBS-only days. The strategy is more complex to a degree but, OTOH, it is still very very similar to the earlier versions I played in 92-93.

Doing some googlin' and going to sites like www.tw-cabal.com, it looks like there is still a pretty dedicated subculture of folks playing it out there. Of course now it is over telnet and in much larger universes (5000-20000 sectors instead of just 1000 and with a lot more turns) and people play simultaneously instead of waiting for the busy signals to relent on the ol' local BBS. There are also very nice helper front ends to automate trading and stealing and other previously monotonous functions.

CharlesC

I used to play on a few BBS when I was in high school. Very cool game. I actually liked the limited number of moves and the small universe. It was nice to have an end in site to the game and the small number of players made it more personal.

ZakVTA

Man I remember playing that back in the BBS days. That along with MajorMUD and Legend of the Red Dragon. Good times.

jfoobar

The server I am playing on is offering the 1000 sector/250 turn classic as well as 5K, 10K and 20K games. It is also not advertised on the major TW forums (yet, anyway) so it is still quiet in there. Some of these other servers and the games get swamped with reallllly good players forming corporations and draining every port in sight within 24 hours of the game being re-generated.

When you played, did some ships take more turns per sector jump than others? I don't recall that being the case back in 93-94. I think that is one of the things that changed since the early BBS versions. Everything was 1 to 1. Now many of the common ship types need 4 turns per sector move or even more. Some are just 2-3.

CharlesC

Yeah I'm pretty sure ships took different amounts of turns. I think I remember only being able to move like 20 spaces in an Imperial Cruiser.

sfsdfd

Anyone play a graphical arena-combat-style game called The Pit? That game kicked ass. The problem was that everyone who played on my BBS played it every day, almost without fail. So people got ranked according to when they started, and everyone marched in lockstep fashion up the ranks. Very rarely did any two players swap rankings.

Funny story about this: Since I was in the middle of the pack, every day I would log in and find out that my character was defeated (yesterday) by the guy one place above me. And I would then stomp on the guy one slot below me, who would get the "Killed by sfsdfd" message when he next logged in. By amazing coincidence, that guy turned out to be my college roommate. And we only realized this after we'd shared a place for two years.

- David Stein

jfoobar

Yup, although on the BBSes that had it in my area, very few people played it so we didn't have the problem you had. I usually just played on it on rare occasions. On the Auburn-area BBSes it was all about the Trade Wars.

Jeremy517

My favorite was always Barren Realms Elite. I loved timing my investments so that every turn, I got the maximum amount of money that you could have at one time. Nothing ilke trying to figure out how to spend two billion 10 (or 15) times per day.

xmiyux

I loved Trade Wars on the BBS's in the 80's.

I also adored a MUD called Ground Zero that i played for awhile in probably 95 or 96. It was a deathmatch mud with guns, mobs, lots of rapid typing, and a button your could depress to kill everyone in the game. You took one death, but gained however many players there were in kills.

jfoobar

I remember the 24 hour computer labs on campus when I was in college back in 91-94. Presumably the labs were open all night for students working on papers, etc. Late at night they were mostly filled with students either on IRC or playing MUDS from their university Solaris shell accounts. You could dial in from home but many came to the labs instead because the speed was so much better.

The only thing more pathetic than the IRC-junkies were the MUDers. The IRC-junkies would at least go home and bathe now and again. Neither group, however, was doing much for their academic standing.

sfsdfd

Heh. That reminds me of something...

January, 1994 - bad snow storm - Ohio State actually canceled classes. We were sitting around in our dorm at 11pm trying to figure out what to do, since we had no classes the next day. I mentioned that Doom (our new fascination) had some kind of multiplayer-via-network option, but our dormitory didn't have a LAN. Someone else mentioned that the computer lab was still open, and networked.

So three of my friends and I tromped off through the snow, in subzero temperatures, toting along some floppy disks containing Doom and an IPX packet driver. Grabbed four side-by-side machines, installed Doom on all four, started playing.

And it turned out to be holy shit cool. We were there for like five hours, making all kinds of noise, just playing deathmatch. Got lots of dirty looks for the two losers stuck in the lab doing some kind of systems programming homework.

- David Stein

xmiyux

Well all my friends bathed Sadly enough every single one of us (4 guys living in a dorm suite) got jobs as a computer lab supervisor in a different computer lab. That way we could mud at work and have a key to get in whenever we wanted on the weekends.

We were a different breed of mudders though in that we all bathed and slept some. But that is because we were in the honors dorm.... the regular dorms had the scary mudders.... or mushers, they were even worse.

jfoobar

I got an email from a lurker wondering where I play. Thought I'd post it here in case anyone else was interested. There are still lots of active TW servers out there operating over telnet. Some are very busy, some hardly at all.

A friend of mine now has one running at telnet://xabean.net It hasn't been advertised anywhere yet so the games are all very slow right now. Additionally, the games are stock (not heavily modded rules/settings-wise) so it is a very good place to re-learn the game without getting blown up alot, if at all.

The eval version of a Tradewars helper app called SWATH can be downloaded from http://www.swath.net, which automates trading and other keyboard intensive tasks. It is actually very nice.