The Tale of 2000

planets*

* Start Dramatic Music

Intro:

(Make sure to read the Snake Saga Introduction on the stories page first.)

This was probably the first full game Snake and I played together as teammates. It took place with Wide Beta 2 I believe, (Before everyone found out about the bug) and took place on our local TW BBS, Stardock.

While we had our fights with other people, the main player we were woried about this entire game was Hemlock, THE best TW player in our area. Not even Me and Snake combined could probably beat him. 🙂

The Players:

Snake and I. (Corped) Octavian (The Sysop) and Xerces, and Hemlock.

End Intro:

As the game started off, Our Corp got into our ISSs by day two. Knowing that Hemlock would probably be searching for us once we no longer had Fedspace protection, We begain looking for a nice place to set up a planet.

Snake quickly found one, there was a 4-way dead-end braching off from sector 6 in fedspace. We thought it was great, we could get our colony started faster since we didn’t need to spend as money on fuel ore to start off. (This was a 400 turn game, mind you.)

However, we knew that it would probably be only a mater of time until someone would find it. We needed to keep it defended until we got a level 4. Unfortunatelly, Octavian and Xerces found out our little hiding place. They busted through our defences and took the planet one day before the level 2 went on-line.

DOH!

We need to take the planet back! We gathered our resources for a few days, and lead the attack on the planets. They had a level 3 now, but photons quickly took care of it. I went back to sector 1 to buy more fighters, but when I sent in the Transwarp command, I was one sector off of where I was planning to go and lost my ship!

DOH!!!

I lost our entire attack force, about 15k fighters. Snake was pretty pissed. 🙂Now that we had no fighters, it looked like Octavian and Xerces would be able to hold the planet until they got a level 4. Hemlock was no where to be seen, probably cultavating his own planets and letting us duke it out.

But Wait! I had a GREAT idea…. since v2 of Tradewars allowed colliding planets, why not just use THEM to destroy the planet? Snake loved the idea. Since no one in our area had ever attemped this stunt before, we didn’t know how it worked, nor did we have time to experiment since their Level 4 would go online the next day.

This is where the fun begins. Since we didn’t know how the CP worked, we just bombared the sector with genesis torpedos. We must have had at LEAST 80-90 planets in that sector when we were done! The Display screen listing the planets practically took 5 minutes to scroll down. 🙂

We logged on the next day, and our evil plan indeed worked! The planet was destroyed with Xerces on it! Victory was ours! Or was it?

Here’s the sticky part, Octavian was the sysop, and used the goddly powers of TEDIT to remake his planet, (And Xerces) claiming that it was an illegal tactic. I knew we should have never played with a sysop!

Needless to say, this killed the current game. Me and Snake no longer had an urge to play until the game reset, and Madman and his corp agreed to not play until the next game since they didn’t like Octavian’s Decision either.

After this Incident, Octavian disapeared. His mailbox eventually became full, and he never even logged on. People still kept calling the board about 1 month after the game officially “died” in hopes that Octavian would at least reset the game. But alas, Octavian never again logged on, and the board quietly died one day.

Notes:

While it may seem a bit harsh against Octavian, I have a lot of credit and Honor for him. He set up THE PLACE for Tradewars veterans to play, maintained it through several games, and this story is probably the only time he cheated. What most likely happened is that Octavian felt a lot of regret about the planet, and no longer had an urge to run his board. It’s really a shame that Stardock went down. Many of us would have still played there, even after this incident. 🙁 In case your reading this Octavian, Both me and Snake forgave you a long time ago. 🙂 Thanks for at least giving us TW players some memories and great times.

If you like this story, Mail me and tell me what you think. I’ll write more stories if people give me some feedback.