Tradewars.org Stories – Murphy’s Law
Introduction:

This story basically proves the point that no matter how crafty you are, Murphy’s law can STILL screw you over.

BackGround:
This was the last game I played with Snake, and consiquently, the last BBS TW game I played. This was between two corps, Snake and I as #1, and Road Runner, Cyan Dragon, Hulk, and someone else (Xerces I think) as #2. We had beaten this corp before, even though they had twice the manpower.

The Story:
Fairly normal settings. We basically went around looking for a good base at first. Lo and Behold, A six sector dead end was found! (Back in the day, these were rare, and bubbles wern’t widely used.) At the end our last game, Snake figured out how to colonize Volcanic classes without losing a large chunk of the populaton in the process. Armed with this ability, there would now be none that would stand before us! Or so we thought.

We quickly started two volcanics at the end of the dead-end. Then, I got the great Idea of filling the tunnel up with Nav-haz so that anyone attempting to get through would have to pay dearly for it. So 5 sectors were filled with 100% navhaz, 250 mines, and a few fighters to keep those pesky E-probes out. Every once in a while, Hulk would start heading down the tunnel, but turned back half-way through. Most Likely because he ran out of shields and fighters.

So how was Corp #2 doing? While I was out making money, Snake was colonizing and scouting for their bases. Time and Time again, we caught them as they were getting their planets set up. Usually, just as they had finished their Level 1’s, or right before the Level 2’s finished, setting them back the few days that we needed.

Finally, we had gotten somewhere! We had three planets going strong in our tunnel. 1 M class at level 2, and 2 volcanics at level 4 and 3. Unfortunatelly, Murphy’s Law struck the first blow to us. I stayed on one of the planets overnight with one of Road Runner’s (Roady for short) limpets on me! DOH!

Roady swept through our tunnel to get a look at our planets, (The Official quote from Roady was, “Nav-haz, mines, and more damn Nav-haz!” 🙂 but he didn’t make an attack off hand. Checking the V screen, we concluded that between three planets, they could easily take one. We then consolidated into the M class and the Level 4 Volcanic and got rid of the third planet. We moved them to a quick hide-away, a small 2 sector tunnel.

Murphy’s Law then again decided to hit for a double header! Snake blind transwarped accidentaly and lost about 40k fighters! With this loss, we knew we couldn’t hold even 1 planets against corp 2. We consolidated more, and destroyed the M class. To top it off, Snake had done some expeimenting with planetary trading. The problem was that I had only started to come up with the idea of upgrading ports. As a result, there was almost no fuel ore on the planet. Roady found our now level 5 but-no-fuel-ore planet, and promptly invaded. SOMEHOW, Snake convinced Roady to destroy the planet instead of taking it. How he did It, I have no idea…

But the battle was not yet over for our heros. Taking a well known strategy from WarCraft 2, we decided to start building planets again in our OLD 6 sector tunnel! Instead of re-building the nav-haz in the tunnel, we decided to leave it as it was so that they wouldn’t think we were still there. It worked for a while, Hulk came in a few times only to leave half way through the tunnel. But Roady eventually came through the entire tunnel and blew up our planets. Thus, our heros were finally defeated, and the Snake Saga came to a close.

Overall, this was the most enjoyable game I ever played, and stands out the most in my mind. The point of this story is that Murphy’s Law always finds a way to screw everyone over sooner or later. 🙂