Sunday, November 9th at 9am Pacific, Alternate Dimensions opens for rare Trade Wars experience. For one week, AD will be configured with extremely high defensive odds, and settings geared to making exploration diificult. In that week, the objective will be to raise as many level 4 planets as you can. When that week is over, the game will be broken into two separate games, each with new ships, planets and settings. In one game, you'll want to be prepared for a conservative war waged with Imperial Starships, the other, all-out terror with extremely dangerous ships and lots of unexpected surprises. The core game will start with 1200 turns, and then 600 each when the games split. Also.. Wednesday, November 12th, "Big Timers" opens with 3000 turns. People have been clamoring for some high turns, well, here you go. Settings to be made public when the game opens. Be prepared.

I've added a new script to the CK Combat Pack, and updated a few others. CK 2 Ship Grid uses a pair of ships to lay figs around the universe. This has proven to be very useful in games where your opponents like to use CK Superphoton, or another Pwarp/Adjacent Photon script. For full details, please login to The Lost Traders Tavern - [https://tavern.homeip.net](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://tavern.homeip.net) Cherokee

the reverend has released a new version of his popular zoc script package. The Playa reports, "an downdated version uh rev-helpuh' gots been released! Right on! de _bot be enhanced tremendously and now includes po't negotsiashun and some pledo'a uh oda' abilities. de _bot gots'ta be so's huge dat zoc wouldn't run it no mo' so's i had t'split it down into some couple scripts. ya' should not notice some difference in actual use dough. Lop some boogie." [Read it in english here](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://thereverend.coastgames.com/tradewars/).

I have officially changed the name of the website to "The Stardock". "The Home Sector" is no more. It's kind of sad, as The Home Sector had a great heritage. But like all new and improved models, The Stardock will continue the tradition, if not the name. R.I.P. Home Sector!

We found out that Prestone isn't a member of the Rainbow Coalition... (post deleted at twgs.org, too late!) Timberwolf can actually have nothing to say (this may not last long!)... [https://www.twgazette.com/](/category/TW_Gazette) HHT Increased the size of the HHT to 10k sectors... [https://www.coastgames.com/hht2003/](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://www.coastgames.com/hht2003/) Cherokee is taking a break... [https://www.twgs.org/?program=messages&command=read&message=20781](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://www.twgs.org/?program=messages&command=read&message=20781)

Let me introduce myself to all of you new to me, Eleq "Hall of Fame" Trizi'T. I'm a nice guy. You will love me. I've found some links on the web that will give you some interesting, if not entertaining, reading. [Mana Knight Interviews Eleq](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://www.tradewars.org/articles/eleq.html) [Quotes Collected by Mana Knight](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://www.tradewars.org/quotes.shtml) [When Eleq Quit](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://tradewars.fament.com/Cruncher/Eleqbye.htm) Pray for me.

This isn't dupe monitoring, it's monitoring of the server itself. I am now regularly checking for connection availability, telnet connectivity, free disk space, CPU usage and TWGS threads. If any one of these falls below threshold, I'll get a page about it. Hopefully, this will help me avoid lag and downtime in the future. That IS the goal.

Not a review by Rawhead Rex, but a review of [the movie](https://web.archive.org/web/20030000000000*/https://x-entertainment.com/articles/0802/) he named himself after. (for those that don't remember or know Rawhead Rex, just know he could kick yer ass)

<img src="https://www.thestardock.com/imgs/phade.gif"> Testing is over! General impressions I get is the server is now fast and stable. On Monday, I'll reopen the TWGS with two fresh games. The first, Phade, will be one bad mama jama based on Massive, a huge game with a ton of ships. The second game, Octane, will be a very high turn cash fest, designed to give everyone a fighting chance and be resistant to a quick win. Advertisement banners will start with more details in a few hours. By Friday, I'll open even more games with some fresh concepts. I'll do my damnest to break the mold. Seems to me like there is a whole lot of boredom going on out there, and I don't like it. Some features of the TWGS that will be available immediately are... Live Game Logs - This was a feature of the previous server and will be a feature of this one. Live Backups - I'll be running backups every 15 minutes of the games, while they are active. This might be not be bulletproof, but it'll be decent. I have a machine and hard drive dedicated to this task seperate from the TWGS itself. Live Dupe Checking - Another function my dedicated backup machine will do is check for dupes on the fly. You dupe, I will know within minutes. Simple as that. Again, not foolproof, but there are lots of fools who WILL get caught. Dupe checking will be replaced in month or so with forced game registration via the website, but for now I don't think that added hassle would be healthy for the player counts. Oh yeah, if you're currently playing Game W, it will continue. BTW, Game W has ZERO RULES, so dupe away.

To hell with it, it was adding too much overhead. I hope to have at least gained 200ms over the horrid 500ms in-game ping times I had.