Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

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1706 days, 7 hours, 52 minutes ago

talespin

Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for nearly 18 years. It's been mostly with 1-3 players, so I'm not overly experienced with the 11 player games - What do you mean I can't build a hundred battlestars??:D I'm really glad I found planets.nu! Thank you for keeping it alive!

1706 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes ago

joseph bradshaw

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Yeah, I remember a game back in the 90's where I had at least 40 Darkwings and we never saw the ship limit.

1705 days, 7 hours, 27 minutes ago

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

planets.nu are a lot more mineral rich and native rich, than what I played years and years ago.

1705 days, 7 hours, 17 minutes ago

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

I did a fair amount of hosting back in the 90's and while I don't remember if there were more or less natives back then, I can tell you that .nu has alot fewer minerals than what I was used to seeing back then. (I believe .nu just lowered the default mineral content at some point from what it had been)

1705 days, 5 hours, 29 minutes ago

joseph bradshaw

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

I'm seeing less minerals but more natives, I seem to remember more Ghip natives being more common but I dunno. I do know there used to be one map we played on, echo cluster, then we had a map program that made a ton of different maps. Like spiral arms, ball maps, and my favorite one that had more planets as you go closer to the center, core map or something. There was a neutral zone map too for team games that had a big rip in the middle.

Also starbase+ was pretty common. And stargates/portal. Race+ and Nemeis/Gryphon were less common but we still dinked around with them. VPA and The Q AI was also in heavy rotation.

I think we might have used the PList as well, the slightly modified ship list to make all the ships worthy of being built.

Lots of chaos, each game ended up being so different. I think the only thing I miss though was all the crazy maps, and maybe the stargates.

Memories. :-)

1705 days, 5 hours, 7 minutes ago

proto

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Oh yes the old times... I too remember less natives, don't know about the minerals. Map setup was a problem, lots of different map creation programs, lots of different map types, but the biggest problem always was the balance of starting positions - or the absence of it. Utility progs as Crystal Ball and VPUtil were needed to do your turn, because the standard interface was horrible. Great job well done here on planets.nu!

I recall I didn't like too many addons, I preferred no Race+ and no Starbase+, but was a minority ;). I do miss the alternative shiplist of PHost, called PList. More mineral usage, more variety, more ships that actually made sense to build. Not like in standard a very long list of ship types with one low level ship type to build, one tech 10 ship if you have enough minerals, and ignore the rest. Would be nice to have that list back.

1705 days, 3 hours, 31 minutes ago

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

If you are handing me this on a plate: you want PList and PHost? It's not that planets.nu is the only choice to play, you can have those options at planetscentral.com and circus-maximus.com :-)

1704 days, 23 hours, 2 minutes ago

talespin

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Did you all ever play on a really slow computer, when you could watch the computer text scroll up and see which race the computer was working on and running the turn application could take 5-10 minutes? Or maybe it was just us that played on really crappy computers in DOS?

1704 days, 22 hours, 52 minutes ago

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

It was those 300 baud modems that took their sweet time.

1704 days, 22 hours, 21 minutes ago

joseph bradshaw

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Yeah I did, I got to watch the computer think. I ran some AI like APC and THE Q too, those took time. Lol. Sometimes lots and lots of time.

1704 days, 12 hours, 13 minutes ago

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

When we played at school, we got a problem when host.exe took longer and longer as the game progressed, we only had a 45-minute break, and by turn 50, host.exe took over 40 minutes. This lead to house rules "please only use Sensor Sweep on ships where you really need to".

The trick finally was to enable a disk caching program, which cut down the times back to five minutes. PHost also boasted with small execution times, and the source code still contains comments like "this function takes 1.2 seconds on a 486 without FPU".

1704 days, 0 hours, 37 minutes ago

lord krell

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

LOL. When I ran a BBS back in the very late 80's, VGAP was the popular space, turn-based game to play. I would host as many as 5 games at a time (all my 80286 and 1200 baud modem would handle). It would take long processing cycles when those games went above 30 turns or so. Always had at least 7 players in each game. Ahh the good old days. sigh.

1704 days, 0 hours, 18 minutes ago

rkious

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Vga Planets was released in 92 ...right? I started in the Early mid 90,s. (93 or 94).

1703 days, 23 hours, 16 minutes ago

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

Can't resist... have to... nope, here goes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

1703 days, 21 hours, 19 minutes ago

pudgyhobbit

RE: Just realized today that I've been playing VGA Planets for...

I normally just read posted discussions but wanted to just say , I believe i remember having to type in Windows to get to a colored rectangular Icon that said "Planets" to unzip, unpack, do turn, make turn and rezip the files. Maybe there was an easier way but that's how i remember. Although the mind isn't what it use to be. Still have the discs, Planets mouse pad ,and (i think) a fc code cheat sheet which all came in a manila envelope. Yes, decades ago ........