PBeM, illegal orders

What do you do when someone issues illegal orders in a PBeM? I'm thinking
about setting stuff up to chop the orders to what the ship is capable of and
going on, sound reasonable?

Admiral: 3 points to Port Aide: But Admiral Admiral: Give the order!

all the small ships go 3 points to port, leaving the thrust 4 BDN to soak up
12 SMs.

> What do you do when someone issues illegal orders in a PBeM?

This is a reasonable approach. The course gets truncated first to a legitimate
value. If the order is still illegal, the thrust gets trimmed to a legal value
also.

Therefore a P3+3 order for a T4 ship would become:  P2+2

> On Mon, 10 Apr 2000 15:48:53 -0400 (EDT), Roger Books writes:

the PBeM game software I used to work on had an order checker, so it wouln't
let you submit illegal moves. You'd get a response that told you if your moves
were o.k., and if they weren't, what was wrong. It both caught syntax errors
as well as things that were simply illegal.

> What do you do when someone issues illegal orders in a PBeM?

Yes.

> Roger Books wrote:

In PBeM games I've run I don't have fancy-dancy software to
plot everything out and up and cross-check for illegal moves,
so I did all that by hand. If someone issued an illegal move and they were
relatively new to PBeMing, I gave them a veiled questioning if they really
wanted to do that or not. If they were more experienced, then generally their
crew attempted to pull off what was asked by the Captain, but given
limitations on ship designs and systems, the desired result didn't always
occur.

Which, in your case above, would have left the BDN to suck up
the salvos.  ;-)

Mk

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000 15:48:53 -0400 (EDT), Roger Books
<books@mail.state.fl.us> wrote:

> What do you do when someone issues illegal orders in a PBeM?

When I ran a PBEM game 2.5 years ago (or was it 3.5? Geez!) I allowed the
admiral to give default orders that took over if no orders, or illegal orders,
were given. This caused some problems as some players felt left out of the
game when the admiral submitted the group's orders on his own.

You can handle it in two ways: 1) do the illegal orders as much as possible;
2) ignore the illegal orders and do the default (usually straight ahead, no
change in speed).

Either way will work, and comes with it's own set of
advantages/disadvantages,
but your method is probably the most reasonable. The problem will be if a
thrust change is illegal along with an illegal turn. What do you do? Give the
most thrust first, then turn, or turn first then change velocity due to
thrust? Be consistent and post how you will do it ahead of time, and you
should be fine.

> On 11-Apr-00 at 00:19, Allan Goodall (agoodall@interlog.com) wrote:

Because of the way my perl module works, it deals with course and acceleration
changes in the order given (to work with vector). So
if you say +3P3 with a thrust 4 ship that will give you +3 velocity
and do a P1, whereas if you do a P3+3 you will do P2+2.  I'm using
the "pool" idea that I hear about in FB2.