If ships do in fact destroy eachother extremely quickly then that does make a big difference. We did eventually ram it, but thats hardly viable if they are moving very quickly, which they were doing most of the time. Last I heard the main difference between old ships and new was maximum volume and aesthetics, I had not been aware that ships would die in a few shots. I'm actually not sure how on earth thats supposed to be workable but I mean meh, valid point if true. It still does nothing to address equipment theft, which more or less decided a lot of conflicts in our favor since many of us only knew how to steal shit. All weapons having equal range doesn't say anything about the validity of jousting, so its not obvious why you brought that point up.
Syndicate was also one of the only groups in the game that actually knew combat in and out at the time. Its quite plausible that you fought syndicate and won at one point, that was far from impossible. Most of the people we fought were severely inept, had no idea how to make difficult-to-capture cities or dangerous ships, and as a result we steadily got more bored with the game and became much less proficient at it. I'd say more than half of our existence in the game was in that inept, half-bored state. Most of us hung around as long as we did in hopes the game would one day change.
In general the long engagement I mentioned proceeded as it did because they were fairly effectively showing up and retaking cities as they were being captured, or in some cases driving off the attacking ships and preventing the attacking players from respawning reliably in order to wear down the cities. Bypassing a warp 9 capable ship that had access to mail reports telling of cities under attack isn't valid unless said ship bypasses you. Part of the reason things took as long as they did was because zeros was trying to avoid them and take cities and was not being allowed to do so.
Yes, it would have been possible to shit out huge numbers of cities and completely invalidate any kind of combat. Yes we could have dropped powered down respawn pods and harassed them indefinitely (this was found to be distateful and was discontinued shortly after its discovery). In fact, we or in many cases the opposition could have fucked off into space and it would have been functionally impossible to find them or us. These are extremely cheesy strategies and huge flaws in the games conflict system as they more or less render the supposed combat entirely moot. In general we avoided that and wanted the game to actually have some interesting action in it.
Syndicate was also one of the only groups in the game that actually knew combat in and out at the time. Its quite plausible that you fought syndicate and won at one point, that was far from impossible. Most of the people we fought were severely inept, had no idea how to make difficult-to-capture cities or dangerous ships, and as a result we steadily got more bored with the game and became much less proficient at it. I'd say more than half of our existence in the game was in that inept, half-bored state. Most of us hung around as long as we did in hopes the game would one day change.
In general the long engagement I mentioned proceeded as it did because they were fairly effectively showing up and retaking cities as they were being captured, or in some cases driving off the attacking ships and preventing the attacking players from respawning reliably in order to wear down the cities. Bypassing a warp 9 capable ship that had access to mail reports telling of cities under attack isn't valid unless said ship bypasses you. Part of the reason things took as long as they did was because zeros was trying to avoid them and take cities and was not being allowed to do so.
Yes, it would have been possible to shit out huge numbers of cities and completely invalidate any kind of combat. Yes we could have dropped powered down respawn pods and harassed them indefinitely (this was found to be distateful and was discontinued shortly after its discovery). In fact, we or in many cases the opposition could have fucked off into space and it would have been functionally impossible to find them or us. These are extremely cheesy strategies and huge flaws in the games conflict system as they more or less render the supposed combat entirely moot. In general we avoided that and wanted the game to actually have some interesting action in it.