This is a companion topic to the 110 commandments.
Please add your crafty tricks of pushing the envelope on the EVO or EV engine. Don't worry that someone else may use your idea (in fact, they should): people always use game ideas in very different ways, so the result will be more and better plugs for all. I think most of my tricks are fairly well known, but here they are for the record.
Trick 1) Play with the look vs type of resources. For instance, my Black Hole was a 'ship' that looked like a stellar object, my wrecked alien vessel was a spob that looked like a ship. You can have outfits that look like characters (especially in the EVO 1.0.2) and missions that look like messages.
Trick 2) Use the extra STR resources to give extra information ย stellar beacons are great for this, as is changing the legal status and the combat ratings.
Trick 3) Use Visbits to create time delay missions that won't resolve until another mission has been completed ย but give your players some warning of this.
Trick 4) Planets with two ports can be created by putting to planets on top of each other. Ok, so everyone knows to do this now, but it still challenges a lot of players.
Trick 4) Use invisible beam weapons a lot. I love invisible beam weapons. There's nothing like them for instilling fear into the hearts of even the most sturdy players.
Trick 5) Use the aspects which really, really annoy you in the standard game to your advantage. One thing that used to annoy me most about EV was having to board a Confed ship, but by the time I'd got near it, it was gone. Another thing I hated was the 'wall' at the edge of the systems. As a deliberate ploy, though, this can lead to hours of fun.
Trick 6) Make ships that look like weapons and weapons that look like ships. Just more on trick 1 really, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Trick 7) One way hyper-links. I love one way hyper-links. You could even have a maze of systems piled on top of each other where you kept on going deeper into 'mirror' worlds (like parallel universes) which seemed to be on the same place on the map, but were totally different, and from which there was no escape without going through the entire sequence. Now that's an idea for a plug.
Trick 
Make some outfits that don't do what they claim to do, or which damage the player (like real life really) ย how about a 'shield core blown' outfit given at the beginning of a mission which can only be fixed by purchasing the 'shield repairs' outfit which becomes available at the end of the mission.
Trick 9) Find a use for the tribbles flag.
Trick 10) Have ships which launch more of themselves. I love that trick, though I've never used it myself.
Trick 11) Make the player do different things from must trading to raise cash. Ships that start disabled (now that they work in EVO 1.0.2) are great. Or what about a mission that gives the player a useless outfit which will fetch a high price on the right world.
Trick 12) Make some weapons which are so powerful that they almost destroy the player unless used with great care. Like space bombs in EV. I loved those.
Trick 13) Use visbits in other ways. You can have planets which appear, disappear, replace others, or even alternate. Alternate is something I haven't seen yet ย how about a planet which goes through an annual cycle of darkness, where the look and feel of the place is totally different, and all the bars are closed down. It would take the player quite some time to work out he had to come back during the summer period.
Trick 14) Muck around with the average ship characteristics. Most ships with high acceleration tend to have high speed and good turning. What about a ship that had magnificent turning and high speed, but low acceleration?
Trick 15) Use 'Always pers' to make a player consciously choose between different mission strings ย either go to Dagobah and talk to Yoda, or city in the clouds and rescue Han.
Trick 16) Use the complexity of mission bits to your advantage. Strings can branch and rejoin, they can go dormant until other strings are completed, they can split into multi paths (although I'm not so keen myself). Use the new refuse bit to allow the player to make a decision on the moment about which way to go.
Trick 17) Use other mission requirements creatively. What about a mission string which begins with the player being given a free pardon for a government, but then having to work their way into the underworld in order to go undercover. The main sequence wouldn't trigger until their record was, say, minus 100. You can also make a mission require a particular ship, and yet have a free cargo space requirement which was too much for that ship, until the player bought the ACME Super-Cargo Bay, which comes with a computer virus that messes up his turning.
Trick 18) Ships do not have to be on a square grid. As long as the dimensions are a multiple of eight, the 'ship' can be ten times as broad as it is high. This might not be much fun for a regular ship, but a stellar hazard like a vortex works well.
Trick 19) Put some spobs so far away that the player will never find them until a particular mission says look for them.
Trick 20) Have some invisible ships and invisible weapons. There must be some use for them.
Cheers
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M A R T I N ย T U R N E R
