I decided to fight fire with fire! If there was an edge, I intended to find it! I set out on the internet, searching for TradeWars. It didn't take long to find some awesome sites dedicated solely to the game! I was amazed! I knew it was a cool game, but I thought it was a local thing, who knew it was so popular!
One of the first things I learned was that there were "Helper Programs" out there to make the game more interesting/fun. I started with Willy Boyett's TWTerm on my little 386, I was able to log on and make my moves in a quarter of the time it took by hand! And I was able to let the helper haggle for the best price and always get the best deal! I quickly surged ahead on my little local board.
The next thing to influence my play was reading SomeGuy's TradeWars Manual. That led to several other awesome tip files. I'll put links to these sites on my link page, so I won't dwell on them too much here. They basically showed me the big picture of the game. I had seen only a portion of the potential of TradeWars.
By this time, I was ruling my local board, and had found another BBS that I could call locally, this one was slightly bigger, maybe 10 callers who played TW2002 on a semi regular basis. What amazed me about this new board was that several people could play tradewars at once, interactively! Another first! It didn't last long though, the board crashed on a regular basis, and finally folded up after a relentless campaign to suck cash out of it's teen callers.
Discouraged, I settled for reading about BBS's out there that had dozens if not hundreds of players. I vowed to find a way, but had to wait for the tools. It wasn't til the spring of '98 that I finally realized my dark dream of Interstate TradeWars Terror!!
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