Player Utilities, by Stephen Whitis

Most of the serious (and many of the casual) TW players use player utilities. I, myself, wouldn't consider playing without them. If you want to be a serious TW player, you need to know about them. Even if you don't use them yourself, you need to understand how the competition works. And, once you've tried them, I think you'll want to continue using them. Utilities alone don't make a bad player into a good one. If a player decides to hunt ferrengi and aliens, wander around aimlessly, or use their money unwisely, then those choices will still hurt them, utilities or not.

Utilities don't make the decisions - they help you by giving you information which aids those decisions, and they help you to implement those decisions.
 
There are two primary types of utilities. Automation, and database. The automation utilities help by automating redundant tasks. It is rather boring to run most of the money-making loops by hand. Trading paired ports, for instance. Move to a port, sell, buy, move to another port, sell buy... That gets old. Automation utilities let you move to the first sector, tell it which adjacent sector you wish to trade with, and it handles the rest. Most of them will stop under several circumstances: for instance, when a ferrengi enters the sector, when the port runs dry, or when you are down to X turns (user definable.)
 
Trading paired ports isn't the only thing you can automate. Most will haul colonists (from Terra, or from one of your planets to another), haul products (from planet to planet, or port to planet), run PT (Planet Trading), and run SST (Sell, Steal, Transport, evils standard moneymaker.) Automating the redundant tasks means spending less time trading ports (the computer does it fast than you can manually). It means less boredom. It means that you can concentrate on which tactics to use, which traders or planets to attack, etc. I use the TLXTW scripts for Telix to handle my automation.
 
Database utilities are used to parse the barrage of information the game sends you. Without them, its hard to locate and remember the locations of paired ports, dead-ends, the class 0 ports, etc. The database utilities do a wonderful job of that. I use TWAssist. Another I've seen is TWAide. Some utilities handle both automation and database functions. There are pros and cons to this approach, but overall, I think its a better one. (However, you may have noticed that I use two separate utilities.) TWHelp, which is very popular, uses that method. I believe that TWTerm does, also. TWView was one of the very popular database utilities for 1.03d, but it has not been updated for version 2.0. It still works with 1000 sector universes, but won't handle the larger universes in 2.0 games.
 
PowerMac's (for the COMMO communications program) were very popular at one time, also, but the author has moved on, and I don't believe they are supported any more. TWGuru was written by Mike Magero for the Amiga. Not having an Amiga, I haven't used it - but if you are an Amiga user, check it out. Mike IS a guru, and from the descriptions I've seen of his utility, it is excellent. I recommend trying several utilities. Different people have different wants and needs, so a utility that works great for one player may not work well for another. Make you own choice, based on your own style. One more word on utilities. Some can do zero-turn mapping, which is very useful. ZT mapping is a subject in itself, handled elsewhere in this text.