Master of Orion 1 unofficial patch

[SDragon]

Hi kyrub,

I think I'm still playing with this patch, but was wondering if there was another one that had most of the updates in but also had the 'use reserves locked' fixed? The one when you send reserves to a planet, that planet seems to keep the production given from the reserves and never reduces back to regular planet production.

Thanks!
SDragon

[kyrub]

Last stable version is here.

Nevertheless, it should be said that this version is not flawless; it makes the alliances between AI partners too strong.

[SDragon]

Thanks! Happy New Years everyone.

[kyrub]

Major update.
(probably unstable)



----------------------

!!!
While removing Embryonic.exe I had a shock: the old file contains a trojan !
It must have been inserted by the patchmaker utility I used at the time. Apologies to everyone! I was naive. Please recheck your hard drives and remove the embryonic patch immediately.

I used a different, much more credible software for the larval stage (shareware from a company). Everything should be correct by now.

[ignatius]

That's great news! I will definitely give it a try.

I've been playing several games with your already excellent Embryonic_18 patch and while some of it might be obsolete by now, I've got some feedback for you:

The overall impression was that the AI know act much more saner that they used to which is a good thing and improves the overall game experience. While the impact of AI alliances seems to be somewhat stronger than usual and I had some close calls during early votes, it was not the "show stopper" I feared it to be (didn't play on impossible though and only did small maps). Maybe having the AIs abstain more often esp. early on might be in order (might also be an alternative way to handle situations where an AI is allied / at war with both candidates). Another idea would be to require positive trade before offering an alliance which would impose some delay and stabilize things b/c of the diplo bonus of profitable trade routes.

When playing the Silicoid in my last game, I've encountered some very annoying bugs:

- After projects or pop-growth is completed, the ECO slider is not to switched to IND or TECH, but stays at CLEAN and burns ressources senslessly.
- atmospheric terraforming does not seem to work at all, denying hostile planets the benefits form soil enrichment.
- (advanced) soil enrichment only seems to work immediatley after discovering it but not for planets founded or aquired afterwards. This way, Orion got stuck with 240 pop after complete terraforming.
- you cannot spy or plunder cleanup / controlled landing tech even if those are the only picks available - this hurts your construction and esp. planetology tech level big time. Considering that 10 planetology tech levels (the total number of landing and eco rest. techs) are good for about 1/3 BCs per pop per turn, this is a considerable drawback.
- In this light, I would also reconsider your decision to have the Coids place zero value on those techs for trading / bribes as the tech-level advancement, while small, is still worth something. And then, there's also the exchange value of those techs when trading with other AIs.

Some other bugs I've noticed are:
- the good old "ENVIRON" display bug in the spy tech report.
- the oracle interface doesn't seem to work against planets and/or with tachyon beams. At least a huge stack of tachyon beams (25 dmg) with OI and attack level 12 consistently failed to do any damage against planets with 16 shields and less.

Please let me know if you require any save files or further documentation.

I _love_ the new history auto-save feature (which isn't included in your feature list maybe b/c it's Embyonic_18 only), but would suggest to change the default name to SAVEyyyy.GAM with yyyy being the year instead of SAVEx.GAM with x being some consecutive number starting with 8(?).

Inspired by your effort, I also did some reverse engineering to tune down the Guardian stats somewhat to make going for Orion a viable game strategy (changed DEF form 1..9 to 2..6, SH from 5..9 to 4..8, SP-X from 5..85 to 5..25 and ADC to ARS on impossible). Doing the latter change, i noticed that there is another switch statment right after the faulty one (the one that gave ADC on hard but nothing on other levels) that you fixed in the patch (offs. 1594F to 1596A)

I have no idea what [0x72d8] contains, but the switch statement almost certainly sports the same bug as the previous one (giving the effect intended for impossible only on hard and no effect on all other levels), so I disabled it altogether in my version.

btw: I have also tried to "fix" the SP-VII "bug" in my house rules by giving scatter pack vii the stats from the hyper-x missile (dmg 8 and +1 hit) like it says in the text (and I might in fact take the liberty to further tune down SP v/vii/x from 6+0 / 10+2 / 15+3 to 5+0 / 7+1 / 10+2 so as to make "normal" missiles useful again), but I have not managed to find the stats in the code yet - any hints?

Thanks for your great effort and keep up the good work!

cu

ignatius

[Daemon]

Hi. Can't really express my support and admiration for all of this. Being a die-hard fan of the game, i've worked a lot at JavaMOO (later called MoO: Rise from Ruin), which unfortunately died cuz of the lead programmer losing interest. But i still got a working copy .

Anyway, i can't patch my MoO using Larval_MoO.exe, due to my starmap.exe being of unknown version to the patcher. Could you provide an already patched file or at least point me to the other patches needed in order to use yours? Thanks a lot!

[kyrub]

@ Daemon

I posted another version of the patch which I tested against the Moo downloaded from a respected website. Hope it works now for you. (I really cannot say what was wrong with the previous one since it worked perfectly on my files with right dates).

@ ignatius

AI improvements in embryonic are quite soft, so I'm glad you can feel some positive change. Conceptually, the improvements should strengthen the AI racial / objective / personality component of the game (in the future). This happened in embryonic by simply fixing the planetary / research allocation bug.

other:
- the Silicoids problems sound silly, could you re-test them with the new patch? A lot has changed in there.
- fixing ENVIRON crashes the game for unknown reason, so I decided to abstain
- oracle! (will look at it)
- I had to abandon for now the auto-save feature because it seemed to make the game lag in the next turn phase (?)
- excellent catch with the Guardian. The problem is I do not know either what is that value. - Could it be the auto-repair percent, perhaps? 15% for hard, 30% for impossible Guardian, 50% for amoeba?

[Ingos]

I found an anomaly, but I cannot reproduce it

When i saw the new larval patch on the first post, i deleted my moo installation and did a fresh install, them applied the patch and started a new game (medium galaxy/five opponents/normal difficulty/mrrsham)

Playing the game, everything is fine, when a Silicoid decided to scout one of my planets, and words cannot describe the horror...



The design name was 'WHALE', i feel that the Silicoids cannot have that many ships so early in game, mostly because the Klackons are the ones that are on top on fleet strength

The turn after, i decided to check with alt+galaxy an was surprised to see that this fleet simply vanished, and the Silicoids didn't even have this ship design, at least not deployed (this is the only game have played so far, so there is no way i could have mistaken by another game/save)

The main problem it's that i cannot reproduce it because we don't have that kind of turn-by-turn autosave anymore, so the only think I can do now is report this, put my savegame here and see if anyone have the same problem in the future

There is another thing not related to the anomaly but its just my opinion: I think that the AI should not receive free colony ships under any circumstances, maybe it's ok for the most experienced players here who play at the hardest difficulty but speaking of me, I am an average player at most and always play on normal (I don't like the idea of giving/receiving bonuses) and it's very hard for me to keep pace with the AI early in game: if I build colships I get far behind on military strength, if I concentrated on a fleet I get far behind on planets, if I try to concentrate on both at the same time I lag behind everything else (pop/prod/research/etc).I feel cheated knowing that the AI don’t need to focus like me, since it receives colships early for free. Is the AI unable to produce colships by itself?

Please don’t take that last part as a critic, it’s just my opinion. Thanks for the attention (and for the patch).

[Daemon]

Patching seems to have been successful, but damned if i can see any difference, or signs it is actually running .

[ignatius]

- the Silicoids problems sound silly, could you re-test them with the new patch? A lot has changed in there.

I would love to, but I do not have MS Windows (I am running MOO using dosbox under Linux) and the patch utility you used seems to generate an executable which cannot be run under DOS.

Could you please post a patched version of STARMAP.EXE as you did with the Embryonic_18: This would not only allow non-Windows users like myself to run the game but would also save much hassle with installing and when running multiple versions of MOO.

- I had to abandon for now the auto-save feature because it seemed to make the game lag in the next turn phase (?)

That's a pity - I never experienced any problems; in fact I found out about the feature only by chance. If you happen to also use dosbox for running MOO: An upgrade to the current v0.73 solved all of the (minor) responsiveness and lag problems with the older versions for me.

- excellent catch with the Guardian. The problem is I do not know either what is that value. - Could it be the auto-repair percent, perhaps? 15% for hard, 30% for impossible Guardian, 50% for amoeba?

Thinkable, however there are only the two values of 15 and 25 and the change only takes place on hard, which would imply that the hard Amoeba would be easier than the medium.

Code:

0001593D  C706BA721800      mov word [0x72ba],0x18
00015943  C706EC720300      mov word [0x72ec],0x3
00015949  C706F8720100      mov word [0x72f8],0x1
0001594F  833E88CB03        cmp word [level],byte +0x3
00015954  7508              jnz 0x595e
00015956  C706D8720F00      mov word [0x72d8],0xf # hard
0001595C  EB0D              jmp short 0x596b
0001595E  833E88CB03        cmp word [level],byte +0x3
00015963  7506              jnz 0x596b
00015965  C706D8721E00      mov word [0x72d8],0x1e # hard

My first guess would have been some initiative value but setting it to 1 seemed to have no effect (the Guardian was still moving first).

Maybe it's some internal AI tweak parameter gauging the aggressiveness or cautiousness of the attack.

ignatius