(November 4th, 2016, 17:43)Psillycyber Wrote: I think a balance patch would definitely need to include a swap of the tech levels of hand lasers and gatling laser.
Changing technology levels requires more coding skill.
But you can quite easily change the power of any weapon in the game. Speed of missiles, damage, extra aiming bonus etc. This is very easy for everybody with a Hex editor.
kyrub
But what about making it so that forming a peace treaty will change the diplomatic stance from war to peace treaty? A peace treaty will last 10 turns before reverting to no treaty and it cannot be broken. Instead an unprovoked attack during that time will often lead to war and just like any other treaty, result in a permanent diplomatic penalty.
Hi, I have a question about this patch. Is the highest difficulty setting still Impossible + Medium size + 5 opponents? I love a challenge, and that was always how I found the roughest ride in vanilla.
I finished two playthroughs on the patch so far and absolutely love it!
It warms my heart that there is still love for this game.
(March 23rd, 2020, 21:10)blackcat777 Wrote: Hi, I have a question about this patch. Is the highest difficulty setting still Impossible + Medium size + 5 opponents? I love a challenge, and that was always how I found the roughest ride in vanilla.
I finished two playthroughs on the patch so far and absolutely love it!
It warms my heart that there is still love for this game.
I think so. In any event, there's no question that this is harder than vanilla.
It's definitely not Small maps where thanks to aggressively having Scouts lock down systems I'm often the first to 6 worlds - and the map guarantees you a second system. Lots of AIs end up stuck on one planet. I don't have the patience to repeatedly play on Large or Huge maps.
(March 23rd, 2020, 21:10)blackcat777 Wrote: Hi, I have a question about this patch. Is the highest difficulty setting still Impossible + Medium size + 5 opponents? I love a challenge, and that was always how I found the roughest ride in vanilla.
I finished two playthroughs on the patch so far and absolutely love it!
It warms my heart that there is still love for this game. :)
Welcome! I agree with Cyneheard that Imp/Medium 5 is definitely a good setup, a good challenge, and the settingI play the most, but if you're looking for sheer difficulty, I believe Imp/Large/5 is even harder under kyrub's patch because his AI expands so quickly and relentlessly.
(December 26th, 2013, 17:06)WhiteMage Wrote: 1. Battle scanner no longer displays the 3. special on opponent ship. Even self ships don’t show their 3. special. Although all 3 specials still work in battle, only two are visible. See 1.zip, 2.zip Some enemy shoots Warp Dissipator, but does not show.
Are we sure this is new in 1.40m? I tried using your saves in the original and they don't show up either. Not sure if there's something in the save, but too lazy to start a new game with the original just to see. Anyone else remember if the v1.3 was able to show all 3 specials (including warp dissipator)?
(April 16th, 2020, 11:10)SDragon Wrote: Anyone else remember if the v1.3 was able to show all 3 specials (including warp dissipator)?
Yes. I have screenshots from Imperium games played in v1.3 that show enemy fleets with three specials displayed, including Warp Dissipator in various combinations (I didn't spot one where the WD was in the bottom slot, but I doubt if that's the issue...) but I did see some other weird gaps in Special systems on the battle scanner screen: Some (including the Guardian) where an enemy ship was missing the middle special, for example, but only had the top and bottom one.
With the help of the available IDA file from the 1oom project, I'll see what I can find. So far from what I can see, MOO uses two different code for the specs page and the battle scan page which I find weird, maybe a limitation of C? The specials for monsters are hard-coded for them, so the missing space is by design and not a bug, it does give them a bit of uniqueness seeing specials in only 1 and 3 visually, but I can see why it could look like a bug as well.
I'll start by looking at the differences in code between kyrub's version and the v1.3 code. My assembly is very beginner level at best, but I might be able to fix some bugs, we'll see.
I've attached modified files that should revert back some of kyrub's code base back to v1.3 which will show the 3rd special weapons slot again. Based on where the code was, it shouldn't affect any of his other changes in v1.40m as I've looked at the changelog and don't see anything that is labeled as a fix that should be using that area of code.
While I was poking around the area of the battle scanner, I also adjusted the spacing of the weapons text as it was a pixel down for some reason so it should look more vertically centered.
Lastly, I changed the [Typo in "Sub Space Interdictor" in "Tech" => "Propulsion": “...device is a placed…". Remove "a"] which was just hex changing it in the Research.lbx file.
(December 26th, 2013, 17:06)WhiteMage Wrote: 2. When my ship with Doom Virus stands next to enemy planet in a battle and I click retreat, it sometimes drops doom virus, sometimes doesn’t. I think that it should not drop it, since the order was to retreat. Based on few tries it appears to be probabilistic so try several times. My observations:
Doom attack:
No when NW of planet (2 times), SW, N.
Yes when S of planet (2), SW, W (2), NW
See 3.zip
This seems to be working as designed, it's not due to the positioning of the ship around the planet but only based on the fact that the ship is being 'targeted' by the enemy - so whichever player ship has missiles being sent to it from the planet, if they are close enough will, 'retaliate' even if they're retreating. We could remove the retaliation but then that would change for all weapons, not just doom virus and this behavior only really affects new players as most other players will know about it and just not position their ship next to the planet if they don't really mean to use the virus.
I tried squeezing code in so that if we could detect that we're retreating than we would skip sending bioweapons (and bombs, would have to be included) but unfortunately there's not enough space to work with or we need someone with more skills than I have. But I would view this as a very minor bug at best and just add it to the 'expected' behavior of the game in some repository.
Since kyrub's v1.40m patch has been around for years and is pretty stable, I've repackaged it without the autosave every year debugging help that was added. It now uses the previous v1.3 autosave of saving every 5 years and only saved to SAVE7.GAM. That way people can play and enjoy his patch without having to worry about having their directory saving every year that they play.
No other code was touched in regards to his patch.
