Natural Disasters

I left my game on overnight running at 'Fast.'

When I woke up the next morning (at day 10,000) I had only lost one planet to the rebels about 5 minutes previously. But about 60% of my planets had had suffered serious natural disasters!

I only had about 12 planets left in the core with Planetary shields left. (Out of 40 core worlds, all with double Gen Core lvl.2's)

Even Coruscant was a shadow of it's former self. Only 6 energy of it's previous 21 was left. I felt robbed of greatness.

It is, along with the limitations of outer rim systems (Yay, lets colonize and defend a system with one energy slot, and two building-options)the killing point of the game. The programmers around here who have given the game so much can't address this without the source code, as was said previously.

Given most of you lot seem to either be at school or university, and ultimately with access to reverse engineering software and/or expertize that could ultimately solve this problem (not least), i'm still stunned none of you guys haven't ventured the possibility.

It's not as if you have to announce your findings here where it might poke the ears of the vile fiends at Lucasarts. Contact me, for example, independantly. I know who can get the real magic out of this wonderful title. I think it will endure longer than the upcomming Star Wars Red Alert.

I have noticed a great deal of concern with the effects of Natural Disasters. I believe I may have discovered a better way to avoid disasters than cheating.

I have noticed that disasters, in my games, always occur eventually on planets with a maxed out energy usage. If you leave at least a single energy square open on a planet, it almost never has a natural disaster.

I have also noticed that natural disasters occur much more commonly on planets with a large number of mines. Perhaps this is to represent over-mining?

I have used this in literally hundreds of runthroughs, and although it is not 100% accurate, I would say it is at least 80 to 90%. Using this strategy, I have also never had Coruscant be hit with a natural disaster.

I hope this helps you guys out - I've seen some wonderful work come out of this site, and I know how annoying it is to have something fail because of hard coded scripted events - I've spent too much time trying to fix the same kinds of problems in Original War not to.

It's nice to see people still researching and reading ~2.5 year old posts

That's an interesting observation. I'll have to keep that in mind during my next game.

Well, save a game before, then one right after. then see if reload the previous if it happen on the next turn.

trying to track down that value in EXE would be difficult with some knowlege of the mechanics. Usually some funtions are easy to spot use PE Explorer works on this old game ASM (assembler) always take one apart, but not very readable, but IF () THEN () are rather easy to see in hex...look for subroutines, close to Natural Disaster string. Oh yeh, very difficult. Do you know the probability absolute?

I did change Freelancer a long time ago to get rid of the singleplayer storyline so you could play it like multiplayer mode with being connected to the Net. I liked that mod my made, but it took forever to find it via the ASM then going back to the original game reference call DLL to goto end.

Well, save a game before, then one right after. then see if reload the previous if it happen on the next turn...

I believe I did this once before If I recall correctly, a natural disaster usually still occurs, but it doesn't necessarily happen to the same system/planet. It's not totally random in that every time you reload a different system/planet is devastated, but the original system/planet has the higher chance of re-occuring. Also, the extent of the damages changes with each reload.

The Natural Disaster, as with the allocation of system energy in systems, are quite frankly the chief disaster of the game, and why I would applaud anyone reverse engineering this bullseye of a game and reseting it on target like it should have always been. I little mod for all of us lot to enjoy, surely

System energy has to be one of the great failures of this wonderful game; can you imagine the gameplay with about twenty slots per system without the threat of an illogical disaster? Magical!

Oh well

... Otherwise its a game of "who can calculate the best numbers" type of simulation. Once one person locks in their game plan and gets ahead, there is really no way for the opponent to come back...

I don't think natural disasters are going to change things that much from what you already said

System energy has to be one of the great failures of this wonderful game; can you imagine the gameplay with about twenty slots per system without the threat of an illogical disaster? Magical!

As DarthTex knows from his work, and so I learned, A savegame can be edited to place in more system energy for Rim planets. A program can be written to add in random energy to all planets to make them worthwhile, if you run it on a save game just after you start.

ReED does allow for Rim planets to be tagged as Core planets, but I think that makes them visible from the start and would ruin gameplay. A person can also change the probablity of structures on Rim planets from the start I think from editing the files in the other editing thread I posted there (expanding on the stuff others have discovered along time ago).

Lastly, would the AI "know" to build up more structures on a planet with "more" energy slots available than it expects? I do think random events does add to the game personally, but it would be nice to be able to control the probabilty (on/off/percent chance). More choices is always good. How about the planet eating Crystal Space Monster from Master of Orion showing up in the galaxy? Joking a bit, but more random stuff would be cool.

System energy has to be one of the great failures of this wonderful game; can you imagine the gameplay with about twenty slots per system without the threat of an illogical disaster? Magical!

 

As DarthTex knows from his work, and so I learned, A savegame can be edited to place in more system energy for Rim planets. A program can be written to add in random energy to all planets to make them worthwhile, if you run it on a save game just after you start...

I think it's possible to do Core systems as well, but I have yet to experiment; still doing research. I've got the codes & locations for system ownership & popular support, plus flags for systems under "military occupation" so far. Just a couple of more items to decipher

My only solution to this completely pointless event in the game, that took far to long to sink in, is you do not not need have to defend every system you control. Watch how the stupid AI behaves. If you control every system in a sector and have them undefended, the AI will randomly bombard you here and there and you will loose support for not being in total control, but with one system in neutral or in it's favor, will not touch you; thus allowing you to build up vast fleets based around shipyards you want to hang onto with troops

Having said that, a nice mod to the game expelling this complete blunder to the original game and enabling systems to have at least 15-20 energy slots, given our processor's are a lot harder these days would be cool.