Rebellion: Pause or Turn-Based

I think that Rebellion must have been originally conceived as a turn-based game and was sloppily hacked into a RTS at the demand of marketing. (The galactic display and management system, not the true RTS battes.)

Essentially the days are turns. Everything that happens on a turn occurs instantly as soon as the turn counter increments. However, the interface has this automatic turn incrementer that, in combination with the many things going on and huge number of messages you get instantly, is annoying.

Rebellion would be much more fun if it was always paused and you could click a button to switch to the next turn. The bad reviews it received are probably because of the incrementer that turns otherwise relaxing and stimulating strategy and empire building in the style of Civilization or Advance Wars into a huge number of clicks to view the many systems while trying to decide where to send your ships and units.

What I'd like to know is if there is a hack, or anyone who knows how to write a hack, that would do any of the following:

1. Set the "very slow" speed so slow that it would be effectively a pause (this might be done with only a single value).

2. Enable the ability to manage the galaxy while paused.

3. Best of all, either of those plus turn "very fast" into a "next turn" button that automatically resets to pause or very slow after being clicked.

I really think Rebellion would be a very good turn-based strategy game.

Rebellion is a unique mix of both genres (RTS and TBS) and the way it treats turns is imho result of this design decision (what we'll never know is whether this was because of aiming at broader audience or design experiments). And I think Rebellion was so badly accepted mainly because of this. Being a hybrid it could not obviously compete wit either of theses genres on their own turf. So the reviewers, who expected a RTS, were disappointed and so we the others, who expected RTS. And the rest was either delighted or frustrated by minor design flaws like clumsy UI (why?), bad AI (we all know) and so on.

The behaviour of the pause button was quite common in older RTS games. You could freeze time in the game, but you couldn't give out orders (maybe because designers thought it would slow the game down?). Rebellion unfortunately behaves exactly like this even in the strategic view which ironically resembles most TBS.

Hacking the game binaries is possible, but it would costs more time than it's worth. And if you had the code, well, you'd be probably screwed anyway, because I doubt anyone would be able to compile it today. We don't even know if it was made using MSVC in the first place (Watcom C was popular for games in the 90s) and besides I doubt anyone has a copy of DirectX 3 SDK or what version Rebellion uses.

Sorry to disappoint you Still, our best bet is to make our own game