Changing Gender? (also MP pact cooperation)

[Clint]

I recently started playing SMAC again after some years of it on the shelf, and had never noticed something annoying... when you attempt to customize your faction at the start of a game or during the game, the option to change your gender is there -- but no matter what I type it just resets to the default for the underlying faction, whether that default is male or female, although any other changes made (name, faction name, etc.) stick.

I'm running with the Alien Crossfire add-on and the latest patch for it... is this something that was just never corrected and has to be lived with? It's not critical to gameplay, but it's annoying, especially when the manual presumes you CAN change the gender setting.

I would have checked to see if this was answered already, but the search function is disabled... so apologies in advance if this has a really obvious answer I'm missing...

Also, I had always presumed that if you had a Pact with someone you could do things like let them load troops onto your transport and ferry them (but the AI was too simplistic for such). When trying this out in multiplayer it appears not to be the case, is there any workaround besides actually turning control of the transport over to them? Can they board it if it's 'docked' in one of their bases, perhaps?

[MariOne]

I think that knowing how Firaxis addressed serious bugs, not only they didn't bother to think about it, but we players didn't bother in the first place to bring their attention on it...
Maybe... they would even declare it a "feature"!

___

No, I confirm that is impossible to carry someone else's units on your tranports, not even your Pactmates'.

You have to turn over the transport, and in addition to that you can only turn over ships inside friend's ports.

Then ther was a bug I discovered sometimes ago and reported in ACOL.
You can't even load YOUR units onto YOUR *empty* transport, if there's a pactmate's ship/air unit stacked with it. If it is already carrying some, then it works regularly.
I never cheked what happens if the above occurs in your or your pactmate's base.

[johndmuller]

It is perhaps being overly charitable to Firaxis, but after I got over my initial disappointment that the game didn't start using a different-sex graphic for the leader, I thought that maybe the gender thing was in there for languages that have more gender-specific elements than english and might actually be used in those languages for some gramatical variations. (Having only the english version, I couldn't say whether that is true or not.)

Regarding the transporting of pactmates units, that is a definite PIA as well as a notable departure from RL. I hadn't completely given up on there being some backdoor way of doing it, but with Marione ruling it impossible, I suppose I should. (I had been holding out hope that there was some approach, along the lines of using the "L" board transport in a base or the "G" Goto command that I had missed the discussion of and hadn't thought of yet on my own.)

In at least one other situation there is such a backdoor. When your pactmate is stacked with one of your units, your unit cannot be activated by left clicking on it (no response); if it has already taken its turn under some preexisting order, it cannot be activated by right-clicking/showing-info then clicking on it in the bottom center of the control panel either. However, if you are able to find it in its home base's support box on the lower right of the control panel, then clicking on it there will allow you to select an Activate option.