What in the bloody hell?

[Psycho146]

Well, i was just playing SMACX not 15 mins ago when something strange happened. I was playing the U and had wiped out santiago and had treaties with Lal and morgan who were bordering me to the south and west. the Cult, Drones and Angels hadn't contacted me in any waay yet. it then happened in 2219. I was suddenly stoppd by a popup, and it reads.

You manage to liberate Provost Zakorov of the University! The university pledges allegiance to you and gives you all of their technology.

Then all of my bases and units dissapear. WTF? Is this possible? I wasn't at war with anyone, plus why would, or how could I suddenly be liberated when I wasn't captured? Is this a real thing in the game or a bug? I haven't ever seen such an act before.

[Psycho146]

What that is is that if a faction is eliminated the leader is taken to the HQ of the faction that took it over. Now if you take a probe team to that HQ you can liberate that leader and they will restart somewhere with a colony pod and basically be your *****. Now I wasn't eliminated as you can see, but I don't see how this could happen.

[Master Marcus]

Yes, it's a SMACx thing fixed by v2.0 : you can now with a probe team liberate a captured faction leader at an enemy HQ. The liberated faction is automatically placed with a few units and 2-3 colony pods on an available island or terrain.

But Psycho146 was victim of a major bug ( maybe by accidentally triggering a hotkey, like me in a past game in January
).
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The art of mastering:"la Maîtrise des caprices du subconscient avant tout".

[This message has been edited by Master Marcus (edited April 08, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by Master Marcus (edited April 08, 2000).]

[Psycho146]

No, I didn't trigger a hotkey, I saw the probe unit enter my base, but, I had my borders filled with units and sensors so there is no way they could enter without me seeing them. Plus I didn't biuld any probe teams yet, so.... Something is amiss...

[Enigma]

I think that even with SMACX v 2.0 I had some very weird things happen to me with probe teams... one time I made a small army of 8 probe teams or so and they were going right through a warzone between two other factions. Occaisionally when I was about to move my probe onto a stack of my probes I would get popup saying would I like to launch a covert attack on the peacekeepers. I said no for a little bit and then I decided to try it, I ended up destroying my own probe team! Perhaps this happened to you.

[EternalSpark]

Bug.

BTW, what is this "you liberated {faction leader}? I only have SMAC, is this is SMACx thing?
[This message has been edited by EternalSpark (edited April 08, 2000).]

[hroman21]

It seems to me that the use of probe teams in the game has not been completely debugged.

I recently played a game where I had a pact with Cha Dawn and used a probe team to mind control one of her cities. The really goofed up thing is that the computer sent the troops from that city into one of my cities (under my control), and sent nearby Cha Dawn units into the city I just captured. The result? I had enemy units inside my newly acquired city - and nothing was happening. I sent a second probe unit (to try and bribe her units), and had my unit inside the city next to her units. It was only when I placed a combat unit next to the city that Cha Dawn decided to attack me - process through which her units got destroyed.

Regards,
hroman21

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"Laughter is the most powerful weapon ever created. Against laughter, nothing stands!"

[Sarxis]

Is the source code for SMAC[x] just irrevocably screwed up, or what? I think that if you took, say about twenty of the best programmers and hackers in the world and had them try to fix all of the bugs in the game, it would take them a long while to fix it (they'd probably just end up scrapping the whole thing altogether).

Is it time for another patch yet?

[BustaMike]

I've actually heard of this before (check the bug list if you can find it). Someone was playing a game with similar circumstances. The Drones probed his headquaters and liberated foreman Domai. The message read "Thank you for freeing the Drones, we grant you all of our tech and cash... blah blah" which is ludicrous because the Drones weren't dead and they did the probing. Right after this every Drone base disappeared.

At least you aren't the only one.

[MichaeltheGreat]

A general fault of SMAC(X) inherited from the Civ II days is that the program creates lots of temp files, and allocates lots of datastructures in RAM. These don't seem to get cleared very often, and SMAC(X) does a poor job of deallocating RAM and Win swapfile. Most of the bug problems stem from this.

If you use a fixed swap file size, reboot before running SMAC(X), and use memturbo http://www.memturbo.com to defrag RAM before running SMAC(X), it runs with far fewer bugs. Of course, you shouldn't have to do all this to run a game, but then, Firaxis staff should have some competent programmers.