Alien Waterworld turn reporting thread

[Plan9]

2159 -> FlameFlash

And... could somebody tell me why the factions keep changing colors/base designs every turn. Gets confusing after a while. Fix?

[GeneralTacticus]

Have you been playing any other games of SMAC? IIRC, factions in MP games change colour depnding on the order of factions in the last SP game you played.

[Plan9]

Sure.. I play IP games on a regular basis.
Are you saying that if I was hosting a game as say the Usurpers, next PBEM game I open up the player first in order will show as the Usurpers in all respects except for faction bonuses/drawbacks?

I guess a crude fix for it would be to do a 2nd installation for PBEM only.. or would that mess everything up as well since in playing several PBEMs?

[knowhow2]

or you could just load a game with the faction you'll play later.

[Mongoose]

This problem only occurs in SMAX and only for scenario started games. (This includes all of Googlie' Specials.)

When loading a turn from such a game, the game sets the faction graphics according to the sequence of factions in your alphacentauri.ini file. That sequence gets set each time you start a new game of SMAX.

To play pbem turns in these kinds of games with the faction graphics properly associated with their respectrive factions, you must first edit the ini file. You can do this in two ways that I know.

One, before playing each of your turns, you start a new game of SMAX and select the participating factions in the sequence they play in your pbem. Play one turn, them quit. Now, when you load the pbem turn, the graphics will be right.

Two, use a text editor (notepad will suffice) to put the factions in the proper places.

What I do is an extension of the first, really. For each of my SMAX pbems, I have created and saved under a different name, an ini file with the factions in proper order. Before playing any pbem turns from those games, I rename that game's saved ini file to alphacentauri.ini. This allows me to play all those pbems with the right graphic sets.

A dual install of SMAC won't help, the problem would occur in each.

[Mongoose]

2159 sent to GT.

[GeneralTacticus]

2159 to knowhow2.

[knowhow2]

turn to Omni

[Plan9]

2160 -> FlameFlash

[FlameFlash]

received... will play after work.

[Mongoose]

2160 sent to GT

[GeneralTacticus]

'Cannot open this file; it does not seem to be a valid archive.' Resend please.

[Mongoose]

re-sent

Very odd. I can extract the file I sent. I can then load the extracted save, though I cannot open it for lack of a password. Hope this one is OK.

[GeneralTacticus]

Nope, it STILL doesn't work. I don't have any idea what's going on; I can open most of my other zip files, but not all. Can you try attaching it here?

[Mongoose]

If this doesn't work, I'll send it unzipped.


edit: File removed.