Faction colours

[Phil_de_geezer]

Greetings!

I've recently started playing SMAC multiplayer with some friends via TCP/IP. We all patched the game to version 5.0 in order to play - the problem is all of the faction colours are incorrect. The PKs are green, Morganites are blue etc.

The colours seem to be linked to the order we connected - my friend hosted and being in top place his faction turned out green. I was second and blue while my other friend was third and was white.

Any ideas on how to fix this would be much appreciated! I actually started a was with the believers early on thinking they were the PKs...

Thanks!

Phil

[bdanv]

make sure that all of you have the patch installed and the same alpha.txt file in the game directory

[Phil_de_geezer]

We have all recently patched the game to V5.0. Wouldn't the patch over-write the alpha.txt?

Another thing - although the faction colours are wrong, the borders are normal, so that my friend playing as the peacekeepers has green units/bases with purple borders.

Also, we played a 2 player game before on V4.0 which worked fine....

[Phil_de_geezer]

Has no one encountered this problem before? I haven't modified the game in any way, so I would expect others to have experienced this

[Mart]

yes, I have experienced this. in smac multiplayer.
I will post when I find more about it.
And that is difficult to recognize factions with changed colors.

[Maniac]

Is such basic knowledge getting lost?

You need to edit the factions to the order they're in your game in Alpha Centauri.Ini.

Eg:

Faction 1=GAIANS
Faction 2=HIVE
Faction 3=UNIV
Faction 4=MORGAN
Faction 5=SPARTANS
Faction 6=BELIEVE
Faction 7=PEACE

[vyeh]

I had a similar problem when I was playing a single-player scenario made by Darsnan. SMAX was using the wrong architectures for the factions' bases.

I fixed the problem by starting a new game and choosing the factions that were involved. Once I quit the game and started the scenario, all the base architecture was correct.

Is this the same problem? (Obviously, creating a new world creates a new Alpha Centauri.ini file.)

[Maniac]

yes

[Mart]

It's not that simple in smac, I think. I don't know how smax works in tcp/ip exactly. Smac, however, does have a probelm in tcp/ip.
It looks for me like it has something to do with creation of the game.
When I host a game, even when playing only me, i'm put in the first slot, by default it's green color in smac. so I choose e.g. Morganities, but my unit flags are green.
I left the rest random, so it was. Spartans were second randomized, now I loaded the tcp/ip game again and chose Spartans and their color is blue (hive)

Phil_de_geezer, probably if scenario or save file is prepared outside the tcp/ip game generator, you should get colors ok.

Some solution is manually chose faction in the tcp/ip lobby: Gaia, Hive, Univ,... but game puts players in the slots as they enter lobby. Can we move human players there?

[Phil_de_geezer]

Thank you all, particularly Mart!

It looks like there are two solutions:

1) create a single player game as the gaians and save that (I believe the gaians move first).

2) create the game in the scenario editor, which is not really an option for us as the player creating would choose the locations of all the factions...

Solution 1 is good enough I think, although it does mean a slightly slower start as you start with fewer units in single player

I tried changing the ini file but it didn't work

Thanks again!

Phil