Ragnar

Also, Gamespy does not support version 1.01. So if you have Supremacy vs Rebellion, you cannot use Gamespy but will have to link up using msnm or IP. Ragnar

You can't give the AI a "headstart". In my experience the chances of traitors and natural disasters seems to increase after the first few hundred days. IMO the trick is to beat the AI as _fast_ as possible, not just to beat it. Anyone can do _that_. Basically, if you ever unintentionally let the game drag on to the point that you have to (or could) build a Bullwark. You should have the upperhand long before Luke goes to Dagobah. Ragnar

Ah well... I *routinely* play the AI with a simple RebEd TC that halves all hyperdrive ratings(aka doubling their speed) and doubles all sublight speeds and maneuverability. I've also halved all maintenance costs and doubled all production rates. I'm thinking of putting the maintenance on capital ships back to normal, as I think that tends to benefit a human player on the long run. As for how all this works out: very well, actually. If you resign to play at at least slow speed and deathstar difficulty you might not make it... I'm currently experimenting with doubling all research times.

Hi Schwartz, Best bet is to email someone that has posted his willingness to play in this forum and set a date and time. Unless one of the players is much better than the other a game will take 4 hours at least, so it's not often you get to complete one at the spur of the moment. I visit the SWR chatroom on GS, but it's usually empty... Aside from gamespy, you the host can set up a game and give you his IP or you can use msnm, which supports SWR games between chatters.

Here's the truth about inciting uprisings: don't do it on planets that are loyal to the enemy and expect results. The best way to take those planets is to assault them and then to either let them revolt and subdue the revolts(if your the Empire) or send in an army of diplomats (if you're the rebels). Generally speaking, the rebels suck at inciting and subduing revolts. Not sure if it's hardcoded or simply the Emperor's leadership boost that does it.

If you want to use gamespy to play Rebellion, you'll have to reinstall to version 1.00. If you do that, it'll work fine. GS also needs the correct path to the executable and other gamefiles, which -if you're not using the defaults and GS hasn't picked up on that- can be changed in GS's settings. I always forget where it is, but it's there somewhere, I assure you.

The only thing the Rebels are better at than the empire is their fighters. So build a lot of them. Spy on your own planets to detect incomming Imperial fleets and transfer them there to meet them. To attack with them, you need carriers. The Neb-B seems like a good choice at first, but as has been noted, it's hullstrength of only 600 means it cannot fight in a sustained battle against Imperial capital ships. And since a good empire player will start out by building Carracks, this is a problem as 2 Carracks will kick an N-B's butt. You need to capitalise on your strengths and those are the fighters, so build escort carriers. No Rebel fleet is complete without at least one. The only half-decent capital ship you can afford to build early on might be the Alliance Dreadnaught. When I try to build one it's usually because I want a troop-carrying ship that won't slow my fleet down, as both the Bulk and Medium transports have terrible hyperdrive ratings (90 and 100). The Mon Cal is a good ship, but for the same price you can build 1,5 Escort carriers with full Y-wing complement, which is more effective against capital ships and can bomb past a gencore as well. Until the empire gets Interceptors or Lancers, you don't have to worry too much about losing fighters.

Hm.. I'm a little confused by all this. First off, people seem to be building Y-wings because they aint got nuthing better, but to be honest, the Y-wing (and tie bomber) is one of the best fighters in the game. Sure, it sucks in fighter2fighter combat, but they excell at fighter vs capital ship combat. To make fighters so cheap (cost/maint all 1) is somewhat obscene. 6 Y-wings will be able to beat down almost ANY capital ship on their own, fighting it 6v1. Just try it. So what I usually do is I build as many Tie-bombers or Y-wings as I can. I only build other things to protect or transport the Y-wings or to blow up the ones the enemy might have. In a fight, I send the Y-wings out to blow up the enemy laser-ships first, then I mop up the remaining enemy fighters, then I start offing SD's. A good commander can speed things up by as much as 30-50%. This is why you should always scout out enemy systems before sending a fleet. A large fighter garrison can really ruin your day.

Nope, they can be traitors just like anyone else. I've seen it happen on several occasions.Generally, traitors tend to turn up if things haven't been going too well for your side. And most traitors only turn up after a few hundred days. I guess that if you're not winning by then, the game thinks it's time for some of the recruits to think of other career opportunities.. Ragnar

I had the same problem once, the other guy simply couldn't find my games.. Now, he was using a hacked version of Rebellion, so maybe that was it. I know it wasn't a router, for other people can find my games just fine. What problems are there with msnm? Ragnar

I don't think it's much use trying to get it even smaller. The one I see now is barely 6k That seems about right for the size, number and quality of the images.

Ragnar Krempel reporting in.. email: ragnarkrempel@yahoo.com the rest s/b under the buttons below, right?

That's ok, I'll hapilly switch sides if that helps..

I'm not sure what he means, but in our games Lebaron does have a tendancy to spy on my empty (completely scrapped) planets. The trick is that since there's nothing there, the chance of success is very high. You can even operate from orbit since there's no saboteurs near. Do this, say, 30 times in 30 days and you get a pretty good picture of what your opponent is up to by those additional information reports. It's not very accurate, but you can get very usefull information in this way and more importantly, your opponent has no way of knowing you have this information. He could mean something else, but I think that's it.

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE... Science fiction movie? Star Wars? Nononononononono.. Just because you see some stars and spaceships don't mean it's science fiction. Strictly speaking Science Fictionon is "Everything that could be". Since there is -in fact- no such thing as "the force", Star Wars cannot ever be classified as true SF. In fact, since it has some form of "magic" in it, one might more readily and aptly mark it as Fantasy. Now, I'll agree that this is not a straight and unmoving line. Our knowledge of what is possible is forever changing. And there are many other classifications.. Like a Space Opera. Space Operas don't really concern themselves with science (or realism in general) at all, they merely use familiar and established SF themes as a background to what is really a dramatic and preferably epic human interest story, yielding something that will appeal to a wider audience than just the odd nerd. Now personally, I *like* Space Operas. I don't take them too serious and watch the show. But, if you're an intelligent person, you can punch holes in the storyline of *any* story ever written. You just spend more time studying the facts than the writer spent on creating them facts and presto: instant dissatisfaction. For some reason, though, Starwars seems to attract more nitpicklers than Gone with the Wind...

-Alexander the Great Great general, no doubt, but his troops where also vastly superior and his enemies often unmotivated in opposing him. -Hannibal Barca I don't know much more but that he was, in the end, unequal to the task he set himself to do. -Scipio Africanus Insufficient knowledge. So he beat the cartaginians? Yes, but I do know that was after they reformed the roman army to a new standard. -Julius Caesar Alesia is noteworthy by any standards. Still, he drew upon troops and infrastructure that where vastly superior in quality. -Napoleon Bonaparte Pherhaps the greatest general of all time, pherhaps not. The french army of 1794-1814 was superior in many aspects to its contemporaries, not least of all its command staff, of which Napoleon was the pinnacle. -Erwin Rommel Brilliant tactician, good leader, but not a very good strategist. Definately showed himself to be superior to many in WWI as well as WWII. -Robert E. Lee ACW is not really my forte. -George S. Patton Well, like every good cavalry officer, he had a knack for getting himself in the right place at the right time. You wouldn't want him to lead an entire campaign, though. -Genghis Kahn Do we really know what he did and how he did it? Surely a superb leader, but also supported by superior troops at the time. Other(my pick): Nadir Shah, Shah of Persia(1688-1747): He came to the throne during a period of invasions and internal strife after which he quickly campaigned in all directions. And I really mean all. He advanced north into the caucasus and towards lake Aral, west into (now)Iraque and Eastern Turkey and even east into India(took Delhi) and even south across the gulf into Oman. His empire collapsed upon his assassination in 1747. He accomplished this in only 17 years. Now, why do I mention this obscure bloke? One reason is because he really was good. He must have been. He did not have vastly superior troops like Alexander, Ceasar, Napoleon or even Rommel. What he did he did by sheer force of will or skill alone and he had everyone around(especially the Ottoman Turks) scared shitless of him. Another reason is the somewhat eurocentric view of military history that many of us have. It's not your fault, for that's what's in most of the books, so you wouldn't know; heck I'm not much better either, but I did know about this guy and from the looks of it, he must have been at least the equal of any of them. And off course, his timely death kept him from any serious failures..

Hey, no problem. I think it's best if we just let people play 2 games, one as Rebs and one as Imps. Kind of like playing a game home and away... Come to think of it, no reason we could not use the same system that any sports league uses (I'm thinking of soccer, but take your pick). We cannot use a simple elimination tree because the sides (reb/imp) aren't completely equal. I'd propose the usual point system of 1 point for a draw, 0 for a loss and 3 for a win. We want to encourage people to yield if the situation is hopeless, so there s/b no gain or loss in delaying the inevitable. A draw is only one by mutual agreement. The way I see it, the biggest problem is going to be logistics. Getting everyone that starts to also actually finish the tournement and finding a way to deal with the inevitable dropouts. The second biggest problem is going to be agreeing on some uniform settings and rules (slow, large galaxy, no suncrushing, etc). Maybe we won't need them, but maybe we do, I'm not sure. One way to avoid the above problems is to not have a tournement. but rather an open-ended ladder system. Players are ranked 1,2,3... and rank N can challenge rank N-X to a duel. If N wins, he and N-X trade places on the ladder. N can refuse a duel if he is currently awnsering or has awnsered a challenge recently(week, month?). Not awnsering a challenge within x days results in an automatic loss... etc, etc.. Now, the fun about this last system is that you can actually avoid the "what side do I have to play" problem, by giving each player 2 rankings, one as Empire and one as Alliance. Imperials can only challenge Rebels and vice versa. If you don't like to play a side, you don't have to, but off course, if too many people play the same side, they'll soon run out of opponents. It'll be interesting to seewhat side comes out on top (aka average rankings of all the Imp/Reb players in the top-10), who gets the calim of best imperial, best alliance and best overall player. Well, I guess that's a lot to think about, so I'll shut up now... cya, Ragnar

I'm not sure if that is true. It would require the assumption that the strategy that yield the best results is also the one that yields a result in the shortest amount of time. As expedience usually tends to carry a risk, I'd say that it's even likely this isn't true at all. Ragnar

The way I recall it, he volunteered for service in the imperial navy after being reunited with his father, discovering he'd been abducted and kept from his true destiny as a child....

Well, there's a number of things that are far too easy to do and are far too effective to still be fun in a game: 1) take a reb planet, sabotage everything on it, then send spying missions there, dozens. Successrate for an empty planet is high and you often get info on another planet. Sooner or later, you know where the Rebel HQ (and pretty much everything else) is stationed. 2) Sabotage all enemy mines and refineries you can get to. It'll completely cripple their economy and they'll be forced into obscurity. The only solution for them is to do the same, but what does that give us? A very, very long game. 3) Pumping up Luke(or Leia). Send them on a mission that has a high chance of failure, yet does not have a high chance of getting captured. Make sure the distance is short(ship in orbit). They get an evasion force bonus for every time and you can repeat this just about as often as you like. There's lots of other things that work, but at least they can be defended against, countered in some manner or they aren't quite so broken. I'm also ambivalent about the Rebels and Empire having equal chances in a game. Personally, I think the Empire has a definate advantage. Their superiority in capital ships gives them the initiative at the start and if they use it well, it will be hard to overcome. regards, Ragnar

Aw, please! Something that allows you to win in 30m cannot, by the very definition of the word, be called a strategy. You can call it a tactic, but most likely it's just a quirk. One question though: could the Rebels use it to do the same? Probably not.

I'd second that opinion, but then again, I was the guy you played yesterday, so we're commenting on the same event Otoh, this was not the first game I've played through gamespy either. The good thing about GS is that it allows you to scan for people that have SWR installed on their system.

I just noticed that Gamespy Arcade still supports SW Rebellion.. Now, if only there'd be someone to play in that chatroom (hint, hint!)

Howdy, I've played a fiend on a LAN before, but after a few games he no longer wanted to play against me.. (sheez, he even won a game!). After that I've tried to use a program similar to RebEd to up the AI a little; Shortening build an travel times by 50% will give a human a bit more of a run for his money, but the game was still all but over in 500 days or so. Well, there's nothing like a human victim so where can I find them?