Alyssa

Yes. I've gone several lengthy games without discovering a single jedi. It happens. There is no fixed number for how many jedi must be present in a given game; it's all luck of the draw. Most minor characters have about a 10% chance of being force sensitive. Some have slightly higher probabilities.

I also do try to limit the numner of jedi I use in my jedi games, if for no other reason than to maintain the relative rarity and mystique of force-sensitive characters. It's not as if I have everyone running around with a lightsaber. My average jedi game usually ends up with about 6 or 7 enemy jedi to my 4 or 5. Call me a sucker for roleplaying, but I also try to structure jedi games a certain way. Usually the enemy will have one "uber" jedi master, and I'll have mine. Those two will be each other's equals, more or less (though usually I'll make mine a tad weaker). Then I'll give the enemy one excellent, though not quite as powerful jedi master, and the rest will be either masters or knights. I'll give myself a handful of novices to be discovered, and it'll be up to my master character to train them all. This actually makes for a very fun game -- especially if the enemy jedi masters encounter your jedi trainees too early in the game, and your trainees wind up dead.

That's another flaw with the game. From the movies at least, I got the impression that only Jedi Masters (Vader, Yoda, Palpatine, Obi Wan, etc) could detect the presence of another force user -- and even then, only if that force user was particularly strong in the force. In the game, even the lowliest trainee can detect another force user. That ends up screwing up 99% of Jedi missions in my games. Very frustrating. I wish there was a way to edit it out.

About high stats: I've also noticed that stats seem to "cap" at around 200, and that stats above the 200 mark really don't confer additional benefits. Also, stats that are *too high* (300s and above) seem to wrap around back to 0 in terms of how they are calculated in the game's equations. To test this out, try using RebEd to boost a character's starting stats to all 100s, and then give that character a force level of 200. His stats will soar past 300, and for some reason, he'll start performing as poorly as if his stats were in the single digits. Perhaps stats above 300 were never intended in the normal game, and this is mostly a side effect of my overuse of RebEd. Even still, it's highly annoying. I am a big fan of playing "jedi games," wherein building up my jedi ranks and sending them on missions is the primarily objective of my game. In such games, it's infinitely more fun if I give the AI a bunch of jedi knights and masters, and then attempt to train my own to challenge them.

After hundreds of SWR games on all three difficulty settings, I'm convinced the AI never runs Jedi Training missions, or really pays attention to jedi whatsoever. It just treats its jedi characters as it would any others. In my opinion, that's a huge fault with the game (and something I wish RebEd were capable of fixing). Where's the fun in playing against the computer if it's not going to bother using its jedi characters, or building them to their full potential? If you ever face off against an AI character who's a jedi knight or higher, it's probably because that character started off at that force level when he was first discovered to be a jedi. Or perhaps because he raised his force level through repeated espionage missions. There is a degree of variance (usually +/- 40) in the starting jedi level of any given jedi character. My guess is that characters you encounter in the knight levels and higher started off around 40 or 50, and then built themselves up accidentally through missions.