Master_Xan

It would probably end up being a massive swarm of units all concentrated in one spot. The Y-Wings all attacking ISDs with the bulk cruisers, the VSDs trying to support the ISDs, the TIEs trying to take out Y-Wings, the X-Wings trying to take down the TIEs with support from the Corvettes, while the Carracks try and defend the TIEs and the dreads try and take down corvettes, all in one central area of the battlefield. Talk about a mess. If you can take out enough Corvettes to keep the TIEs alive long enough to kill Y-Wings, then you have a chance. If the Y-Wings survive, the Empire is toast. But without them, the Empire should have enough anti-fighter capability to hose the X-Wings. It would be an interesting battle. My guess is the AI would lose to a human player, but two humans going at it... not sure what would happen. If I were to guess, I would suspect the preponderance of VSDs and Corvettes were game decisions. They are both older ships, so it makes sense there would be a bunch of them around, and both ships kind of represent their factions. It would be hugely one-sided if the Empire had tons of ISDs instead. Though why the Alliance doesn't get any dreads, I don't know. EDIT: After doing a few quick tests, I think it is important to know that how many units you start with does NOT appear to correlate, at all, with the size of the galaxy. So... smaller galaxies offer not only better chances of finding an opponent, but large galaxies do not give more units. Not even when maintenance is reduced to 1/4 of standard.

This community was much more active back in the day. You'll find a lot more posts from the 09-10 era, and even more before that. Still, good job figuring it out on your own. If you want another project, I can let you know of some that haven't been solved yet

Is the link on page 8 of this thread not working?

Wow. That is good info, RogueIce. I didn't know that Rebellion bases capital ship generation at the game's start off of maintenance costs. I haven't played a game in awhile, but that could be fun. Just think: a game where the Empire really has ten times more fleet than the Rebels! I mean, I've gotten the Empire to build up to that, but never had them start with it. As for refined minerals, I usually lower them by the same amount I lower maintenance. So if I lover maintenance by 1/2, I do the same for refined minerals. Maybe lowering maintenance by more than that would mean NOT lowering refined minerals to the same amount though. If I get time, I'll play around with it.

How romantic is a surrogacy? As for the girl, I can think of worse things than being born to uber rich parents. Granted, crazy parents, but if she can make it through the crazy...

This may be a stupid question, but what's wrong with defragging the real hard drive? Shouldn't that put the vhd into contiguous HD sectors, thus eliminating the problem? You may have to use something better than Windows default defrag tool- it isn't very good.

If I'm strapped for space, I don't tend to do snapshots. But Budious is right, those are faster and easier than re-creating the VM from scratch. I've never had a defrag problem. Are you referring to the defrag process taking longer? Or problems with the VM after the host harddrive is defragged?

I was looking at that game the other day. Looks good. Maybe something to play when I tire of replaying TIE or Descent. But like Evaders, I'm waiting for an epic strategy game.

Once you figure out how to create VMs, it is pretty easy. That first one can be a bit rough though. VMs are actually extremely safe. So long as you don't access anything sensitive (if you do update Internet Explorer, do NOT do any banking!), it is actually far safer than using your normal OS for everything. The VM OS has no idea it is running in a VM, making it impossible for viruses and hackers to break through from the VM to the host OS. I say impossible- I'm sure there is some way to do it, but so far as I know, nobody has figured out how. And if you get a virus on the VM, just delete it and create a new one. If you look at how much free space is on the VM's "hard drive," you can see how much it actually needs. Often they ask for 10 GBs or more, but after installing the OS you may find that 5 GBs are free. That means that if you ever create a new one with the same OS (in your case, XP), you could probably do 8 GBs just fine. Remember the OS needs some free space to swap data files around, and you need enough space for whatever you will install on it. But you should be able to add more space to an existing VM. Most of the time, it is as simple as dragging a slider to the right a little.

Yep, I've used metasploit and Backtrack 5. Handy stuff, those. My thought wasn't that Windows 95 would be secure against an actual attack. Only that fewer people would bother attacking, and some of the script kitties wouldn't have the tools to break it. I'm sure it would take somebody about two minutes in Backtrack to take your whole system over.

Leaving the resolution window open changes how graphics are displayed. Can't remember why, but I think it is similar to what happens when you right-click on something as a program opens. In that case, the open dialog box forces the program to use DirectX9; I think because Windows uses DX9 for the desktop. Can be quite handy, since DX10 and 11 aren't always stable. (It is the only way I can play Red Faction: Guerrilla.) Many old games allow software rendering, so disabling your graphics card forces the game to do it that way, thus solving some problems between old games and newer drivers/cards. Newer games don't typically allow pure software rendering, as they require the extra resources a graphics card provides.

I almost asked what torrents you were seeding. Then decided against it. Likewise with all that encrypted data. Your comments about XP made me curious. How old does an OS have to be before its age actually makes it more secure? I mean, if I'm a script kitty, do any of the scripts you find online still include easy hacks for breaking into Windows 95? If I'm a corporate thief or professional hacker, would I even bother with a system running Windows 95? Or would such people just assume there is nothing worth stealing on it? Following that logic, there could come a time where XP is, functionally, as secure as the newest OS, even without continual security patches... As for Fedora, maybe I'll give it a try. It is one distro I haven't used yet.

A linux junkie, eh? I want to love linux. I really do. Then I try and do anything remotely complicated in it. Some day, somebody will get a linux distro that matches what Windows can do whilst retaining the command-line features and customization of linux. Some day. Out of curiosity, what distro is your favorite? Is it Fedora, like the screenshot above, or something else (since that is a pretty old screenshot)?

Huh. Never had a traitor before. Budious' explanation makes sense- my games rarely reach day 750. (That isn't because I'm a super awesome player- rather, I edited a bunch of stuff to make the games faster.) If you want to make the game harder, use Rebed. You can make the opposing team's units cost less, make them start with more stuff (sadly, not capital ships, but you can stock their capital with extra fighters, troops, or facilities). You can reduce the research requirements for their units. You could even improve the units themselves, though that gets pretty tricky to do without breaking the game balance. My suggestion is to half the maintenance and refined mineral requirements for enemy units. All of them. That means their units will build twice as fast as before, and they can have twice as many as before. Should make the game more difficult without stretching it to 2000 days. But it doesn't fix the AI's other problems, so it isn't impossible to win. OR, you can use Rebed to view the characters, where there is a checkbox that controls whether they can be traitors. Edit that and they won't ever turn against you.

You can also keep using the virtual machine method long after the other method stops working (Windows 8, anyone?).

Ant's link worked for me. But I had to enable some scripts that NoScript disabled. File should be just under 4 MBs.

That guy has a nice background in his video. The files are here. Since you didn't mention exactly which files, I am just guessing that these are the ones you were looking for. We noticed the links died; in a few of the threads, towards the end, there was a discussion about that. ant was kind enough to rehost the files, and of course budious has them hosted as well (he just posted). Good work getting the game working.

Like budious said, I would suggest using a virtual machine. That way, you can keep playing Rebellion even after we go to 128 bit systems- assuming we don't completely redesign computers into brain implants or something. The color issue is common with games from this era. Age of Empires 1 and 2, Starcraft, Warcraft 1 and 2, etc etc. As they suggest in the link you provided, killing explorer will fix it. But doing so is annoying, and not all games recover from alt+tab. Here is a better method. Create a bat file. Do this by right-clicking, going to New->Text Document. Name it whatever you want. Open the file with Notepad, and paste the following into it: @echo off ECHO Using process.exe to suspend explorer.exe (win7, vista palette fix) "C:\Games\AoE2 2\Process.exe" -s explorer.exe ECHO Starting Age of Empires II - The Conquerers in the correct screen mode "C:\Games\AoE2 2\age2_x1\age2_x1.exe" 1600 ECHO Resuming explorer (was suspended before) "C:\Games\AoE2 2\Process.exe" -r explorer.exe Once you paste that in, edit the locations to match your system. In this case, instead of AoE2, you would be using Rebellion. The first line of the file will disable echo statements (notations); each statement that begins with ECHO gives you information about what the program is doing. First, this file will stop explorer. Then the file will load the game (in this case, Age of Empires 2). Finally, it will automatically resume explorer. This means that you click on this one file and it does everything for you. No alt+tabbing out of the game, no manually restarting explorer, etc. The file process.exe is a little command line utility. It is freeware, and available here. If you don't want to use any 3rd party programs, you can replace those lines with 'taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe' to stop explorer, and 'start explorer.exe' to start it again. This will require a little testing on your part to get it right, since I haven't done it. If you use process.exe, make sure you change the location in your text file to where ever you put it- I put it in the same folder as the game, just to make things simple. One last step. The file is a text file, or .txt. You need to make it a batch file, or .bat. To do so, go to a folder- any folder will do, including Computer, My Documents, etc. Press the alt key and go to Tools -> Folder Options. Click on the View tab, and find where it says, "Hide extensions for known file types". Make sure that is unchecked. Save your settings and go back to your text file. Rename it (select the file and press F2, or right-click and chose rename). Remove the .txt and replace it with .bat. Example: Start Rebellion.txt -> Start Rebellion.bat Double click the file and see if it works! You can right click on a .bat file and chose Edit if something goes wrong; maybe you misspelled something, or you want to copy the file and use it for another old game. (For anyone interested, there is a community patch for Age of Empires 2 that makes it widescreen and removes the need to do all this for that game. But no such patch exists for Starcraft, or Cavewars, or other games with the issue, so the above method is still quite valuable.)

Can't help if you aren't going to stick around long enough to get it...

Sweet, thanks!

I found the full manual in PDF strangely enough doing random google searches for Rebellion stuff a few years back, still got in on storage I think. Um. Can I have a copy? Pretty please?

I agree. And using that as a guide, Star Wars (and every version of Star Trek) fail the realism challenge. Most everything Hollywood makes fails, actually. Doesn't bother me, unless it is really blatant. Having only seen a few Clone Wars episodes, I'm not sure I can contribute much about Ashoka or other stuff.

Pretty sure 50 corvettes can indeed kill most any single unit in the game. But 50 corvettes against a few ISDs (not one, but a few) would probably lose. I'm curious about the results to your experiment.

I can't believe I'm defending the Clone Wars stuff, but... well, Star Wars has never been about realism. If it was, stormtrooper armor would do something, tractor beams would have multiple control nodes (allowing them to be powered on remotely from, I don't know, the bridge?), AT-ATs would never have been used at all, the Ewoks would have been completely smoked, Vader wouldn't force choke people (he would crush their windpipes and leave them to squirm in agony on the ground), etc etc. And that's all from the original series; don't get me started on the prequels or the expanded universe. In any case, the Clone Wars stuff was marketed to children. Just as the prequels were. If you approach them from that standpoint, they aren't so bad. Hopefully, with JJ Abrams at the helm, the new movie will be designed for someone older than twelve. I thought the originals were on blu-ray now. You know, as a bonus feature for one of the uber-expensive versions. But maybe I'm thinking of a DVD version.

I was under the impression there were still problems. Can you point me in the direction of the most recent version?