posted 02-22-99 08:28 PM ET     

1. When playing non-simultaneous turns, sometimes while conversing with a computer controlled faction leader the faction display will go black and there is no way to continue the game (no place to click to end conversation). This appears to happen mostly when the current player ends their turn while another player is talking to the cumputer faction.

2. In a simultaneous turn game, I was suddenly stormed by the message 'Artillery bombardment failed.' It just kept scrolling with no way to stop it. The other player's game was locked with no way to end turn. I was able to continue by saving the game and playing as a hotseat game. Apparently the other player had set some ships to be completely automated and they had fired on a section of map that he had not yet explored. This apparently caused the problem, since after the ship was stopped we were able to continue the game.

3. This is just a general gripe with multiplayer--why is no one able to take any actions while one player is doing something like using a right click menu? This seems like it could get very annoying in a larger game. Responsiveness in general seems to be slow for me, I'm playing on a lan and still having a noticeable delay (about a second) while taking actions for units. Is this delay normal and can it be speeded up?

4. Is it possible to demand that another human player remove their units from your territory?

SMAC is a great game and I love playing it, since I plan to spend so much time in Multi I want it to be as nice as possible.

Thanks,

posted 02-24-99 11:02 AM ET            

We here at Auburn had some very similar problems. The game was repeatedly "freezing" with 4-5 players after about 5 or 6 turns.

We found that the problem seemed to stem from when one player would "end turn" and everyone else would still see them as taking their turn. Sometimes it seemed to come from people talking with other people when it was not their turn (especially computer players). Basically what caused the most instability was when anyone tried to do -anything- not on their turn.

This produced 8 or so freezes in a two hour span, after which we gave up on the game (and I deleted it in disgust). It seems like a great game and I would like to see whatever the problem is ironed out so we can get some multiplayer action going.

Any ideas?