posted 05-10-99 07:30 PM ET     

To begin with, the screen for reassigning players is deeply wedged. If we try and change _anything_, chaos results, frequently including the deletion of entire factions. Obvious solution: never change anything. We didn't really want to change factions in the middle of a game anyway. Well, maybe a little.

Even if we just reload without tweaking anything, the game relabels us (both of us) as Hive! (Odd, since neither of us were Hive to begin with, and don't particularly like being Hive.) It doesn't change our social settings, and doesn't give us free perimeter defenses, so I assume that somewhere under the hood we're still what we were, but the other factions _treat_ us as if we were Yang, and telling ourselves apart can sometimes be confusing. (It doesn't help that the original Yang is definitely still around. I gave him a perfectly good city once by mistake.)