Speaking of the patch documentation, the other thing that left me wondering was the "SELECT PLANETARY ORBIT" "80..100 million miles" option when generating a new map. It's the first thing the map generator asks yet I can't see if it affects anything? Another thread suggested it affects eco damage but not sure how to verify it. At least it should be explained in the readme or worded differently. The map in this game doesn't represent temperature per se, there's only humidity which already has its own setting.

I thought I'd have a quick look at this. So it looks like this was enabled by Yitzi's patch, not by default. By default, the global variable that handles this is set to 1: "90 million miles (average planet)".

SMACX global variable offset: 0x94A2B0
valid values: 0,1,2

The only function that references this global, outside of map configuration, is world_temperature(). This in turn is called by world_build() or world_climate(). The key one is world_climate() that gets called during terraforming, random events, planet busting, ecology functions and many others. It seems to get called on average between 10-20 turns.

Inside world_temperature() the global 0x94A2B0 is used as an upper bound value in the random generation of a local variable as well as some conditional checks. In the end, a value between 0 and 2 is passed as a parameter to the function temp_set(x,y,VALUE). The function looks like it loops through the tiles setting this value. Tiles temperature will change over the course of the game. It seems near the poles, it is always 0. This is likely part of the logic checks on the x/y bounds. It looks like the temp of a square will affect whether it is arid, moist or rainy.

Hopefully this adds some clarity to what this setting is doing. If there is interest, I will decompile the entire world_temperature function.

IDA Pro 6.8.150423 with hexrays works. I think other 6.8 versions will work too.

idc files attached (database and separate typeinfo).

They're from my own database and have a handful more annotations than scient's database.

Decided to take a look at this again. If anyone has problems opening Scient's database, it is also pretty easy to import the annotations from these idc files. One should copy the lines containing MakeName or MakeComm and paste them into IDA's script input box. Then you should have most of the important functions with plain text names, no matter which version of IDA is in use.

There's many things we could improve with the current AI though. Some important ones:
1. How many colony pods to build
2. Where does the AI build colonies
3. How many formers to build
4. How is the terraforming action selected for a given former

If anyone has function locations for these actions already figured out, you could post them here. I'd suspect many of them have something to do with function 0X56B5B0, "enemy_move" but it is the most complicated function in the whole binary.

Here's a small mod for terranx.exe that enables some debugging output. It is probably only useful for mod developers. The game by default creates a file called logfile.txt but all of the debug output was disabled when the game binary was built. This patch was built on the default GOG binary, no other changes have been made. To enable the debug patch, edit Alpha Centauri.Ini and make sure it includes these lines:

[Alpha Centauri]
Multi Debug=1
Any other value will disable the debug mode. Then just start the game from terranx_debug.exe and you can read the output from logfile.txt. 

Here is the most recent export from my database. It includes a lot of additional work and clean up over the past year or so. Especially around the internal structures. I had meant to post this closer to the the beginning of the year but I've been super busy with work and certifications. There are still a few things I'd like to do before "officially" sharing this. However, I figured this might be of some use if you are poking around.

Yeah, I have same document from another board many years ago. Pretty sure I tried to incorporate some of that info into my IDA DB analysis. I think it's still on the todo list to flesh it out more. I did add one bit of info to my version of the document related to internal structure and coordinates. This way you can locate a particular tile's data.

How to get to map struct in memory:
[94A30C] + 0x2C * ((x_coord >> 1) + y_coord * [68FAF0])