For you game-starved Mac owners with Softwindows, there are not too many
PC games that will run fast enough, unless you have a really fast
PowerMac. A good new shareware game is Stars!2, a conquer the galaxy game
that most players agree is better than Masters of Orion or Ascendency (the
latest blockbuster space game for the PC). It is also better than
Spaceward Ho!, strategic conquest and most other Mac games of that type
available. Up to 16 people can play a network game, but you can play alone
on the computer. The free shareware version is fully playable, and only
some advanced options are missing. I recommend the game.

Although I play it on a 486 card on my PowerMac 6100, the game is probably
playable on a much slower computer, because it is turned-based, and the
computer responds almost instantaneously.

Thee is a web page with info and from where the game can be downloaded at
http://beast.webmap.com/stars%21/

Henri

Well I got StratCon 4.0 from MacWhearhouse on Friday and I played it over
the weekend and I’ve got to say that overall, it’s a hell of an
improvement! Well done Delta Tao!

What I like:

   - Different sized maps. It used to be, no matter what you did, a StratCon
        game would take several hours. Now with "small" maps, you can play a
        quick game (about an hour or so) anytime! Meanwhile, if you want a
        multi-day mega-game, you’ve got the "big" map for that. Cool!
   - Diffenent terrains. Even better perhaps that different sized maps, is
        variable terrain. Personally, I generally faired poorly with the old
        style of games ("large islands" is what it would be called I guess).
        Now, with the new "desert" setting (i.e. mostly land; lakes instead of
        oceans) I actually have a fighting chance against the computer! I
        haven’t explored the "small islands" setting much yet, so I don’t
        know how that plays.
   - Choppers and artillery. These new pieces make for a much more interesting
        game. Artillery allows for more defense; choppers are great for
        offense.
   - Colors. The land and seas are now brilliantly colored. I like that,
        though there seem to be problems (see below).

Bugs:

   - I found only one, but it’s pretty big. If you forget to reset the
        "Monitors" control panel to "256 Colors" and leave it on "Thousands"
        of colors, weird things happen. The game will still play, but the
        colors are all wrong. Your pieces become outlined in white shadow,
        the numbers for stacks are unreadable, and, worst of all, the "Current
        Piece" doesn’t blink. Delta Tao should either put in a dialogue
        *forcing* the "Monitors" control panel to be set to "256 Colors", or
        at the least they should put in a dialogue saying "Game only runs at
        256 colors" with a "Quit" button. Otherwise, you will spend most of a
        game trying to figure out that the color settings are wrong, as I did.

Things I Didn’t Like:

   - The pieces design. My only complaint is that the graphics for the pieces
        are more "cartoony". I’d liked the old look better; they were sleak
        and geometical. The new pieces look "cheap". I hope they redesign them
        again in the future.

Things I’d Like to See Added to StratCon 5.0:
   - New Pieces. Choppers and Artillery are so cool, I’d like to see
        "Infantry". They could form a rock-scissors-paper with tanks and
        artillery, the way subs-battleships-helicopters do: infantry beats
        artillery, artillery beats tanks, and tanks beat infantry, or something
        like that. "Infantry" could also specialize in taking cities.
           My brother has always wanted "ICBM’s". Like bombers they’d be a
        single use device, but they could reach anywhere on the board in, say,
        2 turns, and could have a larger blast radius. Of course, they’d take
        a long time to build.
           I’d also like to see "Air Transport" (like C-130′s or something).
        They’d work they same way as sea transports, except they’d carry less
        (maybe 1 or 2 armies only), but could fly as far as bombers.
   - Real terrain. Jungle or forest or swamp scenarios could be cool. Also,
        elevations should maybe slow movement.
   - E-mail games. Like "Warlords II", Delta Tao should make StratCon more
        friendly to E-mail games. This game is perfectly suited for it.
   - Multiple Player Games. Imagine "Risk", but for real! If StratCon allowed
        more than two player games, especially over a network, this could
        happen. I imagine the game would have to be redesigned somehow to
        speed up such a game, but I’d love to see multi-player StratCon!

Overall? If you loved old StratCon’s, you *will* love the new version.

That’s all I can think of. Once again, great job Delta Tao! Keep it up!
—
Ian J. Ball         | Want the rec.arts.tv FAQ? Available (soon) at:
Grad Student, UCLA  |    http://users.aol.com/IJBall/WWW/IJBall.html
IJB…@aol.com      | Want my TV guides & FAQ’s?
                    |    ftp://users.aol.com/IJBall3/FTP/

        So how many people have played StratCon4 now?  I spent an evening
playing around with it and I think it’s pretty nice.  My biggest disappoint-
ment, however is that it seems like the enemy always ends up quite close to
your starting island.  This is OK sometimes, but to have it always do this
is rather annoying.  Perhaps Delta Tao could make an update that (pseudo-
randomly) allows greater distance between the initial islands.

        I suspect this was done in order to make the game more difficult, but
judging from the upper levels of the game, this is not necessary.  I was
surprised to find level 8 quite easy and level 11 rather difficult (i.e.,
judging from the first 40 or 50 days of the game, I suspect that I’ll lose
my level 11 game).  Ah.  Here it is in the manual:

        "We tried to rig the game so it’s virtually impossible to win on
        the highest skill levels, so that there would be a continual
        challenge for good players.  So don’t feel bad.  I can’t win
        on level 15 any more."

        So what’s the point, fellows, of having the upper levels if
they are totally impossible?  

        StratCon3 had a nice, linear increase in difficulty.  The difficulty
of StratCon4 seems to increase exponentially around (I suspect) level 10 or
11.  (Although since I’ve only played 1-1/2 games, this is just a suspicion).
I usually enjoyed playing ver. 3 around level 13, because I knew I could win
and it is not as tedious and difficult as a level 15 game.  However, I don’t
understand the purpose of making the top levels of StratCon4 totally
impossible…  Can anyone at Delta Tao answer this?

        Despite this momentary lapse of reason, StratCon4 is a great game.
        I was glad to see that bombers aren’t much smarter than they were
in the old version.  :)
        I also like the fact that battleships are more useful than they
were in the old game.  And wow, artillery!
        I wish there still was a city count (i.e., how many cities the enemy
has).  That was always a nice gauge of how well you’re doing.  (If this
actually exist in StratCon4, someone please tell me where!)
—

                                                  Mike S. (M_Sau…@fccc.edu)

Hello,

Rogue is a unix-based game.  A friend of mine–a former PC user and now
very recently a mac user–is a fan of the game and wants to know whether
there’s a mac version (she doesn’t have access to usenet news).

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks.

     ’       .     .          ’
     ’       .  .  . .    .   ‘
     ’   .   .     . .  . .   ‘
     ’   .   .  .  . .    .   ‘
     ’   .   .     . .  . .   ‘
     ’  ..   .  .  . .    .   ‘
     ’  ..  John Baldy  . .   ‘
     ’  ba…@brewmaster.com  ’
     ’  ..ba…@mordor.com. . ‘
     ’  ..   .  .  . .  . . . ‘
     ’ … Bois la biere, . . ‘
     ’ … pas la marque! . . ‘
     ’ …   .  .  . .  . . . ‘
     ’ …. … …… …… ‘
     ’ …………………. ‘
     ’  ………………..  ’
      ‘                      ’
       ”””””””””””

I’m sure most of you who have played Civ our there have experience Civ
crashing because of a "Type 11 Error."  Well, in an attempt to fix it, I
started playing around with the memory specifications for it.  The
"minimum" memory size in the info screen is still 2500K, but I set the
perferred size to 3000K.  I played Civ all day and it didn’t crash on me
once.  Does anyone want to try and duplicate the results.  I think we’d
all be interested in so simple a solution.

-dan
—
——————————————————————————
Exterminate learning and there will no longer be worries.
                                -Loa Tzu, Tao Te Ching, XX
——————————————————————————

   Where could I find a copy of the Warlords II demo? I really, really,
need this!!! Thanks, I need my "fix"…

    Hi.
    Somehow the fonts in my copy of Civilization have gotten screwed up.  Some
still look like the original characters, some aparently default to a small
nondescript sans serif font, and at least one, the Chinese, has turned into
an undecipherable mess of special characters.   The Chairman might as well
be speaking Chinese for all I can understand him.  
   I tried reloading the game from scratch, but that didn’t help.   Are the
missing fonts supposed to be in the system folder?   There don’t seem to be
any Civ-related fonts there.   Is there a known solution to this?
   Thanks,
                                                     Andy Lubenow.

Kind of like Warlords – you lead armies of various creatures in conquering
4 different continents. Unlike Warlords, when you encountered enemies, you
went to a battle screen – some creatures could shoot arrows or spells. You
could also pick up ghosts as allies whose number swould grow for every
enemy they killed (this could get dangerous – if they grew too large,
they’d turn on you and there’d be no way to kill 100+ ghosts). After you
conquer one continent, you hopped aboard a ship and went to the next one.

Ran in color on a Mac II.

Now the questions:

Does anyone know what this is? Was it public domain or commercial? Anyone
know where I can get it? Does it run on a 040 and/or PowerMac?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

- Drew

–
Andrew Illsik Kim
Brown University
Department of Police and Security
Coordinator of Special Services
Box 1842
Providence, RI 02912
Andrew_…@brown.edu

I’ve got a PowerMac 7500 PCI on order but understand that its OS doesn’t
support Atomic’s Operation Crusader.  This is a blow but what really
worries me is that I might have problems with A-10, Hornet and FC2.
Anyone help out on this one ?

Roger Underwood
roger….@dial.pipex.com

Anyone have any info on this game?  Just an ad for it Wired.

best,
paul