Mr_Hangman

That unlocker tool is many years old now, and it never once worked for me either. It would be easier probably to extract the map and just put that up for download instead. Not that I know how, but maybe I could figure it out...

The trigger for the heighliner and homeworld defense missions are just one campaign turn being completed, whatever happens in those turns doesn't matter. The final missions are triggered by capturing the enemy capital. Whether getting your own capital captured would also trigger such a mission... I doubt it, but it's possible. I have no way of looking at the actual game code, just some data that are conveniently stored in text files, from which I was able to figure out what I know so far.

Ok, I think I've worked out the precise game over conditions, and consequently, how you might get your howeworld attacked. First off, the tutorial mission cannot be lost, because you will always get new reinforcements if you lose all your units. However, losing any of the other scripted missions is an immediate game over. Between the tutorial mission and the heighliner mission, and between the heighliner mission and the homeworld defense mission, each house gets one turn, so you'll attack once and defend once. Losing these four battles will in no way contribute to a game over. So if you want to get attacked at the homeworld, you ideally will retreat on your attacks, then save in the debriefing, then you can reload until the territory you want taken is attacked. You should retry until one of your opponents has pushed inward two territories. After the homeworld defending mission is phase three of the campaign. Normally this continues until you capture one of the enemy homeworlds. You get a game over for losing a total of five battles in this phase. They do not have to be consequtive, and they can be either attack or defense missions, and it doesn't matter if you won or lost in the first two phases of the campaign. You might maximize the chance of your homeworld being attacked by resigning whenever one opponent attacks deeper into your territory, but on attack battles you should attack the other enemy and win, so as not to add to your loss total. Always save in the debriefings after an attack mission. I don't know what the odds are of opponents attacking one territory or another, or what the odds are of which opponent attacks you (for example is it random, or do they tend to retaliate?). In theory they only have to capture three regions before the can attack the home territory, and you can take at most six losses without getting a game over. I'm going to give it a try. Edit: Well now I've noticed an annoying trend, it seems the computer's attack orders are already determined by the time you complete your attack mission. Whether you save during the battle or afterward, it always does the same thing. So if it's determined when you select a territory to attack, I next need to find if their choice is randomly selected then, or if it's deterministic. If it's the latter, it may be a problem getting them to attack the desired territory. However, I think a simple edit to a game file would allow you to lose many more times. Within CAMPAIGN0001.RFH, there's a text file called PhaseRules.txt. On line 36, it says "Lose 5". Changing that to, say, "Lose 25" ought to allow me to resign all the territories. It'll be interesting to see how the game responds to all the territories being captured, especially the home territory.

Ha, I didn't know that could happen either. I have tried to get my own homeworld attack, after a few losses the game gave me a game over. I wonder what the exact condition for it was though: -Was it because I lost too many total battles? -Perhaps it's based on victories minus losses? -Lost too many consecutive battles? -Maybe once a particular territory is lost, you get a game over? If it's the second or third option, then maybe you could get the homeworld attacked if things went just right...

Huh, I've never found this Celimyn-Tuek. I tried flying all around there, attempting to fly through every pixel and still I couldn't find it. Have you been able to locate it in-game now that you know where it is?

Interesting question... I once tried to see if you could get attacked at your own capital, but you get a game over before you have the chance. I'd like to see how this turns out, keep trying!

There's not really a good way to do this that I can think of. You just need to be very vigilant about watching the map. It takes lots of practice. Set bookmarks on your spice fields for sure. One technique that would work is to press the "recall all harvesters" hotkey (B by default) and count them in the refineries, but I strongly recommend against that. It's not worth the lost revenue of interrupting the mining. If you think you lost one just build (or order) another harvester. Even if you didn't lose one you should get your money back, and I expect 9 carryalls and 9 refinery docks should be able to handle 10 harvesters.

That would be a pretty difficult modification. Most mods involve changing skins and models of units, changing their stats and changing what buildings can make. That's just altering data within the game, not code. Garrisoning buildings would be an entirely new mechanic, so that's probably not doable.

You can't tell them to move to the village because the can't stay there. They can only get the weapons with the Go & Search for Equipment command. The problem is their equipment needs to be upgraded one at a time. Krys knives are the weakest weapon and that's what they will try to get first. Once they have them, then they'll want to get Lasguns. After that they will be able to pick up the weirding modules. You could either buy some weaker weapons at the same village and have them pick those up first, or tell them to move to sieches with equipment. If you want you can sent one troop to a siech with a bunch of krys knives and equip that troop with multiple pairs, then they can carry them back to wherever you're training. What I don't know is whether a troop with Krys, Lasguns, and Weirding modules is stronger or just as strong as a troop with only weirding modules...

Not conquering all the Atreides territories on Arrakis is definitely not the problem. You either missed an enemy that needed to be killed or the game somehow messed up detecting the win condition. If you restart the mission and beat it again it will probably be fine.

I sent limiano a message. We should try to get confirmation from everyone before we set another date.

An antivirus program might be interfering with it. Try closing it completely, making sure any background processes are stopped, and start the game again.

That's 7 a.m. here in Chicago, which is probably the hour I'm most consistently asleep given my typical late-night summer schedule. I'm still perfectly willing to play then if that's what you guys want; I don't have any appointments to make or anything. Time to cram in some practicing.

Aw jeez. I've been checking the main thread and for private messages, I didn't know you had scheduled a game. 1000 apologies. I'm open for a game any time except Wednesday night. I'll start checking this thread too and the main board now, I'm less busy at this point than I have been. Send me a message when you chose a time though please! Sorry again.

I'm here, I've been checking the forum every 2-3 days, there's been a lot more activity recently. I'll check in more often now.

I'll join. I could use an excuse to play more often. That plaque looks REALLY cool by the way.

About six years ago I installed NAV on a comp that already had Emperor installed, and after that it wouldn't work. After running the emp exe, nothing happened. I uninstalled Norton and that was that. I got a newer computer not too long after and both were installed simultaneously for a couple years with no problems. I'm not sure what made one of them work and not the other. On my newer computer, I used AVG for a while, but I got rid of that when I got Steam and they conflicted. AVG never caused any problems with Emperor, but I guess I can't speak for the newest version. Now I have Zone Alarm's free firewall and no anti-virus. I've never had any problems and I don't expect to. I run a scan with spybot every... year or so, and it finds up to 60 things that don't appear to be doing any harm. I think the best thing I ever did for my computer's performance & security was to go through every process in the task manager one at a time and uninstall or disable everything that wasn't either a core part of windows or something I could identify and specifically wanted running. It's a chore but some XP computers with 60+ processes running can REALLY improve their performance from this. I only have 19-21 startup processes now.

Those are pretty nice. I'd buy the Dune pins certainly if I found a seller. I guess I'm 10 years too late.

I use a program called VDMSound to get the audio playing; you might try that if nothing else works.

During the first phase of the game, most of your troops should be going there anyway. If you keep them in your base, why would your opponent even bother? He'll just go for harvesters until the economy difference catches up to you and you get overwhelmed. You might be worried about them slipping something into an unprotected base entrance. On many maps it isn't easy to just go around troops in the spice, but you can't depend on that. The solution, I think, is to avoid going high tech too quickly. Take the Atreides for example. Their victory almost always hinges on minos, but it's usually foolish to build them right away. Which would defend you better at the start of the game? 3 minos? or 9 sandbikes and 30 light inf? Minos, kobras, and missile tanks/inkvines are too slow to chase the low tech units. If you build them at first you'll be choosing whether to protect your base, or to protect your spice, and of course the unprotected one is going to be what's attacked. It's crucial to have an army that can move quickly until it's large enough to be spit up. If your strategy early on is to send some to watch the spice and leave some in the base, you'll die. It's pretty amazing how one army can annihilate an equally matched one if first one can fight the second in two groups. Later in the game, spice fields need mostly air defense. You'll have enough troops sprawled around that any ground attack will have to meet them, so your opponent will look for a weakness. Air drones or air dropped devastators can do a lot of damage if they can run right through your AA defenses.

Westwood online is dead. Has been for some time. Follow the instructions in this topic to play online: http://forum.dune2k.com/index.php?topic=15757.0 You don't need to create an account, it's done automatically the first time you log in.

It seems shadows were the problem. I turned them off and the game rarely went below 60. A completely packed screen fully zoomed out only went down to 30. You'd think a game from 2001 would be a piece of cake for 2006 graphics cards but I guess not. How does the game play with an 8800 by the way? I wish I knew more about PCI-e vs AGP back in January 2005 =P

I had 175.16 just before getting the .19 version from NVidia's website. I ran Spybot and Ad-Aware, they didn't find anything. CCleaner got rid of lots of junk but I doubt any of it was affecting the game. I also reinstalled the game. With fraps I see that the frame rate is about 45 when first building the base, and it eventually settles at about 20 over the base when everything is built up, sometimes dropping down to 15. Over an open part of the map with no units the frame rate is always 60. Are these normal levels? The game uses about 160,000K memory, and hovers between 60-80% CPU use. The dxdiag text is attatched. Thanks again for the help XaarKhan.

It's ok on solo because then the game monitors the speed. In online/network play, it just goes as fast as possible so your game speed settings are irrelevant. Turn all the graphics settings up all the way on both computers if you haven't already. You could play online even though both computers are in the same house, that might slow it down some. Otherwise just get accustomed to the fast pace and build as many units as possible quickly to slow it down a bit.

=( I updated DirectX, uninstalled the old drivers, got the newest one from Nvidia (175.19), and to be extra safe closed all background applications. Emperor still slows down to less than half its normal speed anytime 10-20 buildings and units are on the screen. Should I try some older drivers? That's the only potential solution I can think of at the moment. The strange thing to me is how only Emperor seems to be affected. Halo and the games from The Orange Box run much faster, Sim City 4 and Evil Genius run just as well as they ever did. Red Alert 2 on the other hand does have the same symptoms to a degree, but I never played that as often as emp so I don't know if it's worse than before.