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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!ihnp4!mit-eddie!hga
From: hga@mit-eddie.UUCP (Harold Ancell)
Newsgroups: net.games.emp
Subject: Re: PSL Empire bugs(?) & suggestions
Message-ID: <5239@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 6-Sep-85 20:05:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.5239
Posted: Fri Sep  6 20:05:13 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Sep-85 04:22:30 EDT
References: <698@bbnccv.UUCP>
Reply-To: hga@mit-eddie.UUCP (Harold Ancell)
Distribution: net
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 29
Keywords: decompiled empire

In article <698@bbnccv.UUCP> ptraynor@bbnccv.UUCP (Patrick Traynor) writes:
>
>We have had a game going here for a couple of months now, and have found
>a few problems/(needs for improvement):
>
>In our game, war has been virtually impossible.  When attacking a simple
>sector (with only 3-4 military in it) with an attacking army of over 100
>troops, the odds given are in the 90% range, but casualties are usually
>over 50 for the attacking army before the few troops in the victim sector
>are wiped out!  (Occasionally, the few defending troops can even withstand 
>the onslaught and the sector isn't lost.)  Is anyone else having this 
>problem or is this peculiar to my machine?

If you're using the decompiled version of empire on a recent version of
Unix such as 4.2bsd your problem is that the rand() function now returns
a value in the range 0 to 2^31-1 instead of something like 0 to 2^16-1
or 2^15-1.  You should replace every instance of rand with a function
that returns something in the right range.  Do something like

myrand()
{
    return(random() % 32568);
}

(The random function is a much better random number generator.)

This fixs lots of things, and also makes plague possiable.

					- Harold