s2art

Hi; I played both CB 1 and 2 for years on my old Atari 800. It is mothballed at my dads place, half a continent away, so these days I get my fix using a (forgive me) Apple ][ emulator. I think I saw a post for an atari one not sure about the coresponding "ROMs" for CB. Some of your following questions I answered at Tomshardware.com but I dont mind repeating myself. My Post . . . Pasted My God I played Cosmic Balance I and II for years. I love those two games and . . . I remember most of the details for both quite clearly. I'd be happy to try to answer any questions people may have about them. Well there were some definite similarites, but then how could there not be? Mine was on an Atarihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari 800, but who's counting. Hmmm? Play by email? Hmmm? Yes and No. Cosmic Balance was just a starship combat simulator but Cosmic Balance II was just a strategic level game that allowed an albeit lame interface between the two games (save your game, play Cosmic Balance I, okay who won, continue). It must've had 2 Disruptors, they are infinite range and are only effected by speed. They hit in speed ranges 0-20 then 80-99. I cant remember for speeds 100-235, but these were artificial speed attained by ( 1 ) computer controlled ships only ( 2 ) cheating. IIRC the "universe" in CB 1 was either 4096^2 or 8192^2. If you wrapped around the computer ships would turn around. Also when you got to the edges and in particular the corners the ship would, for some reason (on the atari version anyway) not be displayed starting in the middle of the screen; it was weird. I must say it's nice to have found other enthusiast for the two games The game strongly favors fast ships. I believe the ten turn rule is an artifical kludge they put in the game so that people would make slow ones. I'll try to dig up some old designs. Disruptors hit in the speed ranges 0 to 20 then again at 80 to 100. Speeds in the 100 to 235, I can't remember, but these speeds can only be attained by illegal ships run by the computer. Crew efficiency increases the range of (non-disruptor) direct fire weapons. I havent tested the effect on disruptors. Yes, for fast side-firing ships the side that will ALWAYS be away from the enemy need not be that strong. The game has two formulas for direct fire weapons. One is used by light phasers and one by the rest (except disruptors which have infinite range). The difference in ECCM vs ECM will reduce the range of the weapon or not, depending. ECCM does not enhanse guided weapons. I'll try to dig up my game notes on this. BTW Seekers utterly and completely suck. You can only launch one per turn, and how you divy them up in the racks (light verses heavy) is how many IN TOTAL you carry. Would that what you divied to each rack was what you could launch PER TURN, then that would be cool. But it ain't, so skip 'em. This I'm not entirely sure. Planets have 50% armour but they DO eventually fall down. I''ve fought computer run ships with like 20% armour and it seems they took more punishment than expected. Bare in mind that the rules state that even though a system is hit it can still survive unscathed. Really though the question is how does damage work? The question then is if say 3 points of damage get through is it three rolls or one for this damage. If it hits, say, a tractor beam (using 4 spaces) will three points of damage be enough to destroy it? If you want me to, I can speculate about all this. In other news Wikipedia finally has an article about Cosmic Balance I (search THE cosmic balance), if you look through the article history you'll see I tried to post a bugs and exploits section which was rejected. So Ill reproduce it here (in raw WIKI format): ==Bugs and Exploits== 1. When setting up a scenario, Cosmic Balance asks you to choose your tech level before it asks you if you wish to use a saved ship. Furthermore, it does not check if your tech level matches that of the saved ship. This bug leads to the following exploit:<br /> * create a tech level 6 corvette with hull set to 15 and save,<br /> * reload the game, choose tech level 1 and load your corvette,<br /> * reduce hull to 5 and give your corvette a warp drive or cargo hold and save,<br /> * reload the game, choose tech level 6 and load your corvette,<br /> * remove the warp drive or cargo hold and set HULL to 20 and save,<br /> * repeat this process.<br /> Using this method you can give any class of ship a maximum 255 points of space.<br /> 2. The following bug occurs with ships that have a maximum speed of 64:<br /> * the ship must be stopped and at speed 0,<br /> * give orders to increase speed to 32,<br /> * give orders to eliminate previous changes,<br /> * all power that was required to accellerate the ship to 32 will be returned for use, as per normal, but an additional 2 points of power will be created on top of that. So have I yacked enough?