So, here is the report for Economic War.
Bottom LineEverything seems to be working now.
The technical gobbledy gookThe shiplist has been fixed and now generates no errors when I run the server. (Thanks, Bonk!) I seem to get properly generated AI opponents in Romulan space now. (My mistake for doing most of my playtest in the western side of the map the day before the server went live, after I made a last minute change in the shiplist donation scheme.)
I created accounts for (almost) all the cartels last night and tried to run missions in the various empire/cartel relationship hexes. I was especially sure to hit neutral/neutral hexs, since they seemed to be the worsst hexs for getting no DV shifts last night. I get proper DV shifts in all cases.
The PrayerI'm hoping all the problems last night resulted from my last minute swap to using the Roms as the Fed "PF" donor instead of using the TigerHeart cartel, as I've done in the past. The success of my past servers, which all used a pretty heavy donation scheme, was likely a lucky accident of the fact that the server seems to rarely ever try generating a cartel opponent for an AI mission. Thus, it never tried to generate a TigerHeart opponent and the problem went unnoticed by me. In this case, however, with a good Prime turnout, Romulan AI was being generated all over the map and missions were dying left and right. If you played on any of my past servers and ever had a mission close right after generation, perhaps you had hit upon the rare case of a server trying to give you a TigerHeart opponent.
I'm less certain why DV's weren't shifting last night. They shifted fine last week and before during playtest, and they shifted fine last night after my shiplist tweaks. Perhaps this too was a result of my last minute shiplist change. It does not make sense that a shiplist problem would cause DV errors for missions that work, but maybe the server was spitting out so many error messages trying to generate Romulan AI that it was bogging down and not updating properly. I did notice last night that the hexs took a little longer to update after a mission than I would like, but for now I'm putting that down to the fact that I was having to run the game on the same machine that was running the server on. Missions alsot took a second to appear after moving.
The PlanMy plan is to start the server tonight (Monday, 8 May) at 8PM EST. All of your accounts are gone, but since you mostly weren't getting any missions or DV shifts anyway then hopefully this will not upset you much.
You will also need to reinstall EconWar. Don't panic! This is easy. You're going to have to install a few updates anyway as the cartels merge, so this is a good chance to try and learn how easy it is to do.
1) double click the "FromEW" shortcut on your desktop. Your game is now back the way it was before the first install.
2) Go into "X:/Program Files/Taldren Software Inc/Starfleet Command Orion Pirates" and delete the PirateMaker folder
3) Download the zip file
ftp://www.fourpower.com/pub/EWInstall2.zip4) Unzip the contents into X://Program Files/Taldren Software Inc/Starfleet Command Orion Pirates. UNZIP!!! DO NOT DRAG AND DROP THE CONTENTS FROM THE WINZIP SCREEN!!!! This should put a new folder in the base SFCOP folder called PirateMaker.
5) Go into PirateMaker and you will see two files: ToEW and FromEW. Double click the ToEW to install Economic War. I suggest putting a shortcut to this bat file on your desktop, but the original must remain within PirateMaker in the base SFCOP folder.
6) Log on and play! Use the FromEW bat file to uninstall EW. Your game will revert to where it was.