Questions About the Coming Gold Patch

[Clovis]

My sons and I play SE IV, and I just bought the Gold (1.60) a few days ago. Having trouble with the following:

(1) In QuickStart games, some races' AI_Design_Creation files do not recognize the primary strategy "Drone Attack" listed in the sections under Anti-Ship Drone and Anti-Planet Drone. I stop the error Messages (which do not crash the game) by substituting "Ram" for "Drone Attack" in those two lines of each file -- is this a fully valid solution that preserves the AI's drone tech functionality?;

(2) Trying to implement TCP-IP on a two-machine micro-network with P75's running W98SE and W95, the TCP-IP Player cannot contact the TCP-IP host when directions are followed precisely. [A previous problem preventing the machines from loading the game at all was solved by installing/reinstalling Dial-Up Networking and/or the TCP-IP protocol. I have only seen that solved problem mentioned with respect to the Gold demo -- are others encountering it with the full Version?]

[BTW the machines -- both P75's -- are also configured for IPX and we have played 1.49 (and now 1.60) more or less successfully on them for weeks by loading the game from a shared drive on one of them, then both players saving to that drive, etc. (this saves laboriously sending the player files back and forth). However, the following additional observations were made on this micro-network configuration.]

(3) Trades offered and gifts/tributes made between player partners (non-AI) frequently seem to 'get lost' for 2, 3 or more turns, and sometimes altogether, then they will appear in the players' logs ignoring any causes for several turns' delays. Is this enemy intelligence at work?

(4) Sizeable planet populations have disappeared once or twice with no mention of the causes in the player's log. Could enemy intelligence block notification of a massive attack on a planet?

(5) With 'Players Can View Scores of All Empires' set as active, a few score turns into our latest game the scores and various achievement stats of all races in the game suddenly plummeted to about 1/3 their previous levels in one turn, erasing a sizeable lead by the sole aggressive empire AI (in this case Xiati) and putting both players, the one AI, and three AI neutrals at about the same level of scores. This seemigly affected the graph charts only -- the tabular score chart may have retained its data. Is there some bug that causes the scoring and recordkeeping algorithm (or the formats used to report its results) to break down sometimes?

Or perhaps did one of these little old machines' computational abilities fall down on the job? One is running W98 w/ 32 MB RAM and the other is running W98 with 48 MB RAM -- both of them are machines I pieced together for my young sons from spart parts.

Great work on this game everyone - you have made a convert of a long-time Stars! player and are now making inroads against my number one time-sucker, Asheron's Call!