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You can really destroy reunion if you learn the best way to go about winning it. i can beat it in about 2 hours. I have a weird obsession with this game...every year or so i play it and refine my strategy for beating it lol. i set the taxes to oppressing right at the start then with my first bit of cash i buy the second level builder commander then i buy 4 hospitals, a vehicle plant, a stadium, 4 food resources, and 36 residential buildings ( yes 36 ). while keeping my power levels above 50% of course, which i think takes 2-3 nuclear generators. during this i set my taxes to very difficult, which becomes necessary after building the residential buildings or your colony will stop growing. This is all before i even get a researcher or anything else. This can give you about 10k credits every day. Now i buy the second level researcher and the first level pilot. I research satellites and buy 3 of them. I then launch one at the moon and then at zeus. I send my researcher to study electronics so he can research colony center when it becomes available. I put a mine on the moon. The moon is important cuz it uses the wind power plants. but doesnt require tons of medical plants and hospitals to maintain a large population. so build a colony on the moon first. Just as a side note i haven't built any mines or derricks at this point. on the moon you build a builder plant and a vehicle plant, a stadium, a leisure center, a church, a park, a university, 4 hospitals, 4 food resources, and 36 residential buildings. While keeping power levels above 50% with wind power, which takes about 8 or so wind power plants. then move on to zeus's moon penelope and and do the same thing and then onto amnesty 2 moon mir and repeat except you need to double the number of hospitals and build as many medicine plants so 8 of each. with all that youll be making anywhere from 20-30k credits a day. now start building mines on your home planet and putting miner droids in them. then move onto mir and build mines and a spaceport repeat on penelope then repeat on the moon. sometime in the middle of building the mines you should visit jade the last date possible is 2928-5-9-12 i always wait till the last moment to visit jade and get the communicator. once you get the transport ships buy ehm and start transporting all the resources to your home planet. You'll be making tons of cash by this point. as the money becomes available buy all the best commanders and you also need to build 80-100 derricks (yes i'm serious) all on your home planet. This takes a ton of nuclear generators as well but its necessary to make enough detoxin. sometimes around this point i buy another 36 buildings on the moon and on the main planet with another 4 hospitals and 4 food resources to go along with them. but you also have to drop your taxes to difficult and maybe even high for your population to grow any more, So there are trade offs. Again youll be making plenty of cash at this point so start building a constant stream of hunters. i normally get around 30-50 before the first attack. once the jaanosians are destroyed build 2 more colonies on there planets kepler and russel. Russel is an amazing planet for energon. you dont need to make them money producers just build all the happy making structures like the stadium, university and leisure center and then set there taxes to oppressive and they will grow slowly and wont bug you too much with there needs. build mines on them of course and get miner droids in those mines. You can get battle tanks before you even get twin laser guns if your quick enough. With this start you should have no problems crushing this game if you follow it closely and make sure you get all the good technology later on, just keep transporting resources and keep a constant stream of units producing. You quickly see that the real limit to how many units you can produce is how long it takes twin laser guns to build lol. By the end you can easily have 50 hunters 50 fighers 20 destroyers 10 cruisers and 50 missile tanks, Which is way more than enough to win the game. Ive left a lot of little details out like how exactly to get battle tanks and aircraft and the radio and all that stuff...but its covered elsewhere so get that info where its already posted

[dosraider]

Buy a new keyboard.
Your punctuation and enter keys are missing strokes.

[_r.u.s.s.]

i shall use this text as lore ipsum for my webdesigning tests

Hi, i have a crash problem while playing reunion. Everything works fine until i start my first "colony", then it always crashes when i click on the "ship" menu.
Does anyone know a workaround or fix?

It seems like I've missed out on getting the battle tanks in the second system. I've even killed the Kalls without battle tanks. I only have troopers. There's no way I can reach the Morgrul's main base with only troopers, though. Is there a way of adding the battle tank to my save-game file?

Thanks,
warhawk

[areyounuts]

I don't get why everyone is raving about this game. It sucks hard.

1. Time limit to do everything, and no way to pause or slow down. That would be fine if not for...

2. Terrible documentation that doesn't really explain anything.

3. Endlessly increasing uber-stacks of enemies = game cheats against you. Nothing stops ye olde rape traine.

4. Extremely repetitive gameplay due to an asstastic interface. You want to fetch minerals from your home planet's moon? Okay, go to the fleet window (1 click), pick the trade fleet you want (1 click), order them to take off (1 click), enter the course set window (1 click), pick your destination (1 click), and wait for them to get there. Then you have to manually land (1 click), manually go to the transfer screen (1 click), manually transfer what you want to the ship (several clicks), exit the transfer screen (1 click), take off (1 click), set course back to the home planet (2 clicks), wait again, then land (1 click), then manually go to the transfer screen (1 click), manually transfer what you want off the ship (several clicks), exit the transfer screen (1 click), and then you're done. Total clicks to get from A to B to A again with cargo: 16 or more. During this time, other things are happening, you'll be getting other messages, and you might be managing another fleet in the same way as well. What could have been a simple task is a massive journey of clicking through a dozen windows repeatedly.

The Amiga game Deuteros, which came out half a decade before this one, starts off with a similar click-heavy interface, but it then lets you research automated shuttles which reduces this stuff to zero clicks. In fact, I get the impression that this game is trying really hard to be like Deuteros, and failing at it really badly.

5. It's possible to make mistakes without even realizing it, putting the game into an unwinnable state. You won't discover this until potentially hours later when you can't proceed. If you didn't keep a series of paranoid backup saves at regular intervals, you have to restart from zero.

6. Bugs, bugs, bugs. Also, an embarrassing amount of misspellings (phisics? colonysible?).

7. Every click, EVERY CLICK, is accompanied by a female voice announcing what you just did. After about 5 minutes, it makes you want to find the bitch and slit her throat.

8. You'll never know what you're supposed to build to support your planet, since there's no indicators of how adequate your facilities are. You won't know you need more farms until starvation has already begun. There's nothing in the manual explaining how many homes to how many farms is an appropriate number. In fact, there's nothing in the manual about most of the buildings, what they do, what they're actually good for. And the in-game descriptions leave *everything* to be desired.

9. When you get a new technology that you can research, the game announces it by telling you that the said technology "is fully researched". But it's only at that point that you can START researching it.

10. Satellite carriers to carry the satellites. Was this really REALLY necessary? Honestly? Especially given that each one can only carry one satellite anyway? It seems like the developers entered into a conspiracy to make launching satellites as difficult as possible. When the game first starts and you get your first satellite, you are LED TO BELIEVE that all you have to do is locate the planet you want a satellite on, and click the satellite button to launch one there. Then the game destroys that satellite, says NO THAT IS WRONG and makes you research and build satellite carriers, which you have to navigate manually like the trade ships, making it a click-fest all over again.

11. The only strategy guide written for this game implies that the only real way to win is to know in advance what is coming and build up your own uber fleet of death literally as soon as you are able to build the necessary craft. There is apparently no "right" way to play the game except to fail repeatedly and then invoke your in-game psychic powers to know what's about to happen. "Why are we building this massive invasion fleet, sir?" "Oh, to destroy the enemies we don't know we have yet, but which will start a rape train on us in about 5 minutes when we discover them."

12. These rape trains are triggered by exploring the wrong places at the wrong times, after which you're screwed if you don't have aforementioned uber fleet of death. This discourages the player from exploring at all.

13. There really is no story to this game, notwithstanding the intro. It's just a series of pointless, meaningless wars that either end with you sending an uber fleet to their home world, or them sending an endless rape train to yours.

14. Did I mention rape trains?

15. Did I mention LOTS OF BUGS THAT CRASH THE GAME? This is not attributable to dosbox, I assure you. It's just as unstable in real genuine DOS 6.22

I submit that everyone who says this game is good is either saying so because they perceive that everyone else thinks so (herd mentality) or else they remember it being good when they were young children in the early 90s, back in the days when gaming technology sucked and it was easy to mistake "complicated and stupid" for "deep and rich". The game is ass, and that's why no sequel was made, and that's why Amnesty Design changed their name to Digital Reality after they made it. To disavow that they ever did make it.

[dosraider]

I get a distinct feeling you didn't like the game.

[tag8833]

I haven't played the game in a while, and decided to start it up, and I was working fine until suddenly I started getting weird numbers. The price of satellites went up to 26,000,000,000 or something like that. When I tell it to buy 10, it buys 8 and costs me -46,000,000,000. When I attacked jade, the space force causalities were -2,000 hunters. So when I went back with my ground forces, the 2,000 hunters destroyed my space force.

Once I save a game in which an overrun occurs, it stays screwed up, and I can't tell when they are occurring.

I've run it before with dosbox .72 and it worked fine. I tried it with dosbox .73 and that didn't help.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Originally Posted by tag8833

I haven't played the game in a while ... suddenly I started getting weird numbers ...
Once I save a game in which an overrun occurs, it stays screwed up, and I can't tell when they are occurring.

I've run it before with dosbox .72 and it worked fine. I tried it with dosbox .73 and that didn't help.

Anyone have any thoughts?

First off, I just want to say a big thanks to all you people who keep this site running and the games available.

Now, the first time I played Reunion I did not know that there is a speed up feature and I also did not notice these "bugs" that are so often mentioned on the forum. Obviously, I lost the first couple of tries at Reunion because - well, like youmustbenuts said in section 11 of his/her rant: you have to know what's going to happen ahead of time. So, I tried playing the game again by using the sequence of saves which I had put together. It was *only* after I began using the speed up "feature" that I started noticing weird stuff going on - like losing a battle involving 8 of my fighters against 1 of their fighters and then getting a report that I lost 2000+ fighters , or that one where you try to invade Jade and there's a fleet of 200 Kall fighters that doesn't jive with your spy's report of the Kall fleet. After a few repetitions of reloading, speeding up and running into bugs, and paying attention to different counters, I came to the idea that these "bugs" are really just variations of one bigger counting critter which you will not see if you let the game run at its own pace - but which will surely show up as soon as you use the speed up feature.

I hope that helps.

I only ever made it to the point where I attacked the last opposing alliance race's homeworld (the homeworld of the race in system 6? with a picture of some kind of man bull in their description). I would win the space skirmish and I would win the ground battle itself but then some kind of error report would be displayed along with the victory report and the game would freeze. I briefly considered picking up again from an incorrupt save but the joy of the game had left me. For one, the resource transport system is a pain in the you know what; and second, I find it unfeasible to amass resources at the game's own pace (without using the "bug-inducing" speed up feature.) Ah, what a pity.

[tag8833]

Originally Posted by dosboxnewbie

came to the idea that these "bugs" are really just variations of one bigger counting critter which you will not see if you let the game run at its own pace - but which will surely show up as soon as you use the speed up feature.

I've played the game dozens and dozens of times and never encountered that error before. This is the first time I've run into it, but also the first time I've tried to play the version availible here.

I'll dig out my original CD and see if that version has the same bug.