Main VGAP4 page

Diplomat simulator - a battle simulation utility for VGA Planets version 4

Latest release is Version 3.12 (April 2008).

Diplomat is basically a script generator. It uses the scripts to Master a new universe with all units in the same location, whereupon they fight. Since the combat is resolved by the real Host.exe program, and viewed with the normal VCR program, the results should be true to life.
I've found that sharing the code freely has brought huge and unlooked for returns. People post me corrections and suggestions - even entire new features such as translations. The program has become a group achievement, and an example of the co-operative group spirit found throughout VGAP players.

An alternative combat simulator:

alkirej has created a web based combat simulator tool. It offers an alternative to Diplomat but runs on a remote server rather than your own PC.

Important notes

• If you've never installed Diplomat before, you need to install various DLL's and stuff. See further down this document for the full install instructions.
• If you're just updating from a previous version of Diplomat, all you need to download is diplomat312.zip. Note: this now contains ten files: boarding.xls, diplomat.exe, diplomat.hlp, diplomat.csv, gpl.txt, DiplomatPicture.jpg, map2ps.exe, Ground_Assault_Simulator.xls, and two .dat files. Unzip all ten files to your \planets4\ directory.
• Diplomat generally requires the latest version of Master.exe, V4Host.exe and VCR.exe to run properly. The latest versions of these are available from Tim Wisseman's Version 4 pages .

What's new in 3.12 (April 2008)

This version of Diplomat supports most of the new ship and wing combat options in the new Host. (Unfortunately some, like "Escort target", can't be scripted.)
Many of the other ideas came from Thriyon and Gabor Teroe.

Add Ship screen clarifications: cost is now in bold, and a different font colour, to make it easier to find. Tips have been modified to help people understand the new combat options. There's even a new screen explaining how mobility works.
Add ship screen: Number of High Guard saved and shown correctly.
Add Ship Screen: Avoid Base option re-enabled, Avoid Fighters option removed. I had got confused between Ship and Wing options.
Add Ship screen: Attack and Flee options are no longer mutually exclusive. It turns out that you can still shoot while fleeing! Flee is related to the ship's movement, not its weapons. To match the new client, these are now called Aggressive and Retreat.
New: Add Ship screen shows hyperdrive range and fuel cost for this hull when you select a hyperdrive. This should be a really useful tool for hyper-races.
Fixed: The number of colonists in a base is now written correctly to a script. Previously, an error here meant that base ion cannon were not being powered correctly.
Changed: Add Wing screen - "Bang per buck" score - I have increased the weighting of long range beams / missiles. Particularly with the new Host combat code, where they maneuvre intelligently and stay out of range of return fire, such fighters have a huge advantage.
Weapon tip for Gatling Phasor updated - it can now hit fighters. Tips for certain engine types also updated - they give a mobility bonus during battles to help the ship e.g. maintain standoff. (R50 Mega Fusion, and the three Thrusters.)
New: Mobility Meter - this indicates how maneuverable your ship is in a battle. If your ship has better mobility than the enemy, it is likely to obey its orders well and obey standoff, etc commands. If the enemy is more maneuverable, your ship will act like a slug and the enemy has the initiative. This feature was added because mobility (ie acceleration) is an important concept in the new host combat code.

What was new in 3.11 (December 2007)

Changed: layout of the Add Ship screen. There are so many variables to set now, I have divided the screen approximately in half. In the upper half are the key things like weapons which you definitely need to define for combat! In the darker, lower side of the screen are more obscure variables and readouts which don't need to be set if you just want a quick simulation. By clustering the commonly used buttons together, there should be less mousework.
Fixed: occasional crash when editing a Wing just after opening Diplomat and loading a new sim. Found and fixed by Thriyon
Fixed: Wings' high guard were being saved wrongly in sim files. Found and fixed by Thriyon
Updated: Boarding.xls, the spreadsheet bundled in the Zip file. Jochen Schwarz has modified it to include IMT; Crystals' boarding laser immunity; defending crew 5x bonus; similar defending colonist bonus; Aczanny security device; improved damage calculator from boarding lasers; general improvements to usability.
Fixed: Indexing error resulting in clicking on one object selecting another, in the overview screen. Reported by Magik, fixed by Thriyon.
New ship combat switches: Guard base; anti fighter; power boost mode; closest first; blaster cannon power boost mode. This is to support the new combat code in host 213.
Added: "no engines" option for ships (suggested by Gabor Toeroe)
New wing combat switches: Guard base; avoid base
Fixed: Wings' recharge value wasn't consistently correct. Fixed by Thriyon
Changed: Add Wing screen selects owner using a drop-down menu like the Add Ship screen, instead of entering a player number. (Idea by Gabor Toeroe.) Noticed an unused variable, fuel, while doing this - removed it to streamline program.
Added: Ship skill and command code can now be specified. (Suggested by Gabor Toeroe.)
Updated: Wing tips updated. (An obscure screen accessed from the Add Wing screen with tips for newbies.)
Removed / merged: The buttons for Exit without adding ship and Create ship. These are now one command button called Add ship.
Tweaked: the mc and duranium costs for ships with Organic Armour are now nil. (Fixed by Thriyon)

What was new in 3.10 (September 2006)

New: In the basescreen you can now specify the number of cities and factories. (As G Teroe points out, the effectiveness of lasercannon depends on their charge rate, which depends on the number of cities, factories and ioncannon.)
Also fixed some bugs to do with saving / reloading bases to / from saved .sim files.

What was new in 3.0.9 (August 2006)

Fixed: (Bug found by Thriyon) The increased randomness introduced in 3.0.8, depends on using semi random locations around the Echo map. One of these did not coincide with a planet. This made simulations with bases 'problematic', as Thriyon politely put it.

What was new in 3.08 (July 2006)

diplomat.csv updated so Diplomat recognises extra ship in IMT racepack
diplomat.csv updated to correct missing ships in Robot racepack (error noticed by Thriyon)
Diplomat now allows wings smaller than 10 fighters. (This was a pointless 'helpful' feature which actually hindered people. Another problem spotted by Thriyon)
Error in Attackplan switch fixed. Standoff range now works. Spotted and explained to me by Gabor Toroe.
More silly names!
(Idea from Sebastian Ulmer:) The x,y co-ordinates of combat are now semi random. It is suspected that Host.exe uses these as the 'seeds' for some random numbers in combat, and because Diplomat always used the same x,y the results of simulations were sometimes misleading. The new co-ordinates are a set of 11, scattered across the Echo Cluster map used by Diplomat. Sebastian has done some checks with the new version, and reports that Wing behaviour is now much more varied.
(Idea by Thriyon:) following changes to Host, which make food stockpiles important, bases in simulations get 100,000 food so there are no unrealistic effects like population collapse, from their population starving.
(Idea by Thriyon:) When saving a simulation, Diplomat asks if you want to re-use the previous filename.
Ground Combat simulator improved. This is the major upgrade. Minor tweaks: terminology brought up to date (KKK mode changed to CrushKillDestroy); I noticed that it didn't allow for 20% of a base's HG staying behind when the base attacked. But mainly, the new Capture mode is now supported. As a result, the screen is more complex - you have more choices - but it should help you narrow down what you need to do to capture prisoners. While at it, I added all the combat modes, built some extra tips into the analyses, and rechecked the algorithms matched Tim's latest ones.

What was new in 3.07 (Feb 2005)

Updated: Gabor Toro's Ground Assault Simulator now includes mode 5, "Capture". [Tim introduced a new GA mode: CAPTURE.]
New: Ships can be set to use the new "avoid base" option.
Fixed: The default crew number of imported qsp ships was "one". If you made sims with that ship, it always ends up captured because this lonely crewman gets killed very fast ;-) (this is a evil one... i just spend one hour searching the reason why *some* ship always get captured...) - Andreas Benne
New: I received the following suggestion from Andrew Hirst: "Make sim file names related to the subject matter." Now, a typical .sim file name defaults to Player1'srace-vs-Player2'srace-Date.sim, e.g. Feds-vs-Crystals-5-2-2005.sim
Fixed: The switches about including large weapon/engine-costs are always set to on if you open a ship screen, regardless how you set them before. - Pointed out by Thriyon.

What was new in 3.06 (Jan 2005)

New: Gabor Toro's GA simulator added - note: this needs Excel 2000, it won't work with Excel 97. Filename: Ground_Assault_Simulator.xls. This needs to be in the \Planets4 directory. It can work as a standalone file, or be called directly from Diplomat. It is more comprehensive and accurate than the old one built into Diplomat. It has received high praise for accuracy from several Beta users (mainly Lizards after prisoners!)
New Exotic Tech scriptable: Fighter ECM. (Are there any other combat ones I've missed?) (Suggested by Thriyon)
RCS ship comments updated following corrections from Thriyon.
Certain Ship Devices were not being displayed correctly. I found the reason and corrected it. Thanks to Thriyon for pointing this one out.
4 Med units added to RCS Lotus cargo so its Exotic Hull will be active during combat.
The standard engine on Aczanny ships is the Transwarp, rather than Tylium Thruster. Most of the time they will use these engines. (Suggested by Sebastian)

What was new in 3.05 (December 2004)

New: Multilingual: limited support for Catalan, Spanish (translations by David Palma) and German (Andreas Benne). Weapon tips, and some other strings, can be shown in language of your choice using a new Language option in the Options menu.
New: comments on specific hulls appear when you select a hull (English language only)
Changed: Add Ship screen: "Fire Ion Cannon at ships with shields still up" now defaults to ON (idea by Thriyon)
Changed: Reorganised main screen so the list is larger - you can see more things at once now.
Changed: Some cosmetic fixes on odd screens.
Changed: Patched a bug with exporting QSP files which could cause Diplomat to occasionally crash.
Changed: Ship Experience now defaults to 0, instead of 100, to reflect normal battle conditions.
Changed: Following research by Jason Northrup, ship ID's are now scripted as "RANDOM" instead of "NOTRANDOM". This ensures "random" attack vectors don't depend on the order ships are scripted in, and should make battles less deterministic, so the results actually differ a bit from simulation to simulation.

Diplomat is a group effort and people like David and Andreas have helped its development many times. They contacted me and offer their time and services for free. I would like to thank them for all their help!

What was new in 3.04 (July 2004) - lots of annoying things fixed

Fixed: race 1's hulls appearing twice in the Hull List on the Add Ship form. (As a byproduct this has speeded up loading of that screen.)
Improved: the Edit Ship screen was taking ages to load. This is much faster now.
Improved: some screens' layouts were slightly obscuring legends next to buttons etc.
Fixed: allows you to edit PD now, and remembers the changes. (As reported by Thriyon, Hilmar Benne, et alia.)
Fixed: Exit Without Adding Ship button takes ages.
Fixed: PD weapons were showing nonsense like "Max: 5; fitted: 10" when you opened the Add Ship screen. The total number now tracks the true number.
Fixed: you can no longer fit negative numbers of Small Weapons (!)
Unable to reproduce problem: VCR.exe shows the wrong type of PD being used. Ie, you fit Holodecoys, VCR.exe shows 35mm Vulcans. All I can say is, the scripts generated by Diplomat seem to be correct...
Removed: Mivorari hulls have been commented out from the diplomat.csv file until that race pack is released. It just confuses things to leave them there.
Improved: temporary boot-up picture is larger and thus more interesting.

Notes:
Picture DiplomatSplashScreen.bmp (230kB) can be deleted from your \Planets4 directory.
Diplomat now needs DiplomatPicture.jpg (83kB) in the \Planets4 directory. It is in the latest .zip file.
diplomat.csv is slightly different and you should overwrite the one in your \Planets4 directory with this one.

Not fixed yet: A number of people have reported that mc costs (and some say mineral costs), are not consistent when you create / edit / re-edit ships. Rather annoying! This is related to another cmplaint, tht the "include Free Stuff" switches aren't saved when you leave the Add Ship screen. I have really got to improve that sometime. (The following is musings to myself:) I can see that there is some kind of problem with Free Weapons and Free Engines (check boxes on the Add Ship screen). Sometimes subroutine "UpdateShipCost" takes these into account... sometimes not. And I ought to add a memory of whether the ships had free weapons or not into their Class, so it is stored when you save/load sim files and QSP files. (Actually it is irelevant to QSP's... maybe I just need to store it as a global variable or an option in diplomat.csv).

What was new in 3.03 (Feb 2004)

Fixed: Point Defense bug. All PD's were being scripted one tech too low.
Improved: interface to Shipcalc, i.e. import / export of shipcalc.qsp files.

Note: there was no 3.02 release

What was New in 3.01 (Feb 2004)

90% Declan's work again!

• Fixed: No longer (wrongly) asks for MSSTDFMT.DLL. (Declan removed all the invalid reference DLL's that the project had included but was not using.)
• Improved: Player Race Selection Screen: The List boxes have been converted to Combo boxes and the full list of available playes can all be view on one drop down menu.
• Improved: The Fleet Wide attack Screen: The Race Text box has been replaced with a combo box to select the Race Player. The 1,2,3 & 4 numbers to indicate a race type have been replaced with the selected races name for easier use. i.e. I keep forgetting who I have place in the Race 4 selection. Hot Key and Tab order has been placed into the screen for keyboard users. The Screen has also been rearranged.
• Improved: The Add Ship Screen: The Race Number Text Box (1,2,3 & 4) has been replaced with a Combo box indicating the selected races' names.
• Improved: Main screen - menu options have been given more explicit descriptions, to help new users. ("What's a QSP file?")

Note: Steve Nuffer found that Weapon Tips did not appear. We didn't get to the bottom of why, but he found a way round this: "Got it working.  I moved the directory as another user.  Logged in again which recreated my <userID> directory, and it worked." Ie,

C:/Documents and Settings/<userID> to
C:/Documents and Settings/<userID>.old

What was new in 3.0 (Feb 2004)

• Debugged and error trapped by Declan O'Connor. Declan asked me for the source code one day and began sending back modified code modules. He is a professional programmer who has tidied things up, got rid of GoTos, added Hot Keys to many screens. He's done so many behind the scenes improvements I decided it was worthy of describing as a major revision, thus this is Diplomat 3.0 not 2.6. Ironically most of his changes won't be noticed by normal users, but believe me, Diplomat is a lot more robust and faster to use now. I cannot describe how much help he has been!
• New look Add Ship screen, to make it easier to use, and it loads quicker, and spurious white boxes no longer appear as the screen loads. ( <-- Declan's work. )
• Sensible Tab order for mouse-haters, in a fashion that makes creating a ship as quick as possible. Try using the Tab, Space Bar, Enter Key and any Alt^(x) keys that are underlined. ( <-- Declan's work. )
• Diplomat is now Open Source - a GNU GPL (General Public License) statement has been added to the code modules, simplifying the re-use etc of the code by anyone who wants to fiddle with it. I have shared the code with maybe 5 people over the years, and every time I got really useful feedback / code changes, and never any problems. I am very impressed by this co-operative coding thing.
• Updated help file
• Small Weapons tips updated to match recent Host changes
• Ship Experience added. Saves, loads into / out of .sim files. Diplomat still works with old format .sim files, sets Experience to a default 100 if it wasn't set before. See Tim's Large Weapons help pages for information on how Experience influences combat.
• Sektat's improved boarding simulator added. It is an external Excel spreadsheet (boarding.xls) which must be in the same directory as Diplomat. It is called from Diplomat from the Tools menu (as  "improved boarding calculator"). It is included in the .zip file. Excel is a better medium for calculating this kind of algorithm than a Visual Basic screen, and I am very glad to offload this simulator onto Sektat! I've had more (polite) complaints about the inaccuracies of the old Boarding Calculator screen than any other part of Diplomat. it's still there, but I will probably remove it one day.
• Ships can now be given the command "do not attack disabled ships", please note this is not fully tested for load / save in .simfiles. (Requested by Lordfire et alia, advice supplied from Jason Northrup and Tim on how to do it.)

Some minor stuff:

• Add Wing screen: Fighter beams and misiles were showing "0" damage to ships' shields and armour a lot. This was usually a rounding error. I've added a decimal point to show they do some damage.
• Ships' "random" attack vectors are more random now, following tips from Jason Northrup on scripting true randomness.
• Interoperability problems with ShipCalc resolved. (Swapping of SIM files between the two programs following changes to Planets' directory structure a few Hosts back.)
• Diplomat has a new menu item under Files: imports a QSP file (called shipcalc.qsp) directly from ShipCalc.

Details of Declan O'Connor's changes:
Add Base form:

Hot Keys Added
Tab Order Fixed
Small change to the way Defense Base Structures are displayed to get the Hot Keys to work.

Exotic Tech Form GUI Changes:

Hot Keys Added
Tab Order Fixed

Add Pod Form GUI Changes:

Hot Keys Added
Tab Order Fixed

Add Ship form:

Loads quicker. It still takes about a second to load the first time due to the amount of stuff it has to do. (Declan removed a lot of redundant, repeated calls in unecessary loops.) "I am just trying to... remove the dead wood from the organic growth of code over the past few years", he wrote politely.
The E&xit type commands (&) were not working in the Check boxes because you were using labels beside the Check boxes. So I have removed the unnecessary labels and placed the label's caption into the Check box's caption and extended the size of the Check box so that the hot-keys work on them (and the caption of the Check box can be seen). In short they work now.
Placed some code behind the radio buttons to uncheck the other radio button when the first is checked i.e. When you click "Attack All" the "Flee" radio button is unchecked and visa versa.

Hot Keys Added
Tab Order Added in the way one would add a ship
All in all, it will look like there has been no changes to a mouse user but if you are a keyboard user then big things will open up to up and you will be able to add a ship in a couple of key strokes. When you get the form back just try using the Tab, Space Bar, Enter Key and any Alt^(x) keys that are underlined.
Form re-arranged a little to make best use of space available
Added option to have no shields
Following discussions with a Beta Tester group, changed the way in which you add the PD. The idea is to help you add PD weapons faster. It does not default into all the slots whatever you place in slot 1. I have added buttons down along the side and it will copy the PD down into each of the available free slots. (There is also a speed
improvement that I do in my own code here.)
Shield Generator Changed to a Combo BoxEngines Changed to a Combo Box.
Shield Generator Combo Box Extended to Show all Shields
Engine Combo Box Extended to Show all Engines
Ship List Extended into Freed up space (Now fits 10, perfect for the Borg players)
Generator Changed to a Combo Box.
Generator Combo Box Extended to Show all Generators
On Loading a Ship: The Max Number of Engines and Generators that will be on the ship are now displayed.
When you edit a Ship I noticed that no matter how often you try to edit the Hull type you cannot not. You can hit the Save button and nothing it is the same ship hull (It is more noticable when you have the number of Engines and Generators displayed Or it was to me cause I was testing it). Therefore to avoid confusion when you edit a ship the Hull List is disabled and re-enabled when you create a new ship.

Ground Assault form:

Some Error Handling Code

Boarding Calculator form:

Some Error Handling Code

Main screen:

Some tidying up of menus' code

Add Wing screen:

Appearance tidied up a little.

From the above, you can probably see that Declan knows the code as well as I do now.

Known bugs reported and still awaiting fixing. More urgent ones are towards the top:

• Alliances don't work.This can only be fixed if Tim makes them scriptable. Matching Friendly Codes doesn't work the same as in VGAP3.
• I would like to make the contraband screen reflect the impact of happiness with Tim's new formulas. Resource points are less relevant now.
• Update the Help file
• Tim is about to change the Boarding rules:. He posted this to the newsgroup. It is not yet implemented and may change. Once he adds it, Diplomat ought to reflect it:
• I sort of already wrote the new code. . .
  vGuardT = is the target of the attack
  and vGuardS is the source of the attack. . .
   
   v = vGuardT * 5
   If v > vGuardS Then v = vGuardS
  v2 = vGuardS * 2
  If raceA(vT).raceNum = %raceFed Then v2 = 0
  if v2 > vGuardT Then v2 = vGuardT
  vGuardS = vGuardS - v
  vGuardT = vGuardT - v2
  
• There are some minor problems when loading sims: The fleet mineral costs reset to 1 of each minerals per ship, when a sim is loaded. I think Declan fixed that. Similarly he found the numbers of PD were not adding up correctly on re-editing a ship. This is corrected after a reedit of each ship/ships as usual. (If you change the player no. of an existing ship, the mineral costs of the hull are set to 20/20/20 until the next reedit. If you switch the Do-not-include-engine-cost-button the mineral costs are not refreshed in the edit screen.) Additionally, the load of recently saved sims (same version) cause the Notes screen to pop up. After the load of a sim, you should refresh the fleet cost screen. It holds the data of a former sim else. - Thriyon
• When I exclude the engine costs of a ship, the mineral costs don't reflect the change immediately like the mc costs. But this is only a display problem. The fleet screen shows the correct stats after you leave the ship. Can you refresh the mineral costs after the user clicked on the engine costs switch? - Thriyon
• If you add a ship and then change the owner, the mineral costs of the hull are reduced to 20 20 20 in the fleet costs until a reedit. - Thriyon
• What about the ability to compare one race's fighter craft/fighter wings against another race's ? What about the ability to compare one race's ground units against another race's ? - Lyle Chritton
• Weapon number drop downs (at least for SW) these do not fully track the numbers elsewhere in the program. One can get them out-of-step(tm). I was able in 2.5.6 to obtain negative weapons. Also after a few edits and sims to have 12 pulsed lasers with "6 total" showing on the screen. - Pete Chambers - Unable to replicate this with 2.5.7, so I cannot fix it. If anyone finds a repeatable way of doing this I'd love to know.

• I have a suggestion for a better use of the '+' and '-'-key. Don't replicate the effect of Clones and Remove unit, but have '+' add 1 to the multiplier and '-' substract 1. The new effect would be most useful, if the selected ship or wing stays selected after you edited/cloned it. - Thriyon
• The mc costs for the armor of the Borg ships are not considered. This is because of the auto-armoring, I suppose. Then you should ignore the entire armor costs (mc and Duranium) of the 4 Organic armor ships of the RCS, too. They only use meds to grow armor and the RCS gets them for free. It would be only fair to consider this special, too. The ships with OA are the Willow, the Everygreen, the Lotus and the Aurora. - Thriyon. - If it were free armour for all ships from that race, it would be straightforward to do. But for just specific hulls, it may be more fiddly. Not one of my priorities. PH.
  
• Ship cost is not shown correctly for ships pulled from saved files. - Seems OK with 2.5.8
• On the add a fighter wing screen, if you're adding a wing to a carrier, have it state how many more fighters you can build on this ship. Better yet, have an option to repeat this action if there's more fighter bays. (To save typing on the Super Star Carrier and/or Biocide and/or Super Gorbi. Not to mention forgeting which wing you were on.)
• On the clone a ship, when it's a carrier, have it clone the fighter wings as well.
• Thriyon: The fighter wings are not named correctly in time in 2 occasions: start of ADD WING and if you switch the race.
• It's been suggested that the Resource Points calculator, which shows population growth, be tweaked to show the effects of the Tank-O-Tronic Exotic Techs. However, when I got down to figuring out exactly how this would work, I found out that it's a bit arguable exactly when and where the +20% boost should be applied in the Population Growth calculation, and it makes a big difference. After discussing with other players, no conclusion was reached, so I've left it alone. (What I *do* know, directly from Tim, is that the 20% boost of T-o-T A, applies to the growth rate factor, not total population: i.e. if you were going to grow by 5% you grow by 6% overall, not 25%. I tried a simulated game for 10 turns with two identical EE player / planets, one player using T-o-T A, but found no significant population difference after 10 turns!)

• Maybe you could change this "clone" button so, that it adds with left-click (as it is now) but subtracts with a right-click?! (amount given by the number right of the clone-button...)- Marco Schon
• Put more info about e.g. engine power outputs in the black Comments box on the Ship screen. - Thriyon. - Yes, and I feel there is plenty more info I could add here...
• Looks like demobilizing needs added as well for Borg. Order: 1. Top out Crew drones to 10% of the total population. (One time, beginning of turn.) 2. Demobilize 15% of troop drones into colonist drones. (One time, beginning of turn). 3. Mobilize 20% of colonist drones into troop drones. (Per ground combat, can occur multiple times in a turn.) - Jon Nunn re: Diplomat 2.5.7
• Also, for the purpose of surrender calculations only, you might want to consider that new colonists will have been born in pre existing bases. The new colonists can easily make the difference between capturing a lot of colonists and blood bath occuring. Natural growth appears to be before crew drone conversion. Assimilation appears to be after crew drone conversion and demobilization.- Jon Nunn re: Diplomat 2.5.7
• On ships, Borg colonists drones are only converted to troop drones if they are attacking. This is to prevent them from suffering a major penalty attacking. During boarding actions, Defending colonists fight at full strength so Borg colonists drones remain colonists. I assume the Borg King gets the 10X bonus in offensive boarding like other races HG. Note that there is no bonus for HG in defending against boarding actions. - Jon Nunn re: Diplomat 2.5.7
  
• Thriyon suggests: Update the fleet cost after adding something. You have to click on something to update the fleet cost, now.
• Make the number of HG on a ship programmable, to see if it makes a difference to accuracy.
  
• Need to add the Bird Plasmatron bonus to Ground Combat simulations.
• The momentary appearance of a spurious hyperdrive window when you open the Add Ship windw is not fixable. It's a by-product of the way I hack the Windows settings to create unusually long combo boxes. I consider the improvement in the combo boxes worth the cosmetic problem. (Remember how before, you had to scroll up and down the combo boxes to find what you wanted?)
• Popular request: make the list boxes on the Add Ship box nice long ones like the Large Weapon combo box. I will probably do this one day, but it's a big job.
• Popular request: make the hyperdrive, engine, etc auto-select the most appropriate type for that hull. - I can't do this, because there is no "best" choice for many of these things. Do you want speed? Power? Toughness? Generator choice depends on weapons, etc.
• Popular request: make the Superweapon choices only from the appropriate ones for this hull. Will probably do this one day.
• I considered adding SKILL, HAPPINESS, EXPERIENCE properties for ships. I suspected these were causing lots of minor discrepancies in simulations. By not specifying them, they were defaulting to random numbers in the ranges 50-100; however tests show this is the same as for any new ship; but happiness generally climbs to &gt;100 within a few turns, and Experience climbs rapidly with travel. Something to keep an eye on. If anyone wants to look into this further, the scripts generated by Diplomat can have the following lines added (the numbers are arbitrary in this example); I chose not to complicate Diplomat and spend time on such minor variables:
• Happy = 50
• Skill = 50
• Experience = 10
• Further note on Experience: I did an interim version of Diplomat (2.5.13 and a bit) where you could edit a ship's experience. It made no difference whether it was 50 or 30,000! (Host 148 or so). So I took it out. Tim's code obviously isn't active here yet, and it just messed up the screen. However as of 2004, his Online Help implies it is now active (see his page about Large Weapons), so I've put it back in.
• No intention of adding: the Centaur and Aczanny ground combat bonuses. Yet.
• What about editing ship passenger levels?
• Idea for a new feature: a menu next to help that opens shipcalc, planets, master, host and raceview. Not sure if that would be much help... but I would generally like to synergise Diplomat with other packages by increased interoperation. It would add value to the whole. Oh God, I'm turning into a Marketing guru.
• Ground Assault calculator's commentary is a bit weird. Sometimes a comment is doubled. I need to parse it better. - I think I sorted most of the bugs here though in 2.5.5.
• Make the GA Sim form remember your preferred speed setting - Tried this. Couldn't figure out how to do it, due to spaghetti code.
• Marco Schoen suggests: Add the special abilities to the description of the ground-units. Sorry - don't intend doing this - too fiddly.
• Some people say, ground assault animation goes way to fast to make it useful. Seems OK to me! Investigate.
• If you add a carrier (with wings) and delete the ship, it's fighter wings stay. - I don't think this is a problem! But: Diplomat thinks the wings of a deleted ship belong to whichever ship is now in their "son of ship". (Even if a different race is now in the slot.)
• When you cancel out of building a pod or get a message saying you can't build a fighter wing because it would exceed the limit for that ship, the zero-sized fighter wings and/or pods are included in the master script and the objects are destroyed in the first second of combat.
• Thriyon: - What's about the possibility to ADD a sim file to another? I'd like to create fleet files and compose battles with them. This would save much time. - Rather low down on my To Do list 'cos it looks hard. For now, I suggest you use .simfiles and import QSP files as required? You could also use a DOS command line as follows, from a Batch file like this:
• Diplomat.exe ship1.qsp ship2.qsp ship3.qsp

• Have the default direction for objects of race 1 to be 1, 2 to be 3, 3 to be 5, and 4 to be 7 instead of 0 for all. (So you don't waste time finding runing a sim only to discover your 15 Lokis were set to 0 instead of vector 3 like your Missouris, Novas, and Thors.)
• the code that determines who is the attacking base is also wrong. it just makes the attacking base the one with a lower number in the object list. if you switch the objects around (or start a new sim) and you don't change the attack settings, they still go wrong. errorsim 1. the lizzard base should be the attacker, but it isn't.
• What about something to indicate if you've re-run a sim (ie Host) since the ship list was changed?
• Wallace Hill: A feature I'd like to see (if it could be done) with Diplomat would be to run host multiple times instead of master+hosts, and perhaps one can simulate how many turns it would take to e.g. finish off a Base with some fighters.
• This sentence (in the ground combat simulator)  isn't completely true: 'The defending base has no personnel,mechs or fighters left. Its contents are captured.'. I got this message even if I have fighters left.
• There are some non fatal errors when you change the ship hull type after already fitting weapons to it. For example, a Super Nova has a maximum of 20 large weapons. If you equip a Vendetta with 4 large weapons, then change it to a Super Nova, you can get 24... it doesn't bother me, but it might make Master or Host fall over.
• Some users report that they cannot edit clones. I can. Note, however, that you cannot edit a clone's hull type.
• Add nag screen. ("You've been playing for 4 hours! Get a life!")
• Ability to use pathnames with spaces in them like "c:\program files\planets4\" - Can't do this. I think it's because Master.exe falls over with spaces. Tim disagrees. Basically I dunno why 8)

Key features of Diplomat

• Diplomat can do 10 simulation runs sequentially, to give you a better idea of the average outcome of a battle. There are so many variables involved, that sometimes a single simulation can be misleading. (Example: if random factors mean a key ship lasts longer in a battle, it can have big ripple-on effects in a complex fleet action. Chaos theory!) See Notes, below for further info.
• Diplomat can save ships as .QSP files. What's the point of this? It saves you an entire turn: let's say you see enemy ships approaching. You do some sims with Diplomat and decide that you need a ship with Ion Cannons to handle them. But it will take 2 turns to build this ship because you don't have any ion cannons built yet (in your Base's "Parts" screen). However if you can use the Quick Build Screen, all you need is to supply a specification to the Quick Build Screen, in the form of a QSP file, and it will build a ship *including all the parts it needs* in a single turn. By the way, Andreas Benne's program "ShipCalc" is an alternative way of creating QSP files.
• Extensive helpful tips: either short tooltips, or truly useful notes in text boxes, are used to help players choose the best equipment and hulls.
• Diplomat can import .QSP files, i.e. ships created in real games, from Planets4. (Credit due to Scott O, aka "Deneb" for pointing out this possibility when Tim announced the QSP file format.)
• Total ship's energy output (E) is shown as a running total, updated as you select different engines or generators. This rapidly shows the user why certain engines are better for warships.
• Damage estimator graph (see screenshot) : Showing Armour Drain, Shield Drain, and Blast (ie Hull) Damage at various ranges. Also shows the previous ship-you-looked-at's results as dotted lines so you can quickly see "if I set standoff range to this, and select these weapons, I should be able to trash his Cube..." - More detail on these graphs is available in the Help file, diplomat.hlp.

• Animated Ground Combat screen which shows you the progress of a combat stage-by-stage:

Notes:

• Multiple simulations: these are run in Fast mode (no RST files are generated). I use a brute-force approach and simply run Master, then Host, 10 times in a row. The resulting VCR files from each run are dumped in subdirectories off \Planets4 :
• Run 1: ..\planets4\sim\sim1\c1.vcr etc
• Run 2: ..\planets4\sim\sim2\c1.vcr etc
• this is crude, but makes it simple to put all the VCR's from one run in the same place. Otherwise it would be difficult to distinguish them (because sometimes a long battle times out and spans several VCR files).
• QSP file import: Planets4 only creates QSP files when you enter and exit the "Quick Build Screen"
• Diplomat's data structure is simplified in places due to early decisions to make it easier for me to program. So it assumes all generators are the same type - which ain't necessarily quite true for imported ships.

First Time Installation

• First time installation: download diplomat246fullinstall.exe (2.6MB)
• Unzip diplomat246fullinstall.zip into a temporary directory and run setup.exe. Install the program to the same directory as Planets4.exe (usually c:\planets4\ )
• Also included in the Zip file is Diplomat.hlp - containing tips, troubleshooting notes, etc - not required for operation, but used as a Help file by Diplomat. Put this in the same directory as Diplomat.exe
• When first run, Diplomat will now auto-create a new subdirectory off \Planets4 called \sim. This is where Diplomat will dump all the YIG files and other stuff it creates. These can be quite large, so it is useful to have a 'trash' directory where you know you can safely delete any files from, to save disk space.
• Delete the temporary directory with the install files.
• Then upgrade to 3.1.1 using the download at diplomat312.zip [10 files: diplomat.exe, diplomat.csv, diplomat.hlp, diplomatnames1.dat, diplomatnames2.dat, DiplomatPicture.jpg, boarding.xls, gpl.txt, map2ps.exe, Ground_Assault_Simulator.xls] and overwrite your old version of these files.

Running it

Double-click on Diplomat.exe

Miscellaneous

Price: make a donation to charity.

Fleet sizes: Diplomat can handle up to 4 Bases, 40 types of ships and 80 types of Wings. You can have several duplicates of each - that's what the 'Quantity' box is for on the main screen - there's no particular limit to how many duplicates you can enter, I've had up to 200, but of course it slows down Host runs.

Diplomat is written in Visual Basic 6 and has been tested on Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, NT. I'm not a professional programmer so I have no interest in Linux, etc; I just wanted a tool I could use myself.

I accept no responsibility for any loss or damage caused by use of this program.

Heartfelt thanks to Sidewinder, Gray Stanton, et alia for their detailed and thoughtful feedback on bugs, usability issues etc. And, of course, to Tim Wisseman for making it possible!

Some features may not be supported yet by Master.exe's script interpreter, but Tim Wisseman told me what format Master.exe will eventually use, e.g. "StandoffRange = 123", and ship / wing attack orders like "Ram" (which is actually specified by a bit field).

Answers to a couple of recent questions:

• "Can you add the following features to Diplomat: Boarding Lasers [and other Ship Devices]..." - Devices are not currently scriptable, ie there is no command I can use to tell Master.exe "create a universe with ship 512 targeting ship 515 with device X". I imagine Tim will add scripting commands for Exotic Techs within a few months, but I do not think that he will ever add commands for Devices, because there are too many Devices and their associated parameters. Eg Boarding Lasers only work if you transfer some personnel on board the enemy ship...
• "You can't change the owner of a pod" - yes you can, but only by overtyping (ie highlight and retype)

Ironic humour: Whilst deleting old emails recently I discovered a mail I (yes, I) innocently sent to the VGAP4 Mailing List in April 1999. Read it here . Eventually I just had to have a tool...

Reporting bugs and stuff

Mail me at 

One NT user reported problems installing even after I introduced the InstallShield program. I have an NT version I can mail you which worked for him.

Release notes

• October 1999 - Version 1.00 - first release.
• Version 1.10 released after reports of Windows asking for DLL's (which should not be needed!). Ground units (Tanks etc) added to Base screen.
• Version 1.11 released with a proper InstallShield setup program to ensure DLL's are added automatically, don't overwrite newer versions of DLL's etc. (Downside: the download jumped from 70kB to 2.6MB!)
• Version 1.20 adds Ship, Wing and Base orders including Standoff Range; auto-runs Master.exe; allows saving and loading of sim files (some bugs though); Ship Generators and Base LaserCannons added when I realised I'd overlooked those in earlier releases; Tooltips; "Add Max Number of Weapons" button; Removed clicks; Bases now appear at same loaction as Ships and Wings so they can fight.
• Version 1.21 adds file saving / loading and some minor bug fixes.
• Version 1.22 was an intermediate Beta version never officially released
• Version 1.23 sorts out the problem with High Guard not being cloned along with the rest of a ship. Ships now have a maximum complement of power generators (were defaulting to just 1). Help File: Install now puts Help file DLL's in the \Planets4 directory, and it installs a DLL needed by Help which I overlooked last time. Wing size defaults to 20 fighters, the size of a typical ship's pod bay. File save / load problems solved (windows default path errors).
• Version 1.24 prevents crashes after you try to edit without selecting a unit (thanks, Gray!)
• Version 1.25, December '99, adds the Borg ships. It prevents unit misnumbering after you delete all units. Ship hulls are listed in alphabetical order on the Choose Ship screen to make it easier to find and choose them. The Add Unit screen is no longer used: instead the Add Ship / base / Wing buttons are directly on the main screen. Saved sim files are incompatible with previous versions.
• Version 1.26, December '99: Corrected the following - I was using race = 103 instead of 106 in the scripts for Borg players.
• Version 1.27, Jan '00: Corrected flaw whereby Borg wings were assigned to wrong player. Added a warning if someone tries to run a sim with units from only one player present (people sometimes forget to set different players for units).
• Version 1.28, Jan '00: Base ground units are now labelled appropriately for each race eg Borg bases have Assimilators, not Agrovators. The weapon lists now show how many of each type of weapon you've picked. (At last!). Spotted and corrected a couple of bugs which caused errors in ship hull types and numbers of wings, when editing ships, particularly ships with wings.
• Version 2.00, Feb '00: Damage estimator graph added. Diplomat runs simulations much faster: by using the new command line switch "/f" (ie "fast"), Diplomat forces Host to skip huge chunks of code when called, notably the 200 movement phases, and just run the combat-resolution code. This speeds it up enormously. EG:63 seconds for a typical 3-ship simulation is now 20 seconds . This mode does not produce any RST files; an option [not yet added] will allow you to run v4Host.exe in the old slow way if you want to study these. Installation is easier: the first time Diplomat is run, it automatically scans for the presence of subdirectory \sim, and if it is not present, creates it. Some users had reported problems which turned out to be due to not having this "scratchpad" directory present. On a similar vein, Diplomat checks that there is a copy of Master.exe, v4Host.exe and VCR.exe present in the same directory, and warns if they are not present - they are required for Diplomat to actually run the simulations. One user forgot to install Master.exe, which resulted in "File Not Found" errors. The "Run VCR" button is deactivated whilst while master and host are running (user suggestion to stop file sharing errors). "Clear All" buttons added for rapid removal of weapons. A running total of ship cost is shown on the Ship Build screen, to help gauge how feasible this ship is for your cash reserves. (Does not include cost of hull or hyperdrives. Does not, yet, include metals needed either, which might be useful come to think of it, but I generally find the cash is the shortage.) On the Wing screen, the fighter types' names are now "Plymouth Shuttle", "Io Class Fighter", "F400 Bomber" ...etc instead of the less meaningful "Type 1,2,3"... Total ship's energy output (E) is shown. Default starting hull is the Annihilation. Minor bug fixes - Spotted bug whereby the wrong types of power generators were being fitted (I was mixing up the TYPE of generator with the NUMBER of them, so in general, the type used during the battle would not be the type you specified.) Noticed "Quietus" cruisers were out of alphabetic order in the hull listing. Noticed Superweapons could not be added to a SuperNova loaded from a saved Sim file; corrected this.
• 2.01, March '00: Lots of error trapping added. It was possible to generate "phantom" Wings, Ships and Bases in certain circumstances. They caused Host / VCR problems during simulations. In addition, some clean-up code has been added to the script generation section so that even if you load an old saved .sim file which used to create these echoes, they won't appear in the new sim files. Added a check and warning message if you try to add more fighters to a Wing than a ship can carry. (No limit if it's a free-flying Wing, though.) New menu item under "Files": New List, which clears the list of units without having to exit / re-enter Diplomat., excess code in the line drawing algorithms was dumped to speed them up. Warning / error trap added in case someone generates a Wing with zero fighters, which can give VCR problems.
• 2.02 - Diplomat now includes Stormer (Klingon) ships. Diplomat now supports more ships. (Was: 10; now: 40.) Diplomat now includes commentary on weapon choices. Jon Nunn provided the text. Ships no longer inherit the weaponry of previously edited ships. New readout added - Energy Drain. So you can judge rate of fire. Thanks to Sidewinder for this suggestion.
• 2.03 - Diplomat now includes Peoples' Army ships, but not all of them. I didn't fancy typing in 40 ships' worth of information, so I left out the unarmed ones. Many thanks to Martin Pedersen for typing in the reams of data required on all those ships! Diplomat now distinguishes hulls belonging to your own race by [indenting foreign hulls and enclosing them in square barckets, like this]. You can still select them, if you wish. [At this point there were 4 races to play, and I was typing in hull information by hand.] Energy Drain bug corrected. Tech level descriptions for Large Weapons were wrong in the commentary. Spotted by Gray Stanton. More information on ships shown in main form, i.e. if you click on a ship in the list of hulls, a new text box gives a summary of its weaponry etc without you having to use the "Edit Ship" screen.
• 2.10 - April 2000: This was a major rewrite of much of the code, to utilise Tim's v4face.dll. The program size shrank by over 100kB to about 452kB. Many minor bugs flushed out:
• Diplomat can handle new race packs as soon as they are released. It now uses Tim Wisseman's new v4face.dll to draw ship info directly from race packs. I now use an external configuration file (diplomat.csv) to record which races are available and which hull numbers they can use. This configuration file can be easily edited in Excel (not necessarily by me if I'm not around when the new race comes out) to give almost instant access to new races. (One day I will probably get rid of this file and draw the remaining info directly from the race packs, but it works for now.)
• The damage graphs have had a number of problems fixed. You'll now find it is sharper (drops to zero at max range instead of tailing off misleadingly over a 40km spread). Identical ships give identical graphs. Generator and engine types make a difference to the height of a graph. And the "old" ship (dotted lines) isn't always the higher of the two sets of lines - you can truly compare firepower between ships now.
• New option: "no silly ship names", by request. This is remembered when you exit the program.
• "Rude ship names on / off" is now remembered when you exit the program.
• Re-introduced disposal of old .yg1, .tn1 etc files to reduce disk clutter.
• 2.11 to 2.3.0 - see above
• 2.11 - Fixed: "File Not Found" bug........? Fixed: not producing RST files when this option is requested. Fixed: now deletes old files like .log, .yig etc to save disk space. Otherwise they'd build up in the \sim directory. Fixed: remembers settings "Create RST files on / off", "use silly ship names" correctly after it's been exited and restarted.
• 2.12 - Found: "File / Path Not Found" bug. (Ie, discovered Host does not like pathnames with spaces in them.)Fixed: VCR.exe falling over and not showing .vcr files. When the File Not Found error got common enough to be a serious irritant, I tried a different method of calling VCR.exe from within Diplomat, called "DDE". I have now reverted to a straightforward shell-like call and it works without falling over again.
• 2.13 - Useful extra information added to the ship screen to show hull statistics when you click on a hull: whether it can cloak; max shield level possible; attack / evasive modifiers; crew and guest size. There are often reasons for choosing one hull over another which are not combat-related. Also: A new field shows "how long until Ordnance is all used up". I figure most fights last about 500 seconds, so if a fight lasts more than 750 seconds, this figure is shown in black. If it's between 200 and 750 seconds, it's shown in magenta to warn you there is a danger of running out of ord before the fight ends. If the figure is less than 200 seconds, it's shown in red.
• 2.14 - Diplomat now uses different DLL's. This is to avoid a "DLL Hell" problem created by Microsoft releasing incompatible versions of the same files(!), in particular COMCTL32.OCX. Therefore Diplomat would work on some machines but not others. Microsoft themselves seem to have quietly abandoned the old DLL's and written new ones, which Diplomat now uses. If Diplomat has problems running, you may require a full Install (ie you may not have the newer DLL's on your system yet). Other changes: "ADD SHIP" screen: If your ship produces less energy than the weapons draw, the Energy value (shown in the top right of the ship screen) goes red. "ADD BASE" SCREEN: Added costs of hardware and descriptive fields for the ground units and fighters. Added a "Ground combat ready reckoner" to help gauge whether a Ground Assault is likely to work. NOTE: I am not at all sure my formulae are reliable here, but it's a start. Don't take it too seriously. MAIN SCREEN: Clicking on Bases in main screen brings up a summary of their combat values, so you can quickly gauge if Base A is likely to stomp Base B in a Ground Assault. You can now edit Script files (Under "View" option in main screen's menu). This allows people to quickly test script functions not yet supported by Diplomat. "ADD WING" screen: Added fighter stats readout Added Wing cost readout. Another reason for missing paths / files found and patched.
• 2.15 - (not generally released) - Copy Unit button relabeled Clone, and a small textbox allows you to state how many clones you wish to create. (An idea from Michael Henderson.) Patched: miscellaneous Superweapon scripting errors (Noticed by Graham Turnbull). Superweapons seem to work OK now. Note: Superweapons generally fire at tick 310 if you want to see their effect in VCR.exe
• 2.16 - Ground Combat simulation added. Differs from other Diplomat simulations in that rather than relying on Master / Host / VCR to run, typically 30 seconds on a fast PC, the Ground Combat algorithms are written into Diplomat itself. This means they run and display results in approximately 1 second on a slow PC!
  Results are printed out to show the best, worst and most likely results of a clash between two bases - there is some randomness in the algorithms, but by setting all probablilities to 50% we can estimate the most probable outcome. There are far fewer variables than in ship-to-ship combat, so the results should be accurate.
  This feature was only made possible by a lot of hard work by Sidewinder, who analysed and published how Ground Combat works.
  The ground combat code isn't finished yet, but after writing 140kB of code I decided to release what was done so far.
• 2.20 - Diplomat now imports .QSP files. And it now remembers the state of the "assign races" screen even after you switch it off.
• 2.2.1 - Bug found by Russell Patton fixed: "When I try to clone or edit or delete a ship the programme will frequently affect a ship from further up the list from the highlighted ship. Once it has done this once it will continue to effect a ship the same number of lines up from any highlighted ship." It only happened if you did not select a unit to clone when you hit the "Clone" button. I put an error check / warning message in to prevent this. Bug found by Oliver Voigt fixed: importing QSP files for a ship with no generators would cause Diplomat to crash when you tried to edit it.
• 2.3.0 - Diplomat can now do 10 simulation runs at once. Diplomat can now save ships as .QSP files. Added a readout of hull tech level to the Tips field in frmAddShip. Weapon tips have been updated. Fixed: bug which made Diplomat crash when you tried to edit imported QSP files (ships from real games) - and I also noticed that the number of engines was being set to zero, making the energy calculations wrong. Thanks to Ingo Tigger for his help tracking this down. Removed: warning message when you tried to run a Wing-Only simulation. (Because Tim fixed Host and it now allows them to fight. Fixed: Superweapon scripting errors when editing ships with Superweapons. I no longer restrict the type of SuperWeapon you can fit because apparently Victorious's will be able to fit 2 types, so there is a simple drop-down menu to choose from. (In other words, my "intelligent" choosing of the type was messing things up.) Hull Selection box grayed out when editing a ship, to guide folk away from errors. Ground combat: algorihms changed to reflect 1 laser cannon now kills 10 troops, 20 crew or 30 colonists (was: just 1 per lasercannon - typo spotted by Sidewinder).
• 2.3.1 - unannounced intermediate version I placed on this site to patch some QSP file problems found in 2.3.0
• 2.3.2 - Fixed: armour cloning bug: armour was being set to zero when you cloned ships. Added: extra information to ship Notes in the Add Ship screen:
• How many Repair units the hull can carry. (For use against Crystals.)
• Damage Modifier (".modparts"). A ship with a 50% modifier is twice as tough as it appears.
• Ship mass. Ships with mass of 100kT or below are very vulnerable to Glory Devices and the Nemesis Torpedo, and quite vulnerable to mines.
• Other changes in 2.3.2:
• Shields List Box auto-selects the best possible shield that the hull can use.
• Added: cost of armour to ship cost. Lizard ships have several thousand armour points..! Diplomat does not add this to the cost of Borg ships (thanks to Jon Nunn for pointing out it is free for them).
• Tweaked QSP file export so that it exports the actual amount of armour on the ship, not the max possible.
• Fixed: "When exporting a .qsp file, if you hit cancel it gives a Runtime Error 76, Path not found." (Reported by David Ouimet)
• Hyperdrive engines added (after requests from Yosemite Sam / David Ouimet), so that people can design a ship in Diplomat and export it as a QSP file, thus allowing "Quick Builds" in one turn.
• Improved: Ground combat simulation. KillKillKill mode is completed (previously it missed fighters versus personnel, and personnel versus personnel). Lizard Boulder Attack (30x kill bonus) and Boulder Defense (0.5x casaulties) is included. A "Summary" mode is standard (simply reports "Base 1 captured Base 2") and the detailed verbiage can now be seen as an option. The Enforcer powers, however, came out once I'd done this and my brain melted, so those are not included.
• 2.3.3 - November 2000 - Animation added to Ground Assault simulation. Base Ord limit increased from 32000 to 2 million. (Was: 32,000 ord, which was apparently "a bit low for bases with 1000 Ion Cannons"..!).
• 2.3.4 - Fixed: when cloning or editing a ship with a superweapon, the superweapon no longer defaults back to none. Fixed: Energy outputs of cloned and edited units is now correct (ie same as the first time you create the ship). Incidently, this bug (number of engines defaulting to zero when you left the Add Ship screen) also meant the ship costs were not including the costs of the engines in cloned / edited units and probably not in exported QSP files either: that's fixed too now. Thanks due to Dave Feshy and Marco Schon accurate bug reports which enabled me to spot it and track it down. Corrected: Holo Decoy weapon description (tip) - they only work versus SMALL weapons. Added: option for "no generators". (as the last option in the list of selectable generators.) Ensured ships' Friendly Codes are always different to ensure they always fight. Corrected: spotted bug: ships' armour in a simulation was equal to the armour value entered, not "Max Armour" Added: Hi Guard are now saved / loaded to sim files. Back compatibility retained. They clone OK too. More visible: if a ship's energy usage is greater than its generators + engines can supply, more colour is used to draw attention to the fact, and the engine / generator combo boxes change colour to show you where to tweak. (Particularly to help new users.) Fixed: armour bug - people were reporting that ships were sometimes being created with less than full armour / shields. Tracked this down with the aid of "JJ": it only happened when people loaded a saved .sim file and tried to run it without editing the ships. Normally when you create a ship, many variables are saved as you leave the Create Ship screen, but some were not being recorded if you simply opened a .sim file. As a general precaution, explicitly set ship DAMAGE (various types) = 0 in scripts used to generate universes. I don't know if this is needed, but it should eliminate the possibility of inaccuracies from non-zero damage. Note: Thanks to Chris Olin for posting the possible Script options for ships (October 2000). Default engine type is now FTL-1, instead of the lowest tech N20 Fusion Drive. Default Generator is now Servodyne 800 (idea from Marco Schon). Player races were not saved when saving / reloading sim files. This was leading to occasional odd problems where someone would save a .sim simulation file with e.g. Feds fighting Borg, then change Diplomat's player races to Klingon vs. Birds... when they reloaded the saved .sim file, they appeared to have Klingon wings docked to Fed ships, etc! (I wonder if this could have caused any of the problems with armour etc?). When running 10 simulations, explicitly deletes old c1.vcr files - these are sometimes hanging round confusing users, and myself, because it looks like the latest tweak to a series of simulations was ignored. (However I can still see the occasional c1.vcr file left over sometimes, a residual bug still needs to be eliminated.) Ground Combat commentary was being contradictory instead of helpful. Fixed a couple of bugs: it no longer reports prisoners taken if there is no one left alive to take, etc. Ground combat was falling over due to large, out-of-bounds numbers when people simulated with 50,000,000 colonists. Sorted (?)
• 2.3.5 - Text about Ground Combat moved from a screen in Diplomat, to the Help file. Help file generally updated and expanded. The new Help file, diplomat.hlp is included in the diplomat235.zip download. The ground combat information and tips are more extensive than in the original Diplomat screen. Thanks to Jon Nunn for advice here. Fixed bug: maxed out ships were giving Overflow errors due to cost exceeding 65000mc. Cost changed from Integer to Long variable. Found independently by JJ and Yosemite Sam. Fixed bug: picking "No Generators" option still gave an increase in available energy. Found by Yosemite Sam.
• 2.3.6 - Help file expanded. Contains more, accurate info on Ground Assaults. (Included in download.) Fixed bug: unable to edit generators / engines after importing QSP files; energy calculations were wrong. Fixed typo in Ground Assault estimation screen which was confusing 2 types of ground assault vehicle. Thus e.g. increasing the number of Stormer tanks made no increase in enemy colonist casualties. Found and fixed another typo (fighter mixup) in ground assault simulation. Fixed: Commentary could say bloodbath but show remaining personnel. Fixed: Base 1 was never surrendering.
• 2.3.7 - Diplomat now reflects the recent change to ground combat in Host Beta 66. "Changed: The power of colonist to destroy enemy ground units, fighter craft and laser cannons massively reduced. It now takes 10000 colonists to destroy a ground unit or fighter or lasercannon. The power of crew and troops to destroy ground units and fighters" [and, I assume, lasercannon] "reduced by 50%." Interestingly, whilst incorporating this I noticed that there doesn't seem to be any phase where attacking troops, crew or colonists attack defending base's mechs. Or fighters. Although defending personnel get a chance to shoot at attacking mechs and fighers. I asked Tim about this, and he said: "Sidewinder's analysis of the Ground Assault code was correct, the defending mechs can only be harmed by attacking mechs or fighters. However the base will fall all the same if all the base colonists / troops / crew are overrun by the attackers, even if mechs remain alive. I will consider changing this and adding troop VS base_mech attack phases." Tim has uncovered why Diplomat sometimes produces .vcr files which show ships starting a combat with partial shields or armour. (Typically this is seen when simulating big tough ships with loads of armour or shields.) These are the result of a hidden combat occurring before the one you see! But if no hull damage occurs, the first combat is deleted as "dull", and the second battle appears to be the only one. Bug fix: If a ship's generator type is "none", Diplomat was saying its tech level was 11 in exported QSP files. This meant the exported QSP file could not be used to quick-build ships. I have altered the "no" generators to tech 1 in the exported QSP files.
• 2.3.8 - Following the recent Host changes, some opportunities opened up: Assault pods have been added to Diplomat. You can have up to 50 in a simulation. (In addition to the 40 ships, 80 Wings, 4 Bases.) Updated weapon tips to reflect their new powers under Host Beta 68 Engines tips have been added. Ie, if you click on an engine type in the Add Ship screen, its max speed and hardness are shown. Ramming tips appear if you select "Ram!" Thanks to the efforts of Jelmer Renema, David Ouimet et alia in testing the Assault Pod scripting, we found that Pods are invisible in VCR... unless you turn off the hitherto ignored "Hide Pods" option in VCR. Then they appear as small crosses. It's also worth knowing that VCR's involving pods are not generated unless there are at least 2 present, and the best strategy with Assault Pods seems to be to use swarms of them with just a few personnel in each (because many are shot down during the battle). Superweapon bug fix (wrong superweapon index used for certain types eg World Crusher --> QSP files and some sims wrong). Many thanks to Andreas Benne for sorting me out here. (Have you tried his ShipCalc utility?). Starting vectors of new ships randomised. (It seems Master doesn't seem to use a random vector if you set it to 0, so Diplomat gives you a random number from 1-8 instead when it creates the script.) Help file updated with info on how to capture ships in combat, by boarding and with Assault Pods. This is worth reading. I collected all the info from the Host release notes, Tim's mails to the Newsgroup, Mailing List and some private queries to myself into the Help file.
• 2.3.9 - QSP file import bug fix: Diplomat was crashing when you imported a ship with no generators,and tried to edit it. Bug found by Wayne Stone. Some cosmetic fixes. Problems pointed out by Jelmer Renema. Help file updated slightly in Assault Pod area. Now we can play with them, there is some new info from Jelmer et alia.
• 2.4.0 - I broke the "Notes" feature when I added Pods in 2.3.8, this is now fixed. So you shouldn't have annoying garbled notes pop up when you open a saved .sim file. Added ship costs to data window when you click on a ship in the main screen. About 10 spelling, grammar, and some factual errors corrected in the "Weapon Tips" etc - these were ponted out by Jelmer Renema, a Dutchman who speaks better English than what I do. You can no longer run master when nothing is present. Quite a few new silly ship names added, mostly suggested by Jelmer Renema and Roderick de Jong. I am always looking for new stupid names, by the way. Added Stormers' new powers to the Damage Graph on the Add Ship screen... ie +3 Blast damage for large weapons. If you clone a ship and make one copy Stormer, you will see that the red graph line no longer overlays the previous ship's (dotted red) Blast Damage line. When you delete an object the stats from that object now disappear from the information display.
• What's New in Diplomat 2.4.1 - QSP files exported to Planets.exe for quick-build now include minerals. (This has been one of the top requests for agers and I finally got round to it. It was a lot simpler than I'd thought: turns out small weapons, PD weapons, shield generators and power generators do not require minerals.) Note: the minerals aren't saved in .sim files. Superweapons 3,4,5 (World Crusher, Antimatter Maul, PMC) were showing as the wrong type. Again. This was a bug I fixed in version 2.3.8, but it looks like I overwrote a module with an archived one and lost the fix at some point since then.
• 2.4.4 - Introducing mineral calculations introduced several minor errors, and there have been some rapid update releases in the last few days... Fixed: error in Duranium calculation in exported QSP files (bug spotted by Andreas Benne). Fixed: Error in calculations of how much Moly is required for a ship. (Bug found by Alexander Gessinger.) Fixed: Apparently armour needs 0.01kT Duranium per point, not 1kT (Bug noted by Tim). Note: Diplomat includes the Duranium required to build the entire ship, this includes engines, hull, large weapons, superweapon and particularly armour. For some ships, armour is the dominant Duranium requirement. Armour can be reduced in the "Add Ship" screen.
• 2.4.5 - If you don't fit a heavy weapon, you no longer get a heavy laser in that slot by default. Fixed: When simulating a ship with large weapons when I set the number of large weapons in Diplomat to less than maximum then Heavy Lasers are used in combat. Improved: when importing ships (as QSP files), the ship name is no longer padded out with spaces at the end. Clicking on Wings in the list of units on the main form now shows their orders e.g. "Anti Fighter" etc. Ion Cannon and Sandcaster tips changed. Fixed: GF Prilldyne 100 Generators reset to Servodyne 800's when you edit a ship
• 2.4.6 - Fixed: some Evil Empire ships had so many crew, they were causing overflow errors in Diplomat. Ditto: Gorbi has 220,000 Ordnance... about twice what I'd anticipated as the possible maximum. Support file diplomat.csv now has lookup data enabling Diploamt to find Evil Empire ships; i.e, Diplomat can now run Evil Empire simulations. A new " full install " file has been created for version 2.4.6. Some users with WinNT and Win2000 machines were beginning to find problems with unregistered DLL's etc.
• 2.4.7 - Max Number of ships increased from 40 to 120. Max Number of Wings increased from 80 to 200. Max allowable Ord increased from 300,000 to 3,000,000 to allow the Evil Empire's "Slayer" to load up with Ord and not generate errors. Diplomat now greys out Generator box if a ship hull has no gen's. To speed up deletion of multiple units: the Mass Delete command requested was not easy, so instead Diplomat automatically selects the next item as the one to be deleted. So just keep pressing Remove Unit... Reduced disk space required for saving simulations. Up to now, even a 2-ship simulation took 30kB (ie I assumed there were maximum ships etc present). Now: only save ships and wings actually used, which cuts most sim files to 6kB. Diplomat can still read the previous format. It can also read old sim files and resave them in the newer, more compact format. Noticed and corrected a bug which might have caused errors in saved .sim files with more than 140 units. Eliminated annoying, and erroneous warning about not having enough players present for a fight, when editing scripts with the view/edit script menu option. Fixed bug found by Jelmer Renema which generated free vehicles during ground combat with Lizard units (their extraordinarily high defence factors created negative losses, so instead of being destroyed, new ones were created!) When adding Wings, Diplomat warns you if a wing has < 10 fighters (idea of Jon Nunn's) New button on main screen: Set Fleet Vector Diplomat now supports the new data structure introduced by Tim: up to 2000 hull types, using v4face2.dll The download includes a new version of diplomat.csv to allow Diplomat to support the new Centaur and Aczanny races. The Add Ship screen now only displays the hull types of the selected player's race - though a new option button allows you to revert to the old way showing ALL hulls if needed. (Eg when simulating captured or traded hulls.) Fixed cosmetic bug found by Jelmer Renema: if you created a ship, and cloned it say 150 times, you got a message "too many ships". You can't create any more ships but Diplomat didn't show that atually there were new ships, just not 150 of them. Weapon tips slightly tweaked to reflect recent Host changes.
• 2.4.8 - New: You can now specify a ship's hull damage to simulate, for example, mine hits and boarding laser damage at the start of a battle. The file structure of Diplomat has been reorganised. Basically this means there are now two new files in the Diplomat download: diplomatnames1.dat and diplomatnames2.dat. These go in your \planets4\ directory. This has the ancillary effect of making it easier to add more silly ship names. I added about 250. Hurrah! New: Other programs (like ShipCalc) can now call Diplomat and pass it a list of ship QSP files to open. So, Diplomat boots up with a list of ships already in place. Example: a batch file of the following form would start Diplomat and place the three ships described in the QSP files in the "List of Units" on the opening window:

Diplomat.exe ship1.qsp ship2.qsp ship3.qsp
Bug fix: the picture for the first ship of every race was being shown as a Fed Outrider. New: Bases can now have Undercities and Raid Shelters. Idea suggested by Michael Henderson: "I commonly hit bases from orbit with small weapons and/or weak fighters to lower population levels prior to ground assaults just to make the troops' jobs easier. It would be nice to sim this with Diplomat's 'show RST' function." Fixed: ships with no Small Weapons no longer get Disruptors by default. Fixed: ships with no Point Defense no longer get Flake Cannons by default. QSP files have been tightened up. I removed some discrepancies, i.e. Weapon Techs were previously always assumed to be 1, which can make you think something is buildable - only to find Host didn't allow you build it when you get your next RST. New: Boarding calculator added. (New button on main screen.) This feature helps you estimate whether you have enough troops in your cloaker (or whatever) to capture a given ship by beaming them over. Tim was kind enough to send me a chunk of Host code and I quickly realised that I could either waste months of my life recreating it (like I tried with Ground Combat), or I could do a rough guesstimate and ignore the fact that it's a phased combat, Light Powers affect which race's High Guard get first shot with the boarding cutlasses, etc. I opted for the coward's route and made it a rough-and-ready guesstimator of the type I might use myself. Perhaps an option for another third party utility here if anyone out there is feeling very anal retentive? This new window also has a ready reckoner for how much damage a Boarding Laser will do to an enemy hull. Factors which are taken into account, however, are:

• The defending crew gets a x10 defense bonus versus boarders, unless they are High Guard.
• Example: 240 Birdmen Highguard on a Deth Specula can kill 25200 enemy Crystal crew members and almost as many of other races.
• Racial combat factors for crew, troops etc are used in the calculations.
• Boarding lasers only kill a max of 10% of the enemy crew and troops (each). For every 10 enemy killed at least 1 attacker must be transported to the target ship. However, you can still use multiple Boarding Lasers against one ship, this allows them to kill >20% of the enemy personnel.
• The number of crew killed can not be more than 5 crew members per enemy coming aboard by way of boarding laser.

Fixed: overflow error when you try to equip a ship with >18 Large Turbo Laser Arrays. Fixed: "After I have edited the list and save, I always get the message "You need at least 2 players present for combat to occur". I use players 1 and 2 (both Borg), so there are 2 players! When I get back to the main window and click on run master/host, the same message appears and it does not run the master/host. The problem even occurs when I just open the EDIT SCRIPT FILE option, and immediately click Save without editing something!"

2.4.9 - Lots f help from Mark Heinrich, Jelmer Renema and Thomas Peters in this version: New: the order in which Point Defense weapons are mounted, is very important. (The ones in slots 1,2,3 etc fire preferentially to 8,9,10.) Therefore, Diplomat can now specify the order they're fitted in....There are now 10 individual drop-down combo boxes, 1 per PD Weapon. As a short cut, selecting a PD weapon in the first combo box selects that type for all of them, unless there are already some in other slots. Overflow / divide by zero errors fixed in GA simulations with Coalition mechs. The 'Set Fleet Vector' screen was expanded to 'Fleet Commands'. Cost is now saved and reloaded from saved simulations (.sim files), and Quick-Build (.QSP) files. Hyperdrive cost is now included in total ship cost. If a ship has no fighter bays, the "Fighter Wings" button is now greyed out (idea of Jelmer Renema's)

The following (blue) text is awaiting editing into the above list of release notes in reverse order and a more compat form, when I find time...

What was new in 2.5.7

• To match Host 108's changes, Colonists no longer kill anyone / anything in Ground Combat simulations. (Thanks to Jon Nunn for helping figure out what the new algorithms are.) It also allows for 20% of Borg Drones in a base being converted to troops in a ground combat, and tops up Crew levels on a base to 10% of the population. By the way, does anyone know if the Borg get this Crew / Troop conversion bonus when their ships are boarded, which is similar to ground combat?
• I intend going Open Source... but I ought to annotate the VB files with more explanatory comments first.
• The "Clone" button has been replaced by a "Quantity" one. Because there was no way to reduce the number of clones once they were there... so the way it works now is slightly different. Easier to play with than explain in text - try it - you'll prefer it! (Idea suggested by Thriyon and Marco Schon.)
• The Alliance function wasn't working. And it ain't going to, unless Tim adds alliances as a scriptable option for Master.exe. I have added some explanatory notes to the Alliance sub-screen.
• Add Ship screen slightly tarted up.
• Add Ship screen now has an extra check box (not shown in the screenshot above) so you can make "Ship Cost" ignore the cost of the engines [cash and minerals]. [Idea by Mark Heinrich and Thriyon.] Lots of players get their engines for free, from Ghipsoids. This should allow you to set up Quick-Build QSP files with an adjusted ship cost, so Planets4.exe won't complain "you can't build that many ships!" when it totals up the minerals and so on you need.
• Fixed: The muliplier of wings was resetting to x1, if you edit the wing. - Thriyon
• Corrected: (deliberate) t ypos in certain player races: "lost clones"  -> "Lost Colonies", "Droids" -> "Robots" - [Marco Schon]. Also Peeps --> Peoples' Army now.
• Corrected: Weis Guy pointed out: "I hate to be Nit-Picky (yeah sure - PH), but the boarding calculator apparently does not factor in that the attacking ship has a colonist attack factor of .1. So if standard EE colonist attack stat is 5, he now has a power of .5 per colonist when boarding. When a colonist defends on a ship, he has normal power."
• Corrected: after deleting an object, the next one down was selected... but if you were at the end of a list, nothing would be selected. Now the next one up is selected, if you were at the end of a list. This stops the "no unit selected for deletion" errors. - Thriyon
• Improved: "if you add or edit a ship or wing there is no selection after you finished. This causes many needless mouse clicks. Always have an object selected, please." - Thriyon
• Fixed: the Ground Assault simulator didn't recognise the UA racepack r802v2.rce. (Reported by Wallace Hill)
• Added: more silly names. Whilst doing that, I realised that Diplomat has been defaulting to sensible hull names since version 2.5.2, so I fixed that.

What was new in Diplomat 2.5.6

• (An idea from Thomas Peters): If you clone a Ship or Wing, it no longer shows as a separate entry in the List Of  Units. Instead, you see e.g. "Ship 1 (x4): Player 2, Nocturne Class Cruiser". The x4 means there are 4 identical copies of this ship in the fight. They are identical right down to the attack options and names. Not only does this improve readability of the list, it essentially removes the limits on how many things there can be in a battle.Example: previously, you could "only" have 120 (?) Wings in a fight. Now you can have 120 types of Wing, but each of those could be copied many times in the script file. I'm not sure how many you can have, but I've simulated some truly awesome megabattles with hundreds of ships and thousands of Wings!
• Background colour of top ection of Add Ship form darkened for lgibility by popular request.
• Suggestion from Thriyon: I have removed the effects of  Superweapons from the Damage Graph on the ship screen. It is still included in the charge drain calculations (ie how fast all weapons charge), because it drains the generators / engines as it charges up and this affects other weapons. But as it tends to fire once per battle, in an over-the-top way, it distorts the effects of damage-per-second dealt out by a ship on the graph. It makes ships look better than they perhaps are. I can undo this change if people think it is not good.
• Fleet costs now show minerals as well as cash. Note. The minerals will be wrong if you open a .sim file because Diplomat doesn't save mineral costs in .sim files. If you really want that to be accurate, open and close each ship in a saved .sim file in the Edit Ship window, so Diplomat recalculates the ships' minerals.
• The Aczanny ship list has been corrected - again. I hope it's right this time!
• Correction to Boarding Calculator: Hilmar Benne pointed out that I had forgotten to add the x10 bonus to defending ships' crew, during boarding calculations.
• Corrected: when you hit the "Max" button with no weapon selected, all weapon slots would be used up.

What was new in Diplomat 2.5.5

• Diplomat supports the newly released Lost Colonies . (I.e. the lookup table in support file diplomat.csv - part of the Diplomat download - has been updated.)
• The other major change is a completely overhauled Ground Assault Simulator. GA is becoming a major part of the game and I spent 6 weeks' spare time trying to improve the simulator. This was largely due to real life examples sent in by Wallace Hill, Jon Nunn, Drew Sullivan, Andrew de Boer, Bill Rosgen, Mark Cowper, and Thriyon, which allowed me to compare the predicted results with real life ones. Tim answered many questions and sent me a chunk of Host code to examine. My thanks to all of them, and Chris Olin who reminded me to run some comparative sims with Host myself! Here are some details about the changes:
• Host 101 upgraded the power of Mechs versus colonists and crew. Diplomat now reflects this. (It also realises that the x500 and x200 bonuses do not apply versus Lizards.)
• Diplomat's Ground Assault simulator now takes into account that the Enforcers don't need a 3:1 superiority to capture enemy bases; they just need a simple majority.
• The Ground combat simulator algorithms have been overhauled and inspected and generally improved in accuracy. Tim sent me the Host code for GA's and I used this to check my algorithms matched his. (I wish I could have just swiped his code, but alas, that would have ruled out the animation and the commentary.)
• The analysis which appears in a text box is now much more accurate and useful. Working on this, and checking against real-life examples, uncovered a number of problems which I discussed with Tim. Tim decided to change the way Host runs ground combat slightly (which will be implemented in Host 102). Previously: in KKK mode, if both bases were set to KKK, 90 - 95% of the population of both would be out attacking when the other's forces arrived! This has been changed so the combats are (as of Host 102) resolved sequentially, ie if you attack a base of 1,000 colonists you can expect them all to be there when you arrive, which Tim hopes will reduce the number of 'bug' reports about Ground Combat.
• It was commented that Diplomat generally predicts a much bloodier outcome than really occurs in a Host run. I checked Tim's code and noticed that in the personnel versus personnel phases, which are the core of most GA's, the losses = losses "times RND" - in other words, times a factor which could vary from zero to 1. Oops. Corrected.
• On inspection I realised I had never got round to allowing for the fact that in KillKillKill mode, only 90% of the attacker's colonists and 95% of crew / troops join in. I checked with Tim and he confirmed that the other 5 / 10% hide in bunkers until most of the shooting is over, then reappear at the end of combat in the Surrender Resolution mode, where you need a 3:1 superiority to force folk to surrender. Since the original 90 / 95% could be very reduced by now, this fractional force is actually quite significant when you are trying to capture prisoners. Diplomat now allows for these Reserves entering battle in the final phase, and it should be much more accurate in predicting prisoner capturing now. Incidentally, note that if you are attacking, and your first (90%) wave is annihilated, the remaining 10% of your force is probably quite vulnerable to capture itself. That explains a few things!
• Ground combat simulator further overhauled. It no longer has the "best case", "average" and "worst case" settings. Best and Worst were uninformative as it is unusual for random number generators to spit out 0 or 1. I reduced its settings to "average" and "random", where Random actually does use the same random number based algorithms as Host (I think). Random is the default setting. Note that not every phase is random, for example, 1 colonist will always kill the same number of enemy troops. So simple simulations may not look very random.
• Whilst tweaking the GA code I found and corrected a small bug where the AA guns of the 2 fighting bases were mixed up. Also, the code has been considerably streamlined in this area, not that it needed to be faster, but it will make debugging in future easier.
• An entire phase of ground combat was missing! (Base fighters firing upon attacking mechs.) It's been added in. I also found the order that Tim does his phases in was slightly different to mine. (Corrected.)
• Here's a tip about ground combat. Whilst plodding through the Host code, i realised why I could never capture any prisoners playing as the EE. It's because I usually use Colonists as attackers. Now EE Colonists are quite good at killing things (due to their huge Dark Force), but their basic "combat power" is quite low. In the final Capture phase, Dark Force is irrelevant. So to have enough colonists in the final phase left to capture enemy personnel, you perforce will have had so many colonists that they will have killed all the enemy before the Capture phase. The solution? Use more troops and High Guard. (I was surprised to learn that HG do actually take part in ground combat. But only in the final Capture phase.)
  
• New hot key:b - Add base (in main screen).
• Boarding calculator only allowed about 6 digits' worth of troops etc. Now allows 9 digits, ie up to 9,999,999 boarders.

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.4

• Host 95 upgraded the power of laser cannon versus personnel in ground combat. Diplomat now reflects this. Note: 1 lasercannon used to kill 10 troops, 20 crew, 30 colonists. The numbers are now 100 troops, 120 crew and 500 colonists. That's about 5+ times better. Lasercannon are now THE way to deal with invading Lizards, because the cannon shoot before the Lizards get a chance to use their Boulder Attack.
• Fixed: Greg Bahr found a divide-by-zero error could occur when doing Ground Assault sims with Solarians.
• Aczanny hull numbers corrected - Diplomat was allowing combat with hulls which have been deleted from the current racepack. (Spotted by Darkstar.)
• Weis Guy pointed out the PD tips would be better with range info included.
• That annoying pseudo Hyperdrive combo box thing on the Add Ship screen is much less annoying now.
• The Exotic Tech screen now has a button to switch on all Exotic Techs. (Time saving suggestion by David Ouimet, who evidentally has more money than me.)
• Thriyon told me all super weapons have a range of 2000. He got this from Tim after he tested the range. Tips have been changed.
• Michael Henderson: It wasn't just the LTLA and the TLA which had their minerals reduced, so did the Ionic Gun Array. It now requires 10D/110T /80M. - done
• Marco Schoen suggested that ship should be removable from the list of units, by hitting the DELETE key. I have made it so you can use the - (minus) key to delete a unit and the + key to clone a unit. The DEL key was unexpectedly tricky. For now, I can't allow you to delete more than one unit at a time, ie highlight a group and select the whole lot for deleting.

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.3

• Fixed: cost of cloned wings is now correct. (Pointed out by Thriyon.)
• Corrected: Aczanny shiplist Darkstar pointed out the Aczanny racepack had been re-released and Diplomat's lookup table, diplomat.csv was no longer accurate)
• Updated: the Turbo Laser Array and LTLA now use different amounts of Duranium (due to a tweak in Host 97). Diplomat now reflects this, so exported QSP files will be correct.
• Improved: the drop-down combo boxes in the Add Ship form are now as long as needed to show ALL weapons in one go. You no longer need to scroll up and down to get from Sandcaster to Gatling Phasor, etc. Comment: this is actually a pretty advanced bit of programming for me. Combo boxes are normally limited to 8 selections long by Window's default limits. It is not my own idea, but Marco Schoen's. I think it makes the screen much more usable.
• Corrected: Weis Guy pointed out, that the Boarding Calculator had a math error. It did not factor in that the attacking ship has a colonist attack factor of 0.1. So if a standard EE colonist attack stat is 5, he has a power of .5 per colonist when boarding.  When a colonist defends on a ship, he has normal power.
• Fixed: David Ouimet pointed out that imported ships' QSP files have max armour limited to whatever was the current armour when the QSP file was saved.
• Improved: When you use the "New List" command, you are now prompted to save the list before you delete it. (Following David politely pointing out how he had to re-enter 50 ships when he hit "New List")
• Updated: Karsten Okrusch pointed out some errors in the Superweapon tips. I wrote those so long ago, they were no longer accurate.
• In general, I have tried to improve the "usability" of the program. I noted which screens slowed me down because I always selected different options, and tried to make the defaults more sensible. Thus default engine type is now Tylium Thruster, because my EE ships always seem short of energy, and these are nice tough engines. The default numbers of fighters at a base is zero now, but there's a side note to remind you what a homeworld starts with.
• And of course, the lists of silly ship names have been extended!

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.2

• Fixed: if ship names = hull names, the name wasn't changing if you selected a new hull type. (Pointed out first by Thriyon.)
• Fixed: minor display-of-cost bugs with Wings eliminated. (Mark Heinrich)
• Fixed: imported QSP files assumed all ships had zero carrier bays. (Noticed by David Ouimet.)
• Improved: Contraband calculator now updates numbers when you select a race. It was a bit confusing before. (Noticed by Jani Kaljunen)
• Improved: Large Weapon tips (tech 11 up). Refined with help from comments by David Ouimet, Martin Lorenz, Jelmer Renema, Karsten Okrusch, Mark Heinrich, Solos, Kyle Duffield, and J.K. on the V4 Mailing List and Newsgroup.
• Improved: the names for Wings on the Add Wing screen are now updated (to reflect fighter mix) just by clicking on the appropriate text boxes. (Thriyon)

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.1

• Changed: "Clone of" in cloned ship names removed by popular demand
• New: Alliances. At least, you can set the Friendly Codes of your fleets using a new option in the Tools menu. (Idea by Andrew Hirst.)
• New: Supports the Robot racepack. And it will support the Mivorari racepack when it comes out, too (thanks to Chris Doolaege for his help with that). These are wrapped up in the new diplomat.csv file.
• Changed: The Ground Assault simulation button has been removed, to reduce clutter. This feature is still available through the Tools menu. (Idea by Jelmer Renema.)
• Fixed (well, patched over!): throughout Diplomat's history there have been occasional reports that "no VCR file was generated when there should have been." Some of the more observant users spotted that this seems to occur when you use alien hull plans which do not belong to any of the scripted races. Eventually Mark Heinrich and Jon Nunn managed to bang my head against a wall long enough to explain this to me. So now, the scripts specify just about every race pack as a "possible" race, and I hope the problem has gone away. (Actually there's another, less likely posibility. It may be due to the fact that the races in the player 1/2/3/4 slots are out of sequence. For example, Feds are race pack 101, and Peeps are race pack 801.) If this is the case it's easily guarded against in Diplomat, but I want to find out what the true cause of these null VCR's is, so I haven't patched that yet.)
• Changed: Fighter wing names now show the owners race. The name format is now Aczanny Wing 30/10/20. Ie race name, and the types of fighters in the Wing.
• Fixed: An overflow bug when showing Aczanny Nests has been patched.
• Fixed: if you set all the population levels to 0 on the contraband screen diplomat crashes. (Spotted by Jelmer Renema)
• Improved: The Holo Decoy weapon tip has been expanded after Solos clarified how they work to me. The Plasma Bolt Cannon tip has been changed - I no longer think it's pants.
• Fixed: if you cleared all the PDs, the energy drain number did not reset to the correct number.
• Fixed: the Fleet Vectors were misleading. They were shown mirrored vertically from how they actually appear in a sim. (Spotted by Thomas Peters)
• Fixed: Fractional colonists on the "predicted population in 10/20 turns" columns of the Pcontraband screen wasn't rounded down each turn. Spotted by Jelmer Renema.
• Fixed: Incorrect counting of PD weapons. Cause tracked down by Thomas Peters.
• New: The cost of your entire fleet is shown at the end of the ship description on the overview screen. Ie, if you click on a ship in the List Of Units, the fleet cost will be shown in the right hand panel. (I added this feature because I wanted to estimate what kind of fleet my opponents could assemble, assuming I had a rough idea of their budget. It is also useful for estimating what the best fleet you can build is, on a given budget.)
• Changed: The default generator type for ships is now ""No Generator"". You can add them if you're short of power. (This seems more logical to me. Spotted by Thomas Peters.)
• Changed: The menu structure has been tweaked into a more logical structure. The View menu is split into View and Options . The Options menu allows more intuitive control over how the Ship names appear, and adds a new option: ship names can be, simply, the Hull Name, rather than a completely silly name or the uninformative Ship 3.

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.0

• Exotic Techs are now supported. With the latest Host release (Host93), we can now script these in. A new screen is used to define them for each player (accessed via a new button on the main screen), and the settings are saved when you save a simulation as a .sim file.
• Draconian "Orville Class Scouts" were showing up as foreign hulls instead of Draconian ones. Corrected error in lookup table in support file diplomat.csv. Spotted by Mark Heinrich. 
• Tidied up some some minor overlappings, graphic mistakes, etc. I had not realised you could set Visual Basic to work on a finer grid(!). (Tip from Marco Schoen.)
• The Boarding Calculator has been moved to the new Tools menu. (Previously it was a button on the main form - this change reduces screen clutter.)
• Fixed: Boarding Calculator was only taking boarding lasers into account for hull damage, and not allowing for the aid they give in killing enemy crew.
• New: Double-clicking on a ship, wing or base in the list on the main screen, will edit it. (You can still use the Edit button to the left of the display.) (Idea from Marco Schoen)
• New: Map printing function. This relies on you having installed Pete Chamber's "map2ps.exe " utility in the planets4\data directory. Diplomat provides a Windows front end to drive the DOS-based map2ps.exe, which otherwise requires DOS commands like "map2ps.exe -a4 -q3 -l -g200 echo" . Map2ps is a sophisticated printing utility which can print maps at various magnifications, spread over 1 or several sheets, A4, A3, A2 etc. It can print a grid on the map, it shuffles the text of star names slightly to avoid overlaps on the printout, etc. Its one drawback is that the output is in the form of a PostScript file (.eps), to get the highest quality printing; so you need a Postscript-enabled printer to use it. If your PC/printer can't handle PostScript, there is a freeware product called GhostScript which will print .eps files for you.
• Incidentally - I hope this trend of integration of third party utilities will continue. It is a step beyond VGAP3, which has far more utilities but they all require different ways of driving them, and as far as I know do not generally talk to one another. ShipCalc can create a list of ships and load them into Diplomat at start up. And both ShipCalc and Diplomat use the v4face.DLL Tim created to integrate with the Planets code (to call up race and ship parameters, for example, without having to know exactly what they are.)
• New: Contraband Calculator: Guesstimate how many of which race are in your game, and it acts as a specialised spreadsheet to predict -
• everyone's resource points
• relative prices of different contraband types, NOT including the regular fluctuations
• and most importantly, it forecasts what they will be in 10 and 20 turns' time. So you can get an idea of what to stockpile, and who's population needs trimming ASAP.
• Fixed: Simulations involving the University Alliance didn't work. It seems this is due to a weird naming convention in the race pack, ie it is called R802v2.rce instead of Race802.rce. (Presumably because the name is limited to 8 + 3 characters.) Anyway - it was messing up Diplomat's cross-references when using the UA pack. Diplomat now detects the "misnaming" and copies the ship / race packs to ones with new, more standard filenames. This wastes a bit of disk space, but it works. This does not seem to hurt anything else, like Planets.exe, but it asks permission on powerup to reassure you that you are in control.
• Fixed: minor bug reported by Thomas Peters (Thriyon): "If you try to add a fighter wing in the ship screen that doesn't fit into the bays (because they are too small or other wings occupy them yet) a message appears that tells you this. This is ok, but for each of these messages an explosion happens at start of combat. I suppose empty wings explode."
• Fixed: the race name was wrong in the Fleet Command screen. For example, if you set Player 1 = Stormers, it would always show the race name as 'Feds'. (Bug reported by Weis Guy)
• New: you can set the Crew size for a ship. OK, Andrew?

Fixed: Miscellaneous typos, minor bugs etc discovered by Thriyon

What's new in Diplomat 2.5.13 (September 2003)

This is sort of a rush job so people can test the new Exotics. I'd been adding minor tweaks here and there since the last update, but nothing too major.
Important note: you must overwrite your old diplomat.csv file with the new one inthe Zip file, because I've changed the format slightly. The reason is, I store the default QSP directory in the CSV file, so you don't need to re-enter it each time you re-use Diplomat. Ie if you save a QSP file as, say, player 3 in game 4, the default directory is remembered for the next time you use QSP files.

• More silly ship names in the support files diplomatnamesx.dat
• Superweapon descriptions updated to allow for Host changes and general experience with them (thanks, Thriyon)
• Large weapon descriptions updated with help from Andreas Benne
• All superweapons now given range 1000 in damage graph. (The Help files say two of them are range 100, but experiments showed this was untrue. All superweapons are range 1000.)
• Damage graph tweaked: weapon accuracy is now 70%, not 60% at extreme range. (I realised the received wisdom that accuracy falls by 40% at extreme range was wrong when I saw a code fragment from Tim.)
• I noticed the code allowing for the effect of superweapons was "commented out" of the damage graph code. Probably a temporary thing I forgot to undo a few releases ago. Superweapons now have an effect on the damage graph again.
• QSP (ship Quick Build) files are now stored in subdirectories off the \Plans\ directory, to match how Planets4 organises its QSP files since Host 13something. The default directory can be changed through a new option under "Files" on the main screen. Diplomat remembers what directory you last used, on the assumption that you will normally be importing / exporting QSP files for a particular game / player slot.
• New button added to Create Ship screen, which allows you to subtract the cost of the engines (f you get free ones from Amphibians). It also affects the mineral costs (Idea from Thriyon).
• New Exotic Techs: Energized Sandcasters and Anti Fighter Computer are now supported. I also added a button to set all Exotics off (idea from Dave Stevens).
• Wings have a High Guard by default. (Saves you having to click that check box every time. As someone said, "who builds Wings without HG?")
  

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.12 (March 2003)

• New: in the Boarding Claculator, Andreas Benne pointed out defending crew don't get a x10 bonus against attacking High Guard. I fudged this and just put in a x20 bonus for attacking HG. This may be nonsense (do defending HG get it too?)
• Weapon descriptions: refined several of these. Example: Pulsed Laser is far and away the best small weapon per mc, backed up by exotic techs.
• Diplomat now shows the correct energy drain for Plasma Bolt Cannons when fitted to the RCS Lotus and Aurora hulls. (The weapon is extra effective due to their Plasma Stream Enhancer, but has double the usual energy requirement to compensate.) Thanks to Thriyon for his help here.
  
• The Ordnance scripted per Wing was just 1000. I suspect Wings may have been running out of Ord prematurely in simulations. I increased this to 30,000 Just In Case
• Wing analysis code was based on wrong assumption: wings CAN fire more than once a tick. I was corrected and advised here by Jelmer Renema.
• Improved: ground combat simulator. It was giving confusing, contradictory summaries and I noticed it wasn't showing High Guard in the visual readout, which made it look like your base was completely wiped out when actually all the HG were still alive.
• Fixed: bug in ground assault simulator causing negative losses when negative numbers of mechs attacked colonists etc. Found by Dave Stevens

What's New in Diplomat 2.5.11 (December 2002)

Just some minor specialist stuff...

• Fixed: bug in Add Wing screen which caused Diplomat to crash (divide by zero error) when using Solarian type 2 fighters. Bug found by Jason Northrup.
• Improved: Ground Assault simulator was using an old algorithm for mech.vs.mech which Tim's Host had evolved beyond. Diplomat is now more accurate. Incidently, the new algorithm has no randomness in this part of ground combat any more; and the feature or bug where 10 mechs (no matter how bad) could alway skill 1 (no matter how good) has been eliminated in Tim's new algorithm. Thanks to Tim for providing a chunk of Host code here!
• Some cosmetic stuff (I decided dark text on dark background = not good)
  
• More silly ship names!
  

What was new in Diplomat 2.5.10 (October 2002)

• Fixed: in the Ground Assault simulation, defending mechs were not killing attacking personnel. (Bug found by Silentdeth)
• More: silly ship names (in files diplomatnames1.dat, diplomatnames2.dat, included in the Zip).
• Fixed: several errors in the Contraband Estimator page (Tools menu, Contraband Calculator option). I didn't believe some results (like, contra prices are still high even with a single colonist in the game) but test games with known mixes of colonists showed Diplomat's predictions were spot on. It's now a license to print money! By the way, thanks to Gabor Toro here because I found his alternative explanation of the contraband algorithms useful.
• New: The Contraband Calculator has a button which lets you save its settings (race types, numbers of colonists, happiness of each race). You need to save it in as a .sim file though.
  
• Fixed: major flaws in Ground Assault surrender calculation. Best described in this extract from Diplomat's code thus:

'A note on the newsgroup from David Bandy in Oct 2002 made me realise that mechs now count in the surrender phase.
'I checked with Tim and he sent new GA code (my last sample was almost 2 years old). Obviously there's been a change
'I didn't notice because they did NOT count in my old Host code. No matter; I have added their effect in in
'Diplomat 2.5.10.
'Here's the old code, radically different from new lines below!
[If ForcePower1 is > 3*ForcePower2, or vice-versa, one base surrenders...]
'ForcePower1 = (B1.colonists * B1combatColonist)   'I had to split these lines up because with 50 million colonists, we were getting overflow errors.
'ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + (B1.Crew * B1combatCrew)
'ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + (B1.troops * B1combatTroop)
'ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + (B1.higuards * B1combatHG)
'ForcePower2 = (B2.colonists * B2combatColonist)
'ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + (B2.Crew * B2combatCrew)
'ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + (B2.troops * B2combatTroop)
'ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + (B2.higuards * B2combatHG)

New code:
ForcePower1 = (B1.colonists * B1combatColonist) / 10000
            'I had to split these lines up because with 50 million colonists, we were getting overflow errors.
ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + ((B1.Crew * B1combatCrew) / 100)
ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + (B1.troops * B1combatTroop)
ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + (B1.higuards * B1combatHG)
ForcePower1 = ForcePower1 + (B1.MechType1 + B1.MechType2 + B1.MechType3) * 100

ForcePower2 = (B2.colonists * B2combatColonist) / 10000
ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + ((B2.Crew * B2combatCrew) / 100)
ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + (B2.troops * B2combatTroop)
ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + (B2.higuards * B2combatHG)
ForcePower2 = ForcePower2 + (B2.MechType1 + B2.MechType2 + B2.MechType3) * 100

What was new in 2.5.9 (September 2002)

• Improved: the Boarding Calculator (in the Tools menu) is more accurate. It's still not a mirror of Tim's code - he sent me it and I decided not to type in 20 pages of code. But some factors were wrong, and stuff. It is still a rough and ready estimator, but I trust it more myself now.
• New: the Contraband Calculator (Tools menu, the thing which helps predict prices of contraband) now allows you to specify racial happiness. This allows you to see what the effect of tinkering with your own race's happiness will be on the contraband market. (Ie by shifting tax rates, or moving colonists to unhappy bases. You could also use it to predict the effect of eliminating a lot of enemies, etc.) Note: although I have attempted to implement the algorithms Tim published, I don't have many real-life examples to check it with. If anyone can send me real-life examples, ie "In a game with 2 million Feds, average happiness 250, and 3 million Stormers, average happiness about 300, contra prices are..." it would be useful to cross-check with.
• More: silly ship names

What was new in 2.5.8

Fixed: spurious (blank) Notes screen opening when you opened a saved .sim

Added: when you save a .sim file, a ship's hyperdrive is now remembered - reported by Marco Schon et alia

Added: Scripts now include 500 fuel per ship and a ship's hyperdrive. (So if you want to set up a mini-universe to test something with Master, your ships can hyperjump if needed.)

Lordfire pointed out that Sandcaster Exotic Tech wasn't working. However, it seems to have been a Host-side problem, which Tim fixed in Host 110.

New: When you select a ship, its Devices are displayed in the Tips screen. About 60 Devices are covered but some common ones like Dust Off won't be. The idea is to help you decide which ships t