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There is an old strategy came called Stars! by Mare Crisium.

I would like to write some AI to play this game, but I don't get much fun out of trying to decipher file formats.

Does anyone know the format of the X and H files that are used for turns? Or at the very least have some guidance on how they would start trying to decipher them? I am currently using GIT to save history then watching what changes after different actions, but it is very slow going.

http://www.starsfaq.com/index.htm

There are some links in there to download the game, make donations, or find keys to play.

Jonathan Leffler
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Jacob Brewer
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    You may get lucky, but somehow, I doubt it. The FAQ page you link to mentions an open source clone; have you looked at that? They will presumably have reverse engineered the file formats. – Jonathan Leffler May 09 '14 at 01:20
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    Contact the creators of the game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_Crisium_Studios, chances are they will help you. – Matas Vaitkevicius May 14 '14 at 10:12
  • I am guessing they are using PGP. My next step is to extract all of the readable strings try using them as keys. Failing that letting a brute force method run against it a few days. I hope "the Jeffs" as game fans call them see fit to release the keys and save me some hours. – Jacob Brewer May 23 '14 at 15:44
  • Well PGP failed pretty quickly... What other encryption may have been used at that time? – Jacob Brewer Jun 10 '14 at 20:20

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