Anyone know a quick fix to disable those pesky natural disasters that ruin a planet by destroying all its slots? I always find these supremely annoying, and I would love to not have them in my games.

Try asking at http://swrebellion.com

Unfortunately, something happened to their site and they are stuck in read only mode now. No one can log in or post. :(

Yep, I used to head over to their website off and on to see how their modding was going, but I guess we're out of luck for now.

I used to follow the modding progress on swrebellion.com too. It would be a shame if that body of knowledge is gone for good. Essentially the problem with the natural disaster was that it was coded deep in the game. The code responsible couldn't be deciphered without the source code itself which was never released.

Apparently if the source code could be obtained then it could be easily fixed. Who knows if it even still exists? I guess then the AI could be improved too. Otherwise I think it was a case of clever people reverse engineering a bunch of code using a hex editor which never managed to fix the problem.

I hate the natural disaster - it meant that infinite games were impossible as the galaxy slowly undergoes total apocalypse. The only way to slow them down was to reduce planetary assaults - there was a school of thought that these seemed to increase the event frequency.

Try this.

Never build so that you run out of open energy or mining slots completely, always build only until the 2nd last one on both. So if you have 10 energy and 7 mining slots, never build more than 6 mines and never more than 9 facilities total.

No guarantee that it totally negates disasters completely, but since i started doing it everywhere, i´ve played thousands of days without a single disaster.
And i started doing this after noting that disasters always seemed to hit planets that were maxed out. And as i also save a lot when i play, i started reloading and checking the planets that did get hit by disaster, and i´m yet to see it strike a planet with free energy and mine slots.
(and i bought my SW Rebellion in the late 90s)