Keyisfull, I'm in exactly the same predicament while playing mission 7.  I'm trying to beat it before I post it for everyone, but I got myself into a situation where I have no energy and my cat population is on the verge of rising too high.  For me, I've concluded that when I load my last saved game, I'm already too close to the problem.  The levels of cats and mice were leading toward disaster, but I didn't see it coming until I didn't have the power left to prevent it.

Earlier the question came up, why would anyone want to just kill cats when you could sell them?  You might have a perfect reason now.  Yeah it stinks to lose the cats without getting all that money from selling them, but killing them only uses up half of the power and it might be your only way to control the population before it gets out of hand.

Hayden, the tiles list algae when you inspect them, but you can't grow algae unless it is a water tile.  To make it less confusing, I probably should have had the game hide algae info when you weren't looking at a water tile.  As long as the bird population isn't shrinking, at least it seems stable.  That's good, but I'm guessing you don't have as many birds as you want.  The larger your dome is, the harder it is to get small populations to breed, because they have more room to spread out, and they are less likely to run into each other to breed.  I can't be certain this will work, but maybe you just need to buy more and see if that gets their numbers rising on their own.

I've just uploaded version 1.6b which has mission 7, the piranha species, and limited JAWS 12 support.  I downloaded their 40 minute trial but the darn thing expired before I could finish.  As long as people are willing to hear "Title is" in front of each spoken sentence, it does work.  If I'd have only a little more time I would have finished it, so I'm wondering if I can just uninstall it and get another 40 minutes.  Has anyone tried that before?

All you need to do for another 40 minutes is restart your computer.

Staindaddict, in message box mode, each new statement requires you to press Enter to close it.  Basically it is using standard windows message boxes to relay the information.  Once you've closed the current message, press Tab again to cycle to a different text output mode.

Keyisfull, the cats will reproduce, but if you can get their numbers low enough you can keep it there.  Sometimes I will use Kill rather than Sell when I have to lower a population in a hurry.  Since it takes only 10 power to kill, you can lower the population twice as much using the same amount of power.  If the cat population is simply too high, even using kill won't help because they will still reproduce faster than you can charge your batteries.  Anticipating a problem, before it gets out of hand, is sometimes needed.  I'm happy that I finally beat mission 7!  Yay!  Now that I know what I'm doing, I think I could beat it again pretty easily, but it was very hard until I figured it out.

Hmm, I'll look in to that.  Thanks Hayden.

Yeah, that's on my list of things to try, as plan B.  I'm always glad when someone suggests something I had been thinking, it makes me feel like the idea is better because I wasn't the only one to consider it.

Nocturnus, try adding more trees.  It's true, that more trees hinders grass growth, but it promotes the growth and moss and also produces more acorns.  Rabbits do eat grass, but their preferred food is moss, and they also can eat acorns if necessary.  All in all, having a lot of trees should increase the food supply for your rabbits.

Hi,
Well...some of it would be good either way; I really have never considered rabbits eating moss.

Hi,
One thing I'd suggest for future games is the use of the .net framework and the Slim DX library so as to avoid errors related to Com usage.  Like instead of VB6, you could begin to program in VB.net.  But I need to try out this game now.  It sounds awesome.

Aprone,
Why not simply use the API interfaces for the various Screen readers? Jaws, Window-Eyes, and System Access all have api interfaces that you can use to send speech directly to the screen reader. Blind Adrenaline, All In Play, the RS Games and Quentin C Playroom, Entombed an VIP Mud all use these interfaces and I think they will remove a lot of the headaches you are having.

Good suggestion as documentation on JAWS scripts is very scant indeed.  In fact, as far as I've seen, it could use another language to hold it up.  The API would make everything easier.