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Mr. Ostrich's Bug Compendium
I've encountered a few bugs here and there that I've decided to put in one place. Due to my, how shall I put it, unusual (selling for 30 keys, pm me on steam), playstyle, I imagine some of these won't have been experienced by anyone else. I'll probably post interesting anecdotes about my games here too.
BUG: Station Madness!
In the event that the player attacks and destroys a station that the AI is trading with. It is possible that the AI will become bugged, resulting in them thinking that you are continuously attacking the station for the remainder of the game. Naturally, this destroys your relations with the civ. I have a save file where that has happened, and can post it if it is needed, but I imagine it wouldn't be overly difficult to replicate.
As an addendum to the station madness bug, AI's will get grumpy at you for destroying stations that they themselves are trying to destroy. (See also, harmony miasma, combat satellites while helping them fight a war, etc etc.)
BUG: Mind $#@%ed!
The fact that this one got through testing is baffling to me, but whatever. Anyway, what happens is this, say, Hutama builds the mindflower, and I, as a harmony Elodie player, can't have that uncultured Yobbo ruining humanities first impression with Planet, so I go and take Freeland from him, both robbing him of his mindflower and giving the name Freeland a delightfully postmodern ironic twist.
The game will then break. The mindflower will not progress because the city is in resistance (which makes sense mechanically but in the lore isn't possible) and from what I can tell (the game got progressively more broken as time went on) it will end the game at it's usual time, breaking things because it doesn't know who to give the victory to. In my case, it couldn't tell whether Hutama should win or Kavitha, I sold her Freeland after seeing the ridiculous amounts of Terrascape.
Something so integral to the game should not bug out so hard. I lost the game (I think) but was frozen in the diplomacy screen with Hutama so I couldn't tell. Despite having taken Freeland, I was able to attack the mindflower I'd just captured, so I don't get what's going on here.
BUG: Empty Words!
If you use the diplomacy menu while waiting for turns to progress, any diplomatic pop-ups will be empty, which is to say, if someone wants to renew a deal with you, the deal will be an exchange of nothing for nothing. This is a problem because I like to view the current state of Diplomacy during turn calculations. Much like the above Mindf*ckery bug, how the hell did this get through testing, and this is directed at said testers, not the developers. Bugs like this one are the sort of thing that playtesters seem to be specifically meant to pick up. I sound angrier than I am, I'm actually genuinely curious to see how playtesting works, because I know if I was doing it I would **** around with menu's and things constantly because interacting with several systems at once seems like it'd be the most likely way to break the game.
BUG: How dare I declare war on you!
Less of a bug and more of an oversight, the diplomacy calculations will flag the player as betraying alliances if said alliance system forces a player into war. Basically, if I declare war on an AI, and he is allied with my ally, I will take massive diplomatic hit's. This wouldn't be a problem but there is no easy way to track interAI diplomacy.
I do love the Alliance system though, in the aforementioned broken Elodie game. Fielding declared on Barre, which resulted in a chain reaction on a global scale, it was the first time a war situation in Civ felt like an actual diplomatic affair, and I called it The New World War. The AI does need to be tweaked a bit, if you and the AI both declare on somebody, you can clearly see the AI putting no effort into the war. Barre was the exception to this rule, and we were staunch allies throughout as he fought off invasions from both Fielding and Kozlov.
My third game will begin soon (I've abandoned the Elodie game to the Bug God!) and I expect many more bugs will rear their heads. Stay tuned.
BUG: Station Madness!
In the event that the player attacks and destroys a station that the AI is trading with. It is possible that the AI will become bugged, resulting in them thinking that you are continuously attacking the station for the remainder of the game. Naturally, this destroys your relations with the civ. I have a save file where that has happened, and can post it if it is needed, but I imagine it wouldn't be overly difficult to replicate.
As an addendum to the station madness bug, AI's will get grumpy at you for destroying stations that they themselves are trying to destroy. (See also, harmony miasma, combat satellites while helping them fight a war, etc etc.)
BUG: Mind $#@%ed!
The fact that this one got through testing is baffling to me, but whatever. Anyway, what happens is this, say, Hutama builds the mindflower, and I, as a harmony Elodie player, can't have that uncultured Yobbo ruining humanities first impression with Planet, so I go and take Freeland from him, both robbing him of his mindflower and giving the name Freeland a delightfully postmodern ironic twist.
The game will then break. The mindflower will not progress because the city is in resistance (which makes sense mechanically but in the lore isn't possible) and from what I can tell (the game got progressively more broken as time went on) it will end the game at it's usual time, breaking things because it doesn't know who to give the victory to. In my case, it couldn't tell whether Hutama should win or Kavitha, I sold her Freeland after seeing the ridiculous amounts of Terrascape.
Something so integral to the game should not bug out so hard. I lost the game (I think) but was frozen in the diplomacy screen with Hutama so I couldn't tell. Despite having taken Freeland, I was able to attack the mindflower I'd just captured, so I don't get what's going on here.
BUG: Empty Words!
If you use the diplomacy menu while waiting for turns to progress, any diplomatic pop-ups will be empty, which is to say, if someone wants to renew a deal with you, the deal will be an exchange of nothing for nothing. This is a problem because I like to view the current state of Diplomacy during turn calculations. Much like the above Mindf*ckery bug, how the hell did this get through testing, and this is directed at said testers, not the developers. Bugs like this one are the sort of thing that playtesters seem to be specifically meant to pick up. I sound angrier than I am, I'm actually genuinely curious to see how playtesting works, because I know if I was doing it I would **** around with menu's and things constantly because interacting with several systems at once seems like it'd be the most likely way to break the game.
BUG: How dare I declare war on you!
Less of a bug and more of an oversight, the diplomacy calculations will flag the player as betraying alliances if said alliance system forces a player into war. Basically, if I declare war on an AI, and he is allied with my ally, I will take massive diplomatic hit's. This wouldn't be a problem but there is no easy way to track interAI diplomacy.
I do love the Alliance system though, in the aforementioned broken Elodie game. Fielding declared on Barre, which resulted in a chain reaction on a global scale, it was the first time a war situation in Civ felt like an actual diplomatic affair, and I called it The New World War. The AI does need to be tweaked a bit, if you and the AI both declare on somebody, you can clearly see the AI putting no effort into the war. Barre was the exception to this rule, and we were staunch allies throughout as he fought off invasions from both Fielding and Kozlov.
My third game will begin soon (I've abandoned the Elodie game to the Bug God!) and I expect many more bugs will rear their heads. Stay tuned.
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