Massive PBEM Bug: Player 1 Cannot Trade

[Arnelos]

I've done some more testing with the problem and as far as I can tell, Player 1 in both PBEM and HotSeat games is unable to trade anything - techs, open borders agreements, etc. They show as available, but if you click on them, they briefly pop down to the "offered" area and then IMMEDIATELY get popped right back up to the "available" area.

I have found no way to trade techs or any other type of agreement with Player 1. In test PBEM and Hotseat games, players 2 through 7 are able to trade with one another without problem.

Has anyone else encountered this? Does anyone know a workaround or is PBEM hopelessly bugged until it gets patched?

[John-SJ]

I have not tried either of these so I do not know if they will work.

How about making player 1 an AI player?

or

Make player 1 a dummy human player. Every time his turn comes around whoever is handling the dummy just hits end turn and then use the save for his own turn.

Oh! What about making a player 1 dummy and then have him retire on his first turn?

[Mart]

Originally posted by John-SJ
Oh! What about making a player 1 dummy and then have him retire on his first turn?

That would definitely work ok. I think disbanding the only settler would do the trick. But I need to check this.

[ayronis]

Does anyone have any new information on this?

Can anyone confirm that retiring/disbanding player 1 successfully bypasses this?

[Claus]

I've tried several PBEMs this morning, but there was no problem of the kind you described.

Question:
Does the problem happen to you also when you don't start at the beginning, but eg. in Industrial Age?
I set up a three player game with the rest of all possible slots filled with AI factions. I set a "tiny" world to have immediate contact.
I tried to sign "open border" agreements, and all worked fine, even as Player1.

However, I have a certain theory. I couldn't verify it, but maybe it's something worth a closer examination:

I've experienced that sometimes the computer on initializing the game seems to reset Player1's leader name to the name of his workstation. In the PBEM that we have started, I called my leader "Claudius III.", but when I made my first turn, it was reset to "Kassandra", my computer's name. Also possible that I simply forgot to give myself a name, it doesn't matter.

The point is: When I received the savegame for my second turn from the player who is last in our row (let's call him abc), his file to me was labeled "abc_to_XXXYYYZZZ", XXXYYYZZZ being the name of HIS machine.
It should have been "abc_to_Kassandra", because he was adressing the file to me.

So what the program probably did was this: It saved my name not as "Kassandra" but as "name of local machine", which is obviously different with every computer. So on one computer I'd be called "Kassandra", on the next "Workstation1", then "XXXYYYZZZ" etc.

If those two issues are connected with each other, it could be possible that Player1 is not able to trade because the program has contradicting info about what his name is.

Has anyone experienced anything similiar?

[ayronis]

I think that is an interesting hyposthesis. I bet it does have some connection to that bug.

Here are some other threads where people discussed the Player1 load bug:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=140881 http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=140899