Roman Civil War ToT PBEM playtest

[Kull]

"From the Golden Halls of Ecbatana - A Warning to Crassus":

Be silent, Roman cur. It is not for the likes of you to lecture the friends of Orodes. Oh, and here's a bag of heads to assist you in passing the time; archers, infantry, cavalrymen - and somewhere in there you'll find that of your former General of the Euphrates. It will undoubtedly please Crassus to learn that his old friend wept like a woman prior to receiving the death he so richly deserved!

[MagyarCrusader]

Cruel fortune for Vercingetorix that Legio's garrison could not perform as well as Orodes legions. Going against the advice of his generals, Pompey would like to offer the people of Gaul one last chance at reconciliation. Promptly disband all military personel from the presence of Brigantium or else Gaul will face a mighty host from a united and blood thirsty Iberia.

[Kull]

It would seem that hearing problems must be added to the long list of ills afflicting that pox-ridden flea from Iberia, Pomposity Maximosity. So let Vercingtorix speak loudly and in terms that even one so ill-begotten can clearly understand:

"Thy word o'Pompey, has been proven by thy actions to contain as much substance and worth as a blast of gas from the buttocks. Take thy pathetic threats and begone with ye!"

[MagyarCrusader]

!!!

[Civfan]

lol

[techumseh]

Only a Gaul would have the gall! How wude!

To add to the levity of the Gaulish "Council of Petty Chieftans", here are the heads of two bands of horsemen which strayed too close to the camp of Mighty Caesar.

[techumseh]

Here is the save.

[The ANZAC]

Still fair sailing for all on Mare Nostrum

[Civfan]

the turn

[Kull]

There's a problem here:

After starting up the August Save, I made the rounds of my cities - and noticed something unusual. Most of them were building things I didn't want. Puzzled, I opened up my July save and wrote down a complete list of everything in my build queues, and then made a detailed comparison with the August File:

Of my 12 remaining cities, NINE were building different units.

Here's another odd thing. In August, two cities were going to complete a pair of expensive units. But after starting up the game, I only received notification that one had been built. When I looked in the city that was building the other, it contained a cheap archer unit instead! Worse - there wasn't ANY message indicating that this archer had been built. It just appeared magically, and my accrued sheilds were gone.

I definitely used "Control-N" (since it's impossible to move any of the fortified units from the July Save), so there certainly wasn't an "opening" for the AI to take control of the Gallic Civ. And in every turn to date, not once have my build queues changed. In addition, many of my cities are "working" terrain the AI would never select - and all those "human-choice" selections are intact between the July and August saves.

It's hard for me to believe that any of the human players would have cheated open the game and changed these queues - you'd have to be an idiot to do something so obvious - and to so little purpose. But some sort of human intervention has occurred, and here's why I know:

As a test, I downloaded the Egypt July Save, let it play through to August, and examined the Gallic Build queues. Result: No change.

I had played Parthia for Fairline, so I ran the same test on that file, with the same result: All was well in Gaul.

The next file was that of Pompey. And this is the file that changed the Build Queues in Gaul.

Tecumseh: This is your PBEM, so it's your call as to what happens next. But Gaul will not play until an explanation is forthcoming.

[Civfan]

your referring to your civ gaul this has happend too?

There is a problem with the Civ2 engine and a program out their to fix this problem with city queries being changed by the Civ2 engine.

I've experienced this many times in my history pbem and ancient history game.

If someone remembers the name, dont be shy just post it here.

basically your suppost to save each turn with this program and then on your next turn load this program. It saves all the city productions and loads them from the previous turn.

thats what this sounds like

[techumseh]

I've been back through the various posts, and it doesn't seem that the AI has had a chance to play a turn for any of the civs. This is the most common cause of this sort of thing, and I've seen it happen even if it plays a turn for an entirely different civ. Still, there might be a non-human explantion as Civfan says.

I indicated on an earlier thread that I would like to see PBEM games randomly audited. Perhaps we should do that now. What do people think?

[MagyarCrusader]

Well, thanks for not coming right out and accusing me, but the problem is the Civ2 enginge. Civfan gave us the jist of it, and the program is called "LazyCiv" and its written by Xin Yu. Speaking from personal experience on the short end of the stick, the bug is trigged when a city is conquered. This doesn't happen all the time for everyone player, but only for certain players everytime they lose a city their queues will be changed. Xin Yu's LazyCiv is a god-send to PBEMers. However, I don't think it works with ToT. This is my first ToT pbem and IIRC, I tried it out on my first turn and it didn't work. I then proceeded to post on April 16:

Question: do I need to use Lazy Civ for ToT?

And nobody took time to respond. Great. I was hoping that ToT would be different from MGE and this bug wouldn't present itself. Now we have a serious problem on our hands and we won't be able to fix it without going back several turns and replaying. Possibly, we could put the game on hiatus and try to get LazyCiv to work with ToT, or we can beseech XinYu to make another version. If successful, I'd suggest letting Kull "cheat" for this turn to build the units his queue lost and continue on. I fully understand Kull's plight because I've been jerked by the bug in the past, so if lazyciv won't work for us then this game should be terminated and all future ToT PBEMs avoided.

[MagyarCrusader]

Furthermore, I wish that this does not affect my reputation as a reputable PBEMer. If you guys can fix out the bug and want to continue on without me, I'll drop without any objections.

[Kull]

Originally posted by MagyarCrusader
Furthermore, I wish that this does not affect my reputation as a reputable PBEMer. If you guys can fix out the bug and want to continue on without me, I'll drop without any objections.

Perish the thought! Seriously, I'm pretty new at PBEM, and this is my first encounter with this bug. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would deliberately change another player's build queue - but the fact was that something happened during your turn. I felt obligated to point that out, but certainly could have done so more diplomatically. My apologies on that account.

I have to agree with MC on his other point. If there isn't a version of Lacyciv for ToT and everytime you lose a city the AI is going to mess with your builds - that's a pretty serious bug. For now, I'll just suck it up and move on (with "suck" being the operative word!)