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When a unit performs the commercial "Franchise" attack, it siphons off 10% of the production generated by that city (percentage is editable in const.txt). The only way to get rid of a Franchise is with a Lawsuit, specifically the "ORDER_SUE_FRANCHISE" (as listed in orders.txt). Unfortunately, this no longer works in the Apolyton Edition. In the attachment, you can see a Sumerian Lawyer standing next to one of his cities, which has the "Gear" icon appended to the city status bar. That tells you a foreign franchise has been established there (the amount of lost production is also specified in the "City Manager" screen). The Lawyer has the special attack necessary to remove a franchise (the briefcase-with-skull button, circled in red) and the game recognizes this, as indicated by the "Gear-being-smashed-with-a-hammer" attack icon, along with the cost of the attack (200 gold), all of which matches the settings in orders.txt. However, when you click the icon on the city, nothing happens. No message, no sound, not even the "circled-red-x" which normally indicates that an attack is not allowed. Sumer has thousands of Gold in the treasury, so that's not the problem either.
I've tested this with the unaltered AE base game as well as several Cradle versions, and all produce essentially the same result. The only difference is the AE Lawyer doesn't even have a "Sue Franchise" button. FYI, the existence of the button is determined ENTIRELY by whether the UnitPretest says "CanSue" (provides the button) or "CanSueFranchise" (no button). I have an older version of CTP2 which uses the unaltered executable, and in that game the "Sue Franchise" attack works normally. So there's no doubt - this is a bug which was ADDED by the Apolyton Edition.
While looking through the Apolyton_README.txt file I spotted an interesting comment from the 2004-05-19 update: "Fixed: Check which prevented suing of franchises"
Since that matches the results we're seeing right now, I suspect that bug crept back in during one of the later updates. It's probably too much to hope for an exe fix, but if a SLIC expert happens by, it would be nice if the effect of that lawsuit could be replicated with slic. Otherwise, it's really unfortunate, because one of the more interesting Special Attacks will have to be removed from the Cradle 3+ update, plus it means that even "normal" AE games are going to be fundamentally flawed.
I've tested this with the unaltered AE base game as well as several Cradle versions, and all produce essentially the same result. The only difference is the AE Lawyer doesn't even have a "Sue Franchise" button. FYI, the existence of the button is determined ENTIRELY by whether the UnitPretest says "CanSue" (provides the button) or "CanSueFranchise" (no button). I have an older version of CTP2 which uses the unaltered executable, and in that game the "Sue Franchise" attack works normally. So there's no doubt - this is a bug which was ADDED by the Apolyton Edition.
While looking through the Apolyton_README.txt file I spotted an interesting comment from the 2004-05-19 update: "Fixed: Check which prevented suing of franchises"
Since that matches the results we're seeing right now, I suspect that bug crept back in during one of the later updates. It's probably too much to hope for an exe fix, but if a SLIC expert happens by, it would be nice if the effect of that lawsuit could be replicated with slic. Otherwise, it's really unfortunate, because one of the more interesting Special Attacks will have to be removed from the Cradle 3+ update, plus it means that even "normal" AE games are going to be fundamentally flawed.