BUG:Trading Communications Changes Civ

Architect · December 10, 2001, 00:23

This is with 1.16f.

Been lurking since Civ3 released and decided to post a bug I found. I mainly posting it to see if others have experienced similar problems with trading communications.

Basically, in the attached game I have been sharing a pretty large continent with the Germans and it is now 1030 AD. We had no other contact until the Babylonian borders extended across the ocean and I noticed it. If you'll look at the game I have a Galley down by the southern tip of our continent and if you move it towards the Babylonian red border you find a city and can make first contact.

During our first meeting I noticed that the Babylonians where still in ancient times needing Currency and Construction. Well I knew I needed to get contact with the rest of the world so I setup a trade where I gave the Babylonians Currency, Construction and 130 gold for contact with the Aztecs. This trade is very important and must be done as I specified. Do not add Contact with the Germans or anything else. You'll note that they are polite with me. Here's where everything goes wacky. After this trade is complete, before exiting out of the diplomacy window do another trade and check what they need. As expected, they need feudalism because they just made it to the middle ages.

Don't do anymore trades, but instead exit and then start another trade with the Babylonians. Now they are annoyed with me! I start a trade and they now are suddenly ahead of me in tech!!!!! If you check the Aztecs, they are exactly the same as the Aztecs. In effect, by trading me communications with the Aztecs, the Babylonians have become the Aztecs! You can actually make them become any civilization this way.

A huge show stopping bug in this particular game. I am going to try and reconfirm that this happens all the time, but I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this. I read a post about insta-trading after selling a tech by someone else, which sounds similar to this but there was no details about trading communications. Btw, if you just trade the Babylonians the tech, nothing gets corrupted.

I'm sending this to Firaxis too.

Edit: Changed title to make it more clear.

Soren Johnson · December 10, 2001, 02:19

Quote:

Originally posted by Architect
This is with 1.16f.

Been lurking since Civ3 released and decided to post a bug I found. I mainly posting it to see if others have experienced similar problems with trading communications.

Basically, in the attached game I have been sharing a pretty large continent with the Germans and it is now 1030 AD. We had no other contact until the Babylonian borders extended across the ocean and I noticed it. If you'll look at the game I have a Galley down by the southern tip of our continent and if you move it towards the Babylonian red border you find a city and can make first contact.

During our first meeting I noticed that the Babylonians where still in ancient times needing Currency and Construction. Well I knew I needed to get contact with the rest of the world so I setup a trade where I gave the Babylonians Currency, Construction and 130 gold for contact with the Aztecs. This trade is very important and must be done as I specified. Do not add Contact with the Germans or anything else. You'll note that they are polite with me. Here's where everything goes wacky. After this trade is complete, before exiting out of the diplomacy window do another trade and check what they need. As expected, they need feudalism because they just made it to the middle ages.

Don't do anymore trades, but instead exit and then start another trade with the Babylonians. Now they are annoyed with me! I start a trade and they now are suddenly ahead of me in tech!!!!! If you check the Aztecs, they are exactly the same as the Aztecs. In effect, by trading me communications with the Aztecs, the Babylonians have become the Aztecs! You can actually make them become any civilization this way.

A huge show stopping bug in this particular game. I am going to try and reconfirm that this happens all the time, but I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this. I read a post about insta-trading after selling a tech by someone else, which sounds similar to this but there was no details about trading communications. Btw, if you just trade the Babylonians the tech, nothing gets corrupted.

I'm sending this to Firaxis too.

Edit: Changed title to make it more clear.

thanks for posting this... that's a pretty serious bug. I'll check it out.

RTodd · December 10, 2001, 18:24

*bump*

Ouch....if that's indeed the case, good catch Architect.

T

Architect · December 10, 2001, 18:46

Well, I made a small map scenario and tried to recreate it but no luck.

What sucks is I spent like 8 hours getting that game to its current state and now its a waste. Even if it only happens 10% of the time, I don't want to play the patch with continents or archipelegoes(sp). Its pangea for me now on only which I don't really like because its much easier.

Hopefully for the rest of you its just my problem and not something that's going to start ruining some games that go along time without contact.

Was anyone who downloaded it able to recreate the problem I reported with that particular save? I'm curious if maybe its only XP or something.

Capt Dizle · December 10, 2001, 20:05

Its probably a feature. Anytime someone reports on a new tactic Firaxis will change it. They think of it as closing loopholes.

There is only one way to play the game.

Soren's Way or the highway.

Adam Wallock · December 10, 2001, 20:35

JT did you have stupid-pills for breakfast!?

This is a legitimate bug. Try to contain your bitterness for a thread in which it actually has some merit.

Geez.

November Adam · December 10, 2001, 22:06

I haven't had this bug, but one that I've had is that is in the diplomacy screen. After playing for a while, all of the diplomacy lines vanish. No idea who is trading, at peace with, at war with. Nada.

Brundlefly · December 17, 2001, 10:33

I can't understand why more people aren't complaining about this one. This is a show-stopper and makes patch 1.16f useless. So now it's either play with the patch against this huge AI trading advantage or uninstall the patch and go back to crippling corruption. I swear, if I could find the receipt I would return this game in a second. Really, Firaxis, if you are listening, this is a problem caused by some change you made for the patch so it can't be that difficult or time-consuming to track down. Make a 1.17 patch real quickly that contains only a fix for this problem, ok?

Mongoose · December 22, 2001, 02:23

Architect, or anyone else that has experienced this -

Did you ever have this happen before patching?

Were you using a modified rule set when this happenned?

Had you changed the number of civs for the map size you were using?

I ask these questions because I only noticed this phenomenon ( at least I think that's what's happenning) in my current game. In this game, I AM using a mod and I HAVE increased the number of civs. (to 10 on a Standard map, 1.16f)

If this isn't happening in unaltered rule sets, I speculate that the number of civs is the driving factor. Hmmm. Could be that it would occur even without alteration in large and huge map games where the default no. of civs exceed eight.

I seem to recall that allowing greater than eight civs was added to the game rather late in the development process. Perhaps this crept into the code then!