Hi.

I have encountered two issues so far:

1. Invisible enemy leaders roaming around the map. There was one weakened enemy French leader around my Spanish colony (I had beaten him the round before) and as I set off to chase him -to finish him, during the processing of the next turn the same colony got attacked by another leader which was entirely invisible originally (no enemy ships whatsoever either that could have ferried him)

I would have never made my leaders abandon their post on pursuit if there had been another leader in the first place.
Just for the sake of it, I let my colony get destroyed and then looked for him immediately after the battle and he was not there.

2. Own units dissapearing from battle on advancing troops.

I had one cavalry unit vanish into thin air when there was a movement of about 4 troops into the square it was occupying. No battle rounds, no dice-roll, no resistance, just dissappeared.

Has anyone found these glitches before?

No.

Haven't seen anything alike. A few stupid troubleshooting questions could be:

- your overland movement settings are easy, normal, or hard?

I usually play with hard movement, just for the map to feel larger, and also exactly to more reliably intercept enemy leaders. They shouldn't be able to attack from extreme distance, but sometimes they apparently do.

- you don't happen to have undiscovered territory nearby? Not even on that invisible back slope of the mountain?

Sometimes the enemy leader is hiding under that single dark square. Nothing intelligent about it, just pure bad luck.

- There aren't another leader right under the one you're chasing?

The closest I can recall to this was two enemy leaders stuck at the same pixel one upon another. It was slightly noticeable because the combination didn't blink on selection as it should. The strange thing was, after I nearly killed one, the pair retreated still together, and it was only after I killed the first, the second was even open for attack, and as soon I did that that second leader reverted to aggressive behavior. That happened quite far from my colonies, I was "policing" a local conflict between two others. But I may imagine, if the pair was still in range... Then, yes, how the AI units behave, it should have stood right where your colony center used to be afterwards. Weird glitch indeed.

Anyway, my Garrison leaders rarely if ever leave the town. It's the job of Hunter class to chase the enemy, or even Pixie can do, if it's just a few wounded units.

. Yes.

This I have seen several times. I have come to conclusion that it's just sometimes skipping over the animations of the attack. You may notice their attack count to decrease, or they turn ends immediately after it. But yeah, it is quite a "WHOOSH WTF just happened?" moment.

~~~

Now, a few things of my own, nothing such puzzling though.

3. The ((building list)) thingy of a colony only supports up to 100 entries and hard crash to desktop if you try to open that helper for a colony with more buildings. It's stupidly easy to get more than hundred buildings, especially in a flatlands forestry enterprise, or even easier when playing Native and filling most of it with gold mines. I love to use that list, but have trained hunch of when not to. If in doubt, I test first thing on a new turn, then at least no progress is lost if it indeed crashes. There's no apparent harm to actually having that many buildings in a colony, the engine itself manages just fine, it is just that list that got hard limit on the short side.

4. Ships with more damage than strength. It sometimes happens after naval combat. Such shops are immobile, listening damage 6/5 for example, or some such., but the still it stays on map and there's nothing you can do with it than disband it manually. No ill effects, just a nuisance.

5. Overlapping buildings. I once built a colony close to enemy one, but didn't want to destroy their colony yet, I intended to milk it with repeated raids and eventually capture. The few overlapping squares of the two colonies was good farmland, actually best my colony had, so I positioned my raider to destroy buildings there. So I did, and ordered my new farms there right away. I didn't raid them that turn again, and they rebuilt their land too, including placing a new fort partially overlapping one of my farms, by two squares. No ill effects, just weird visuals and two "saved" squares in use by both colonies.

I tried not to, but destroyed that fort in another routine raid before capturing the colony. They even managed to rebuild that territory once more, without any overlapping buildings this time.

6. Long delay on selecting "transfer to colony" option on trade screen. It doesn't happen always, but if you're an European player, have seven or more colonies and one is in considerable distance from most others (transfer times 4+ turns) that option may appear unresponsive. Don't panic, wait, sometimes over a minute, it will open and function. Right away after making multiple transfers between the same locations there's no lag. Then, next turn or from another city, it can be slow response again.

Enemy leaders can stack on top of each other outside your colonies . You can usually determine this by selecting your general(or single combat unit) to attack that leader. If the enemy general darkens he is a sole leader no stack but if it remains bright there is another leader beneath it and you cant attack it until the next turn. And they can remained stacked if generals" survive combat. The original combat selection should take place unless that leader has strong movement "bonus or is ferried away.

7. It may be possible to produce goods at half price. This could be potentially exploitable if it wasn't so elusive, but if colony has both workforce shortage, and not enough resources left at the end of the turn to produce all the goods it otherwise would, the projected output may at some resource values be doubled versus expected. It can be noticed when, say, placing a new house, spending wood that's already in the shortage, and both food surplus and goods produced goes up. I have no idea what other exact prerequisites may be for recreating this, but have noticed it more than once now.

While we're on this, I think it requires mention in this thread, because it could well be the most interesting bug in the game:

8. Native player raiding European colony to victory results in capture instead of destruction, if European colony raided was currently under control of Mother Country during European player's independence war. This is also the only way Native player can acquire artillery -- if and only if some was produced by occupation administration of the Mother Country in such a town before capture. I have written about this in length here.

Two more weird behaviors, long known, remembered because I ran into them again:

9. Player units can't enter own colony by overland movement if it's center is currently in hostile tribe's territory.

The work around is to position the unit on the left corner of the Colony Center and then use Unit List to place it inside. Or, of course, to destroy the offending tribe, but there's a number of reasons one may want not to do that I wouldn't expand on here.

There's a number of legitimate ways one's colony may end up in hostile territory, for example: 1) tribe may change disposition from friendly to hostile; 2) tribe's territory may expand (sensing federating Native player); 3) player can deliberately build colony within hostile tribe's territory; 4) player can capture a colony that's in hostile territory.

10. Sometimes the game fail to start new game.

Thing is, there's seemingly a soft limit on the number of saved games. It seems to be a bug though. One can always open and Save As an existing game, without limits or problems. However, when there's some unknown cumulative total number of saved games -- both single and multiplayer contribute to it, as well as mapped scenarios -- is reached, no new game or mapped scenario can be created. Attempts will fail bouncing back to main menu when the world building should start, without any announcement or error notice. One other way to notice you're way past the very little limit of files the game can handle is if Save As games don't show up on the list without closing and relaunching the game.

Deleting saves in game helps, but I have strange feeling the number of saves it can handle goes down over time. Manually moving out (or deleting) ALL old save files and mapped scenarios seems to reset the process. So, if I'm unable to start a new game, that's what I do.

A bit of inconclusive elaboration on this:


It appears not to have anything to do so much with the number of colonies (since I ran into it by having just 3 colonies triggering this limited research), as with number of actual docks, and even more specifically, number of and distance to docks in landlocked water basins of colonies that have no dock with ocean access.

Okay, that statement of unintended legalese needs some unpacking. Apparently, the trading distance between colonies is calculated not between colony centers but between actual docks placed on the map. Cool, but usually inconsequential nuance. And there's apparently some extreme inefficiency in that algorithm if none of the docks of the colony have ocean access, with, I guess, is also examined per dock.

To provide some counter example, I will say that I used cheat engine to place a dock registered to far away landlocked colony on the ocean coast right next to docks of my first colony and the trading distance between said colonies changed to 1 turn and the dialogue dropdown list reverted to instantly response.

So, a central valley postal hub with 20+ docks on a lakefront is sadly bad idea dude to annoying technical nuisance meta reason.