Hi all, I just purchased BTS the other day, and I encountered some strange behavior that I couldn't decipher any explanation for. I wonder if it was a known bug, an unknown bug, or maybe something that has a rational explanation.

I started a standard-length game on Noble, playing as Charlemagne, with a Hemispheres map. I started on a small continent with enough room for 5 cities or so. Willem was on the same landmass with me and I eliminated him very early to create room for myself. Shortly thereafter, I found the Vikings and the Khmer on neighboring landmasses; we all wound up with the same religion so I decided to live in peace and harmony for a while as I built an economy.

About the time I was starting to think about researching Astronomy, I was discovered by Justinian. Mindful of what I've read about trading too hastily when you start off isolated, I refrained from doing any deals with him.

Then it started getting weird. A few turns later, Saladin popped up for the first time. But instead of the normal dialog (WAR! or peace in our time) I had a blank box where I couldn't choose anything. Looking over at the scores, I now had Saladin (WAR) and his vassal Cyrus (WAR). I had never encountered either civilization, and in fact, I never even saw the unit that supposedly discovered me. I was apparently at war with Saladin and his vassal before we even met.

Compounding the weirdness, I noticed that Amsterdam (which had grown to about size 20 since I seized it) had some unhappiness all of a sudden. I checked the city screen and found I had 5 sadfaces from "we yearn to join our motherland!" Inexplicably, the city was showing up as 48% HRE and 52% Persian, and in fact, the entire cultural footprint of Amsterdam was suddenly checkered HRE/Persian. Recall that I had never even seen Cyrus up to this point in the game; I only knew he existed because he was Saladin's vassal at the time we met. Indeed, as it turned out, both Arabia and Persia were in the opposite direction from my landmass as Amsterdam; there was no hidden Persian city near Amsterdam or anything like that.

I'm really at a loss to explain these events. Does anyone have an idea?

Saladins vassal is a colony and this is the colony bug - Cyrus has inherited the stats of Willem, also the war/peace status. To confirm this, look at the graphs and see if Cyrus has inherited Willems graph (so that Willem is no longer on there).

To fix this type of bugs, get Bhruics Unofficial 3.13 Patch.

Saladins vassal is a colony and this is the colony bug - Cyrus has inherited the stats of Willem, also the war/peace status. To confirm this, look at the graphs and see if Cyrus has inherited Willems graph (so that Willem is no longer on there).

To fix this type of bugs, get Bhruics Unofficial 3.13 Patch.

Welcome to the Forums Solon 70. :beer:

For more info about this patch, look in the first sticky in this forum.

Wow, reading up on this bug, now I feel lucky to have survived my encounter with it! I will definitely download the unofficial patch.

I'm not sure I understand what a colony is, though - the non-bugged type, that is, the way it's supposed to work. I must have missed that in the manual.

Thanks for the welcome to the forums. Here I thought I had some zany bug and it turns out to be the totally garden-variety type :)

You "liberate" cities that you have on another continent, which makes a new AI civ. That civ is instantly your vassal and you have +10 with them. If you piss them off enough, they can break free though.

This can cut down on maintenance, but I generally wouldn't do it unless I settled a small island somewhere that can support about 6 cities and don't want to bother with it. If I'm invading a big continent, I'll want my own presence there, and will probably just throw a forbidden palace down or run SP if I have communism.

It's just so drastic that everyone complains, therefore most of the forum rats recognize the situation quickly. And, for a brief explanation on colonies, it is a vassal created out of own cities on another landmass to lower the maintenance. As far as I know, most of the people doesn't like the idea as it splits up your tech between two nations, but the AI loves it.

. . . it splits up your tech between two nations . . .

The new colony immediately gets all your techs, which usually puts it well up in the scores list. You can tell it what to research - something you've bypassed, or not on your main path ? - and hope to trade for it later, but you're right in that you yourself lose any research generated by the colony cities.

Does that mean, then, that Cyrus wasn't one of the original civs at the start of the game? That he was created at some point when Saladin made a colony on the adjacent landmass?

Actually, now that I think about it, I never realized that the civs didn't add up! You had HRE, Dutch, Vikings, and Khmer on my side of the world, and Byzantine, Arabia, Persia, and Germany on the other side, for a total of 8 instead of 7. If I'd been more alert I would have realized that something wasn't right about this!