Interesting save bug

While progressing with my "perfect building" game, I loaded my last save to discover a bug I've yet to see. It appears cities, roads, and rails have shifted twelve tiles to the right, though the cities are invisible. Familiar corruptions are random forts and pollution squares, concentrated largely in North America, but don't appear until some actions are taken. Civilization crashes in a fantastic array of color when attempting to load hidden cities. Units lie where they should. Most entertaining are the irrigated forests and arctic squares.





Surprisingly, the roads and rails are functional where they are; it's not just a display glitch. Moving the Calvary in Africa around, I come across fortified units that don't exist where cities should be; if I move the view while keeping the Calvary stationary, the false fortified units vary. Most interesting is the blank fortified square.



I can found new cities, however, but only one since I have 126. Visible and accessible cities are near Alaska and the Philippines, but they move around after some actions.



Unfortunately, Terra Form won't load the save; it fails with Run-time error '9': Subscript out of range.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/112588/civil2.7z

The game is still playable beyond this point, but cities begin to starve and revolt. Cities become temporarily accessible when construction forces the city view.

i've had this bug maybe 2 or 3 times within 1000 (save)games beginning with my PC area (since ~1996) ...

never the 1000 games with the AMIGA Computer (before 1996).

the only solution to this was using a (much) earlier savegame
(=that's why it is useful to enable the (additional) 'automatic saves' by the game itself...).

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btw.:



huh? a barbarian (air)fighter unit?

In the 90s I encountered with annoying regularity a bug where my map was covered with forts and pollution squares upon reload. The worst was that the pollution squares were active, leading to rapid global warning. This is the first time I've seen anything like it since then. I attributed that particular bug's absence to no longer saving when pollution squares are present, but Dack believes that to be a long shot as a cause.

Look a little closer at the scrambled picture. While there are several identifiable units and a gold brick, the rest of the image seems to be pieces of other tiles. I see what appears to be a line of Submarines a bit beneath the Legion.

I lost comparatively little with this bug; glitching saves are the least of my troubles the way I play. I use three saves to encompass about five turns, though I'm likely out 30-45 minutes on the current turn. I don't like using auto-saves because they essentially obliterate the 50th turn.

Whelkman said:

In the 90s I encountered with annoying regularity a bug where my map was covered with forts and pollution squares upon reload. The worst was that the pollution squares were active, leading to rapid global warning.
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Click to expand...

that is (maybe) another bug, called the pollution bug

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=42973

The pollution bug happens when you develope future tech 60-70.
I assume it is FT64 that causes the bug. It is because technologies are represented as a binary string and probably 8 bytes are reservec for FTs. when you develop FT 65 it flips a bit at a memory location reserved for something else probably counting pollution.
there is no way stopping runaway pollution. it grows exponentially and will cover everything in a few turns.
the real cause of the bug was discovered by my friend a hardcore CIV1 fanatic spending months to find out the reason. his name is Ferenc Benko and he is a lawyer ))

Click to expand...

as far as we know now
The pollution bug happens NOT ONLY "when you develope future tech 60-70" ...
it is suspected when you have 'too much of something'
as a kind of math overflow that kicks within memory location 'one step to far' in the table and so it changes data not related with what you have done.

as long as you keep everything 'small', 'state of the art' & effective (less than 128 units or cities, maybe - Dack?)
it shouldn't happen...

i 'by myself' never caused/seen the pollution bug...

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another bug 'that came with the pollution bug(s)', here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=65669

Ha! "Keep things small" doesn't work for a guy who wants as big a game as possible. 126 cities by 1200 BC with 80 Settlers and about as many Mfg Plants is grossly excessive. At one point, founding cities reduced my setter population to a "mere" 55, so I created another 25 for the next turn. Maintaining existing Settlers, along with mass producing Caravans every turn, places me constantly near the unit limit.

I'm quite accustomed to uncovering boundary bugs associated with "big building". My favorite is the "wonders" bug where having (circa) eleven available wonders plus all other possible constructs destroys the construction list. The only workaround is to assign them for build before the list overflows (but steer clear of the Apollo Program!).

My next favorite is the "children" bug where the game reveals that it stores floating point numbers as two integers. From time to time my birthrate displays a number like "-5.-3". Unlike negative approval and productivity, which requite many turns to work back to positive, negative children can flip back to a reasonable number at any time. Negative children shows up at or around the stage where I grow cities with "We love the President Day".

Still, I haven't seen the pollution bug in years, and those civilizations were decidedly smaller than what I build today. Future Tech as a cause is a fascinating thought, but there must be an associated trigger. Otherwise I'd have seen this bug more recently. Also, my pollution bug sounds a bit different than what's posted in the archives. Squares didn't appear continuously; the whole map was hosed upon load, much like the map linked here. No other thread mentions junk forts, either. Corrupted tiles were spread randomly but evenly across the globe, most of it, naturally, being over water.

Whelkman said:

I'm quite accustomed to uncovering boundary bugs associated with "big building". My favorite is the "wonders" bug where having (circa) eleven available wonders plus all other possible constructs destroys the construction list. The only workaround is to assign them for build before the list overflows (but steer clear of the Apollo Program!).

Click to expand...

Thanks! I've been doing the Colossal city trick (Colossus and Copernicus' in one city) getting new tech every round. It got to the point where my cities could produce units, but when I picked <more> to get to the buildings I would get nothing.

I thought there was something wrong with my install, I've tried all the versions 01-05, but the same thing happened.

Just spamming caravans to get rid of the useless, and cheap, wonders and thereby reducing the number of choices in the list fixes things...

Hmm, I've done that before. It completely stops when you click more...
Do you have the advisors on? If I remember correctly, the advisors bug is related to that.
If not, I'm not quite sure what the problem is..

kirkham7 said:

Hmm, I've done that before. It completely stops when you click more...
Do you have the advisors on? If I remember correctly, the advisors bug is related to that.
If not, I'm not quite sure what the problem is..

Click to expand...

No, it's related to having too many choices (buildings, wonders) to build in a city. That's why I kept making wonders I didn't need to keep the number of choices down - that fixed it.

I had most of my cities without buildings just spitting out caravans to build the wonders faster. Future tech in 520 AD, can be done faster if you get gold or coal (or both) in your colossal city.

It's possible that if you neglect getting the outdated wonders out of the build list, that the cities that become broken with the <more><more> prompt might return to normal later on after you build all those wonders.

I haven't tested that yet.

dcruze75 said:

It's possible that if you neglect getting the outdated wonders out of the build list, that the cities that become broken with the <more><more> prompt might return to normal later on after you build all those wonders.

Click to expand...

That's correct. During my games there are some 15 turns where all cities lose their building menus. However, just before they reach that condition, I switch from settlers to wonders + caravans. My memory is a bit foggy at the moment, and I've probably written the real answer here before, but the player needs to build something like 6 non-Apollo wonders to guarantee non-overflow at 100% tech research. Building Hoover Dam helps, but I don't think it has to be one of the 6.

However, I make it easy on myself and assign far more wonder building than I need to. Once the lists start coming back, the junk wonders in progress get switched to Mfg Plants.