Is there a save game penalty?

So I sack an Iroquois city with little resistance. I went another couple of rounds and quit, thinking I had saved post-battle. Turns out my last save game was right before my assault. But this time, there are a host of new military units that were't there before. An extra archer, a couple more of those UUs they have and a bunch of knights I didn't have to deal with the time before.

Is that a thing done intentionally to discourage saving to test an upcoming fight? I know it sounds strange, but I'm telling you, there were a lot more enemy units than when I did it the first time.

No, the AI doesn't get any more units when you save and reload.

However if you do anything at all different, especially combat related you'll change what number you were on within the RNG list and so the AI will behave different.

A simpler explanation is also possible in that you might have revealed more tiles the second time that you didn't see the first time.

There is an occasional bug where a unit becomes invisible on the map. But you can still target or attack it. For example, sometimes I have accidentally run into / attacked an invisible unit when I was simply moving.

Reloading may cause that unit to become visible again. It is remotely possible that is what happened. The units were there but invisible and reloading made them visible.

When you load a save the game generates a different seed value each time, unless you check the option in the advanced part to keep the same seed value. The result of this that in battles the rng is used, so if a different seed value is used then different results will occur.

to answer your q there is no penalty except you may not win a battle that you narrowly won the last time.

phillipwyllie said:

When you load a save the game generates a different seed value each time, unless you check the option in the advanced part to keep the same seed value. The result of this that in battles the rng is used, so if a different seed value is used then different results will occur.

Click to expand...

Preserve seed value is actually the default.