Newest Bug - Surprise Trebuchet

Oy. There is not a day that goes by that I do not discover some new bug. You would have thought that we'd have seen them all by now. Anyway...

I call this one the Surprise Trebuchet.

Just took Rome's capital, Rome. (In case any of you were wondering if it was Milan or Ravenna). I went to observe the city, and I noticed that a tile was blockaded by an enemy unit. I've seen this a few times, and it usually means an enemy unit will move there next turn. So I took a few screencaps, like I usually do for the many bugs I've found. (Just in case).




Well, next turn, what do I see but a Roman trebuchet moving out of the newly conquered capital on it's way to Roman territory. It didn't even move to the tile the game incorrectly predicted, which is like an error within an error. Obviously I can't take a screencap of it moving away from Rome, but I think it's obvious what happened, because the trebuchet is facing away from Rome and towards the direction it is heading, Roman territory. (Or now that the city of Rome fell, is it Byzantine?)



I'm assuming what happened here is that the unit was due for completion the turn after I conquered the capital. Then, for some reason, the game continued to build it because... well, I don't want to say the game's a buggy mess, because every time I do people come out of the woodwork to call me a Civ4 lover, despite not even mentioning Civ4. (Okay, technically I just did there).

C'mon. Firaxis. I'm giving you every benefit of the doubt here, and I'm continuing to play your game out of some sort of bizarre mix of loyalty and blind hope that I'll suddenly find this game challenging & fun... but you need to playtest this stuff. Things like this shouldn't be happening.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering why I'm fielding no horsemen/knights, this is a non-horsemen game for me.

To be honest I think it's a feature. How those Roman soldiers were able to smuggle that Trebuchet out of the capital while remaining undetected is a mystery. I suggest we play it safe and assume an inside job by your own military. To eliminate the conspirators within your ranks, send the military unit in control of Rome on a suicide mission since they were the ones responsible for security but failed.

I've linked this to a thread I started in the bugs forum ttp://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=394012.

next time try a to mouse over the suspicious tile. I might be that the catapult was already there, but had its cloaking device activated

Seriously, in quite a lot of cases I have seen that there was a discrepancy regarding the position of a unit between what the game engine was thinking and what the graphics engine was displaying

Things that happened to me
- invisible units (decloak usually next turn)
- two units sharing a tile (one of those actually occupies an adjacent tile)
- ghost units (killed unit is still displayed)

LegioCorvus said:

well, I don't want to say the game's a buggy mess, because every time I do people come out of the woodwork to call me a Civ4 lover, despite not even mentioning Civ4. (Okay, technically I just did there).

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It's probably not so much an issue of lack of playtesting, but an issue of releasing a game far before it is finished.

tokala said:

next time try a to mouse over the suspicious tile. I might be that the catapult was already there, but had its cloaking device activated

Seriously, in quite a lot of cases I have seen that there was a discrepancy regarding the position of a unit between what the game engine was thinking and what the graphics engine was displaying

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This, yes. I bet if you (meaning LegioCorvus) have a save from 880AD, if you load it you will see the trebuchet standing on the hill W of Rome.

I'm a perfectionist myself and I don't like unpolished rushed products...but I will continue to support Firaxis and play CiV because I luv the series. :-/

Pulseczar said:

It's probably not so much an issue of lack of playtesting, but an issue of releasing a game far before it is finished.

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Or, you know, a random glitchy bug. I work in the tech industry. The random bugs that only happen rarely are a real pain to find and fix, and it'd be especially worse if it only affected a certain graphics card or something.

It may have been a treb heading towards Rome by "move-to" order.

It happened to me quite some times that units under "move-to" orders literally became invisible until having to stop or reaching their target field.

tokala said:

next time try a to mouse over the suspicious tile. I might be that the catapult was already there, but had its cloaking device activated

Seriously, in quite a lot of cases I have seen that there was a discrepancy regarding the position of a unit between what the game engine was thinking and what the graphics engine was displaying

Click to expand...

Jaffa Tamarin said:

This, yes. I bet if you (meaning LegioCorvus) have a save from 880AD, if you load it you will see the trebuchet standing on the hill W of Rome.

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Actually, in the second pic I am mousing over the tile. You can see the pop-up information, but not the mouse itself. I included this because I thought it was ridiculous that it would display this, but I could still move a unit into that tile. (I really should have included a pic of my Great General being able to move there in go-to mode, but hindsight... 20/20... etc...)

Unfortunately my Auto-Saves are set to every 4 turns, so I have the save right before I sack Rome and 3 turns after. I tried replaying the sack, but Rome changed tactics and sent suicidal archers deep into no-longer Roman territory.

An aside: Does anyone know if The Great Wall works if a city is still in rebellion? I know The Great Wall has been buggy as heck, but it actually affected my invasion of Rome significantly. I ask because I can imagine a trebuchet running away and only getting one tile, IF it was invisible, but that would bring up another bug of why my Great General was able to move into that tile.

It happen to me yesterday when i played, the captured city the next turn released a great general, so i'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with production.

Just use your imagination to explain the trebuchet...it's really augustus using a cloaking device to escape.

This is actually a great idea for an espionage mission - secretly cause an enemy city to produce a military unit of your own! Imagine the shock on Elizabeth's face when an enemy Giant Death Robot emerges from her own capital and starts attacking it!

Or maybe some Trojan horse thingy where you "gift" a unit to an enemy civ, but that unit is timed to flip back to your side within a number of turns.

Nice I wonder if its a graphics glitch or gameplay type thing. Because I once had the AI stack units on me, turned out the graphics messed up, it showed the image for a unit there dispite there not being a unit there anymore so the AI could move units on top of it and I could move units onto it as well.

Ive also experienced this bug, more than once. One time an enemy archer remained inside a base I had taken over and was pot shotting my units from within what was now my city.

The other time it was a catapult and something kept bombarding a city and couldn't see it, finally figured it out, moved some longswordsmen over to kill it.

They then fight an invisible battle, lose health and then move onto the tile.

Playing Civ 5 feels like being an entomologist in the jungles of Borneo or the Amazon - hordes of new bugs wherever you go . . .

I concur with Jaffa Tamarin and tokala -- this is actually a cloaked unit.

On Turn 154, the Trebuchet is on the tile just west of Rome.

On Turn 155, it moved away from the now-enemy city of Rome. (It couldn't move any further, because of the Great Wall you now own inhibiting its movement.)


If you have the Turn 154 save, bombard that tile with your Chu-Ko-Nu or try to move into it with your GG to confirm.

OTAKUjbski said:

I concur with Jaffa Tamarin and tokala -- this is actually a cloaked unit.

On Turn 154, the Trebuchet is on the tile just west of Rome.

On Turn 155, it moved away from the now-enemy city of Rome. (It couldn't move any further, because of the Great Wall you now own inhibiting its movement.)


If you have the Turn 154 save, bombard that tile with your Chu-Ko-Nu or try to move into it with your GG to confirm.

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If you being serious...
I have never seen an AI use a great general. They always place them in the cities, and a random great general left my recently capture city yesterday. I disagree with the cloaking bug... or your joke?

nycguy said:

Just use your imagination to explain the trebuchet...it's really augustus using a cloaking device to escape.

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As it has been said... It's an complex game