All right, this might be the strangest thing you've ever seen in Civ 4. I've got something here that goes beyond a bug report, to be a report about how the game completely and totally imploded (yet somehow is still running). So here's what happened. My friend Omega and I decided that we wanted to play this game in Multiplayer. We didn't see any reason why this wouldn't work. We selected a Custom Continents map, large, with 4 teams of 2. We also selected all of the leaders to be civilizations and leaders in the original Civ 4 BTS. Here's what we got (note: I'm supposed to be Hatshepsut, but am instead, for some reason, Mansa Musa of Egypt. My friend, supposed to be Louis XIV, somehow managed to become Shaka... of France.)
Screenshots:
So here's my explanation for what happened:
When we started up, everything seemed normal, apart from the fact that I wasn't Hatshepsut and Omega wasn't Louis anymore. (Also, he had no interface) This all changed when we founded our first city.
In short, we both got about 40 religions upon founding, only two of which were actually religions. The rest were represented by a strange ribbon and our event log said "has spread in Thebes!" and such. This was undeniably strange, but not game-breaking. What was game-breaking was the fact that we all seemed to have -45 commerce, research, culture, and espionage. (not exactly -45 for all cases, but roundabout).
The next turn, our culture had shrunk to just one tile, our only warrior was on strike, and the game had gone out of sync. In addition, every tech said that it would be finished in one turn, despite the fact that by now my research said -49/turn. We tried playing like this for a couple of more turns before we said "f*** it" and closed the game.
Here's a save of our fun little escapade (it's in multiplayer, so don't try opening it in singleplayer):
How Did This Happen?
In a probably unrelated note, we also get a multitude of XML errors when trying to start a multiplayer game. This doesn't happen in singleplayer. The XML errors all follow the same pattern for different leaders. The basic XML error is shown below:
Code:
Tag: LEADER_THEODORA in Info class was incorrect
Current XML file is: modules\Custom
Leaderheads\Theodora\XML\Theodora_CIV4DiplomacyInfos.xml
This is the list of leaders that have XML errors following this pattern:
Wu, Wilhelmina, Sejong, Richelieu, Nefertiti, Nebuchadrezzar, Masinissa, Marcus, Leonidas, Lenin, Kangxi, Joanofarc, Jayavarman, Ivan, Hirohito, Henry VIII, Franco, Dido, Cleopatra, Charles V, Cetshwayo, Basil, Atotoztli, Afonso, Abubakr,
So... strange enough?
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