Multiplayer Caravans Dissapearing after loading

[ChampionMaster]

A group of 5 of us plays regulary and bought all civ5+g&k+bnw to play online.
We've tried several times, with several different configs. and we keep having this problem:
When someone builds a Caravan, the next turn the game for everyone goes to the "loading" screen and then comes back. Since its the turn the caravan should have popped, it doesnt, and it goes to the city where it should have popped and asks you for your next build. Something similar happens with the maritime trade routes, sometimes having an extra turn to get the same loading screen, allowing you to have 1 turn of trade.

We've tried everything, duel matches, pitboss/internet games (no lan games yet), different civs, different timings and every time its the same.

I've read some other people have run into this issue, and as far as I remember it's been only happening in MultiPlayer games.

We all run the latest steam version as for today (22july) with the BNW dlc active (and not neccesary the G&K because some of us dont have it.

Any ideas are welcome, I hope its just us and with some crazy tweak we've been missing it will work.

 

[PuerNoctis]

Hi there!

I can't believe someone got stuck with the same error as our group does, what a relieve!

We are four players with Civ5+GK+BNW (all players), and in the beginning we experienced some weird problems, where units just disappeared and the game started its resync (the "reload" in between turns) constantly every turn. With GK, before BNW or the big update the day before its release, everything was fine in our games. The M.O. is the same as ChampionMaster described:

Some player is finishing a caravan, then when the turn ends, the game is being reloaded and the next turn starts with the player not having a caravan at all. The city completed the build order, but the unit just disappears.

The same applies for one player when he buys a missionary unit with faith. The unit vanishes next turn after the reload, but he get's his faith-points back instead. My guess is that this is the same bug, only that in case of caravans there is no real "refund" for city production that could have been noticed.

We did some testing and found that these are (most likely one of the many) the scenarios where the game forces a sync/reload at the end of the turn and units are lost. We did not build/buy any of the mentioned units for a few turns for the sake of testing, and all went smooth until a caravan/missionary was built. After that, as soon as they did their purchase/production the error happened again right off the bat.

So the error is basically reproducible, but I must mention, that this strangely applies for two of the four players only - the other two can build whatever units they want without the game going nuts.

But we still didn't have a clue what was going on, so we tried to get some more answers from the debugging information from the FireTuner panels (where an immediate resync can be forced, too), but the port FireTuner and Civ5 are communicating over is closed in multiplayer games, probably to protect games from cheats.

Anyway, we then enabled the network debug logging, and found the following lines that sound quite interesting:

// The purchase of the "faith" unit (the missionary?)
[240483.094] Net RECV (0) :NetPurchase : Faith Purchase at City, city ID is 8192, unit 122, building -1, project -1
[240486.922] Net RECV (0) :NetTurnComplete : Turn Complete, 0, 0/3

// First sync point recognizes something is fishy
[240525.281] DBG: City out of sync. Player=0, Name=TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_ROME, id=8192, X=38, Y=20
Variable Out Of Sync : CvCity::m_paiUnitProductionTime

// The unit (probably the missionary) is deemed as not-existing...
[240525.297] DBG: Received a sync request for unit (172038) which does not exist locally!
[240525.297] Net RECV (0) :NetPlayerSyncCheck(Player=0), ArchiveDataSize=242
[240525.297] DBG: Variable Out Of Sync : CvPlayer::m_paiUnitClassCount

// ...therefore a resync is forced and next turn the unit is missing, because it "does not exist"
[240525.297] Net SEND (0, 1, 2): size=36: NetForceResync : m_targetPlayers (  )
[240525.297] Net RECV (2) :NetForceResync : m_targetPlayers (  )

That's my interpretation on the whole thing.
I just pray that any Firaxis people are actually reading this, I saw that some of the devs are active in this forum (please correct me if I am wrong).

I have attached the debug logfiles to this post, feel free to analyze (note that these logs were made with only 3 of our 4 players). Also, if someone needs us to reproduce/try something, let us know, we have our savegame and people ready

Hope this issue gets fixed sometime, the game is practically unplayable like this for us

Cheers!

 

[dshirk]

Taking a look. Thanks for the extra details.

 

[PuerNoctis]

Taking a look. Thanks for the extra details.

Thank YOU for having a look at the problem
I don't know if it helps, but I've attached the savegame we loaded to create the logs. Player 0 (Rome) is the one that bought the missionary and then caused the faulty state + resync. Same for caravans produced by the same player and player 2 (Arabia).

 

[dnatural]

I am also getting the same issue. Anyone found a way around? will reinstalling fix anything ?

 

[DanAlbert]

Some friends and I are having the same issue. I've seen this happen in the very beginning of the game (within the first few turns), so I don't think it's related to the caravans, missionaries, or anything. I've only seen the error that early once; it's usually in late game that it starts happening.

dshirk, is there any other info we can provide that would help you track this down faster?

 

[PuerNoctis]

Some friends and I are having the same issue. I've seen this happen in the very beginning of the game (within the first few turns), so I don't think it's related to the caravans, missionaries, or anything. I've only seen the error that early once; it's usually in late game that it starts happening.

dshirk, is there any other info we can provide that would help you track this down faster?

I think we got two issues here in general: For one the constant resync in later game, or sometimes (with huge map size, all AI slots filled, multiple human players, ...) even in the beginning as you have experienced it, probably because of the amount of data to be crunched. The other thing is the resync due to missing units which, for whatever reason, is indeed connected to caravans and missionaries - we can actually reproduce this, and we did it many times. But no matter what root cause those two issues have - having to resync every turn is really killing the fun in multiplayer for us by now.

A quick word from dshirk or any other member of Firaxis would really help out (even if you are not attending to this particular issue, just so that we know if you looked into it and/or found something or if we can help in some way). The problem is, after playing single player over and over, and after weeks of waiting for a fix and practically being unable to play the game in multiplayer properly, our group rapidly loses interest in Civ5... sadly, because its an awesome game and Firaxis put huge effort into making it.

Any information is very welcome

 

[xaxox]

Any news about when this will be patched, same problem with LAN games.

 

[da_Vinci]

This seems related to a shrine disappearing issue.

Searching disappearing shrines here and on 2K forum finds threads that allude to DLC mismatch between server and client (or even among clients?) as a potential cause.

Spoiler :

Disappearing shrine issue
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=514510
http://forums.2k.com/showthread.php...without-Steam-amp-disappearing-shrine-re-sync

Other general resync threads: (one raises render level mismatch (DX9 vs DX 10/11) as a potential issue.

Spoiler :

Caravan or Missionary desync issue (this thread)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=503158

Reload resync issue
http://steamcommunity.com/app/8930/discussions/0/864973981161598612/

dV

 

[da_Vinci]

After suffering disappearing shrine builds in a pitboss game, my friends and I have a game that is working fine (at least for the moment), with everyone disabling all DLC except for BNW, which matches the server setting (nothing but BNW). I got a shrine built.

Match of server and all clients on the DLC active for the game seems to be critical.

dV

 

[da_Vinci]

Well, after getting shrines to work in our pitboss game, we now are running into caravan issues. Any ideas out there?

dV