Out of Sync, Advice Requested

Lord Parkin and I have been playing a 2 player FFH multiplayer game, but have stopped because every new turn brings us out of sync. We can work around it with a reload, but it's painful to do every turn. So, I'm after some advice if there's anything we can do to fix it. I don't have the save but I can get it if someone wants it.

Here's the relevant details I can think of:

* It's 2 human players, but also 5 AIs (5 originally, then 4 when I wiped one out, now 5 again with Hyborem fairly recently summoned).
* The AC is still fairly low, 10-15% or so from memory, no blight yet.
* We got an out of sync earlier that was caused specifically by one of us having the pyre zombie/sons of asena fix and the other not. We fixed that by patching the other player and a reload, and it was fine after.
* It started a couple of turns ago and has happened again every new turn since. We're not aware of having done anything in particular the turn it started. Hyborem was summoned recently but has been around since well before the problems started.

Any advice on what we might be able to do to get the game going again, or how to avoid this in future, would be welcome.

 

I'm not very good at technical matters but have done a lot of trial and error. My experience is that there is a problem with one of the files somehow from something that is currently in play, but that might require a reinstall of either ffh, bts, or civ4 itself. It's clearly not a one- time error such as from an event. It has happened to me very rarely, though I have found as a workaround that it can be a civ specific issue. For example, I had a problem with playing as Clan of Embers where anytime I had a worker in the game, even if it was just one way down the list in my production queue, we would go oos every turn (something to do with the worker's orcish race i imagine). Removing the worker would fix it every time. So we restarted and I played as another civ instead. After I re-installed later, there was no trouble with the Clan.

Again I'm very not savvy in these things, but I wish you good luck and hope there are easier solutions. Then again, depending on your computer, it may not take long to re-install anyway, but it does leave behind the question of who is creating the error.

 

You might want to investigate PBEM (play by e-mail) as an alternative form of multiplayer play. OOS errors do not occur in PBEM games.

 

The most effective solution I have found:

1) Navigate on your computer to
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\My Games\Beyond the Sword\cache\
(you have to view hidden folders to do this)

2) Delete all the cache files


And that's it. Clears up 90+% of my OOS errors. You can even continue with your current game.

 

Awesome, thank you, I will try that next time

 

In the latest version it's the AI causing the most of the OOS's, to the extent that it's unplayable. I suggest you get more people playing and play human-only. Alternatively you can downgrade to 0.41g, which is somewhat stable, from before the major AI upgrades, but then the economic and spellcasting AI's for instance are less developed.

 

Is there a substantial difference in game/balance aspects from patch 'g'? I always prefer to use the latest patch to get the best balanced game, but if the only difference is AI intelligence then we could probably consider stepping back to the older patch next time we play the same sort of setup.

 

Another way to get minimal to no OOS is to have ONLY HUMANS .... as for every human that is playing (beyond the first one) each additional AI increases OOS odds something fierce.

Aka, organize a big human game of 4 or so

 

You'll be missing a myriad of new models, a number of bug fixes and some spell rebalances (at least Ring of Flames and Rust were nerfed after patch g). The most irritating thing with patch g is that whenever the Infernals capture a city the game goes OOS.

 

Yes, would be nice if someone would mod Patch G so that the Infernal bug is fixed so at least it can be played in multiplayer