PBEM games stuck on a player's turn

[infinitey]

Since upgrading to 3.19 last month, we're having a lot of problems getting PBEM working. We've had our old and new PBEM games ruined by a "turn bug".

For no apparent reason, newly saved games are permanently paused on the saving player's turn, even though the filename contains the name of the player who should do the next turns. We tried to isolate an offending computer by going back one turn, but even those games became corrupted! We are completely stumped.

BtS is installed on XP and Win 7 machines, and all fields in the About window match up on every installation. No player or admin passwords were set in the beginning.

What in the world is going on?

 

[infinitey]

We decided to try again. This time, I set an admin password on the games. In addition, all players erased their old Civ user profiles so Civ would generate new ones. Hopefully, these steps will help.

 

[peter grimes]

Hi Infinitey

I've had the exact same problem with a friend of mine. We had two PBEM games going, and we both upgraded to 3.19. After the switch, one game didn't experience any problems at all. The other game, however, had the same sort of hanging problem that you describe. We thought we found a fix by dropping an older save into Hotseat, playing my turn, starting his turn, saving without doing anything, and then emailing him the intra-turn save. Seemed to work, but we're now having the problem again, and this work-around isn't fixing it.

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'm all ears

 

[infinitey]

Hi peter grimes.

We were actually lucky as our old games were just about to finish and the new ones were only a couple of rotations in. The only other suggestion I have is to downgrade to 3.17.

 

[infinitey]

An update: we did encounter the problem again and as it turns out, it's related to some anti-cheat mechanism introduced in 3.19. It seems the only workaround is to completely erase your Civ IV profile and cache (within My Documents and %localappdata%, respectively) and then for the player who generated the faulty save to redo his/her turn. The lesson here is to do all your moves within your turn and not to go back if you made a mistake.