I just found out about yet another Conquest bug, this one affecting non-standard map sizes. Ive been working with Watorrey on testing and updating Thamis mod,
The Ancient Mediterranean, and along the way, Watorrey discovered that Conquests does strange things with custom maps. Apparently, when reading in a .BIQ with a non-standard map size, it retains all map settings from the most recently played standard map. This primarily affects OCN, and the Tech price multiplier. This is true not only for player-made mods, but also for the Conquests themselves, which shipped with the game.
I asked him to post it in the Conquests/Bugs forum, which he has, at this link:
World Size Bug Alert Strangely, he received the response that this has been known since the Beta. I certainly wasnt aware of it, although I wasnt part of the Beta, but I heavily followed the various bug reports when Conquests was released, and dont remember any mention of it.
For example, if you had recently played a small-map game, then start a Rise of Rome scenario, your OCN and tech price multiplier will be the default for a small map. Conversely, if you had recently played a huge map, then load up Mesopotamia (smaller map), it will retain the Huge map settings (OCN of 32!). Since all of the Conquests use a non-standard size, this affects all of them.
In most cases, the conquests are larger than average maps, so the most likely effect is a smaller-than-expected OCN (which should raise corruption) and a smaller-than-expected tech multiplier (which would speed up tech pace). However, thats not going to be true in all cases. More to the immediate point, it means that two different attempts at the SAME conquest could have widely varying rules.
For example, within this SG series, it would be possible for one team (who happened to have recently played a huge map game) to have an OCN of more than twice as much as someone else (who started their team after finishing up a Tiny map game). Of course this series has never really approached these Conquests as competitive, rather more as exploring the possibilities, but it still could (and maybe has) led to some wide variations in the progress of various games. It certainly could explain a lot of the strange tech cost problems we dealt with, specifically in Middle Ages. (I know a lot of that was related to the Flavor settings, but I seem to remember problems in determining the true tech costs, and getting odd comparisons when looking at different games).
Watorrey has found a (relatively) simple fix, if you are willing to go into the editor, by changing the OCN and Tech Cost settings for each world size to be the same, choosing whichever setting most closely approximates the actual map size. Of course, editing the Conquest .BIQs makes them no longer count for Hall of Fame, etc. The other option would be to determine in advance which of the normal sizes is the best fit for the scenario, then make sure each Captain loads an epic game of that size before starting the Conquest. Once opened (and saved), the current world setting is locked into the save file, and so passing the saves around should have no effect.
