The Phantom Turn

[Thorvald of Lym]

I first ran Civ2 on a Win3.1 rig so old, for years I never knew units had sound, and the end-game flag always glitched such that the score would keep tallying past a victory condition or the mandatory retirement year. I'm no stranger to strange behaviour.

But I've never known anything like this.

Playing Civ2 MGE with FoxAhead's patch, I've encountered what I can only describe as a 'phantom turn'. The previous turn seems to end as normal; the AI makes its moves, city production completes (short of a couple cities I thought were due to finish) and a new caravan pops up. Only pressing 'wait' doesn't cycle to the next unit; nothing else activates when I click it. I move the caravan and the turn completes.

Thinking something glitched and I lost the turn, I save the game and load the previous bookmark to replay it; more city production completes than last time. There's the caravan again. I can select other units. I make a discrete save to compare against the first cycle.

One save has a caravan ready in the city. The other has the caravan en route and the next round of shields in the production bar. Both saves have the same date and same turn counter.

Somehow I managed to play a partal 'free' turn that did not advance in-game time. I don't know if this is a bug from UIA but I've been using it for months and never encountered anything like this, and wanted to share.

 

[FoxAhead]

So, you do have 3 states: A, B, C?
A - before turn.
B - strange state where not all cities are computed and you can't select any unit
C - normal state with all cities computed and units available
B and C have the same turn number. But C has the city which produced Caravan and also made one more production step.
And somehow you passed from A to B, but only once, and this is not reproducible. And if you load A, you always get to the C.
Right?
Is it some scenario or normal game? Do you have saves for all the states?

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Yes.

It's the Age of Discovery (DISCOVER) scenario from CiC. Saves attached; 'mo_1681' is after the 'phantom' turn; 'alt' is after the reload. Unfortunately I didn't save the phantom turn itself.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

It happened again, and this time I saved the phantom turn: city production progresses, research and income accumulate, but the date and turn counter don't advance and only one unit activates; AI moves are entirely skipped.

 

[FoxAhead]

This happened with the latest 1.20.1 CIV2UIA?

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Yep, UIA is up-to-date.

 

[Knighttime]

I've seen this happen in Test of Time, too, on very rare occasions. But I've never been able to reproduce it consistently. As far as I can recall, it only happens to me immediately after loading a saved game file -- but if I reload the same file and try again, the next time it will work fine. Of course 99.9% of the time loading a saved game works fine the first time too.

I have no idea if my issue caused by the same thing as what you're experiencing, but just wanted to point out that it may not be MGE-specific or related to @FoxAhead 's patch.