Unused leader animations

[ButtBillionaire]

Over a year ago I found out that if you play the game as a modded leader, your first meeting with another (official) leader could glitch, allowing you to interrupt their introduction and trigger their neutral reaction animation early. As I'm sure everyone has observed, leaders seem to only have one of these animations for each mood they're in. So what I found interesting about interrupting the leaders' introductions is that sometimes they would play a different animation than the one they always do, meaning that they have multiple animations to react with, but they're not used. Some examples:
Mvemba a Nzinga
Jadwiga
Cleopatra
Tomyris (she still goes "HM" though)
From memory I am certain that Teddy Roosevelt also has an additional animation, where he pretends to be lifting an invisible hat. I tried some other leaders, too, without luck: John Curtin, Gandhi, Catherine, Cyrus, Victoria and Harald. That was over a year ago, and I haven't tried to discover more unused animations since then, but I am fairly certain that the glitch allowing you to interrupt them is still in the game. I tried to make a thread on the subreddit about it around the same time, but the people there, from what I could tell, either couldn't figure out what I was talking about or wanted to use the thread as an excuse to talk about something else.

So, this begs the question: why aren't these enabled to be used by the leaders normally? I wouldn't mind having more variation in their physical responses at all, like the leaders in Civ5 had.

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

It might be a bug. The dev team may not be aware that these animations never fire.

 

[ButtBillionaire]

It might be a bug. The dev team may not be aware that these animations never fire.

I think that is likely, too. But the other leaders I tried without fruit, I believe I tried multiple times and I still never got any alternative animation with them, which made me think that perhaps these leaders only have one animation, and that's why the existing alt animations are disabled - it'd feel a little off if some leaders had more than one reaction, while others don't.

Or maybe the glitch just makes their animation "pool" expand instead of directly picking the unused one, and I just got plain unlucky...

 

[Ondolindë]

This is cool to find out. Maybe you could report it to Firaxis via the established channels and see what they respond, if they do. Also, Dennis Shirk (dshirk), Senior Producer at Firaxis, has been active here the last few days, maybe he can illuminate us on this or other members of Firaxis that monitor CivFanatics. Maybe you can write to him by including his forum name in your message with the @ symbol. I would do it, but it is your very interesting find.

 

[ButtBillionaire]

This is cool to find out. Maybe you could report it to Firaxis via the established channels and see what they respond, if they do. Also, Dennis Shirk (dshirk), Senior Producer at Firaxis, has been active here the last few days, maybe he can illuminate us on this or other members of Firaxis that monitor CivFanatics. Maybe you can write to him by including his forum name in your message with the @ symbol. I would do it, but it is your very interesting find.

Good idea, though I'll do it in a new message (this one), in case merely editing a message with their name doesn't alert them.

@dshirk

 

[Sagax]

They might also be proto-versions of some final animations, and got scrapped mid-way without being completely removed from game files. Your example of Teddy lifting a non-existing hat is what makes me think so.