[Norfleet]

Ceremony: The AI behavior is a known fact: The reason it occurs is because the AI doesn't really make its move until you press host: Unlike a human player, who must decide his move AFTER a hosting, the AI decides his move DURING a hosting....after everyone has already submitted their moves.

Furthermore, the AI is omniscient, a behavior which can readily be demonstrated as a mage travels between provinces in the back of your empire of absolutely no importance....and suddenly....ARROWED!

Obviously, there are certain things the AI is incapable of looking at, or understanding, either because attempting to code them to look at this would reveal blatantly that the AI is, in fact, omniscient, or is beyond the capability of present programming techniques.

Also, not EVERYTHING can be undone. Bad Alchemy, for instance, cannot be undone: If you convert 30 Astrals to 15 Waters, when you try to convert waters to Astrals, those 15 waters will give you 7 Astrals back, not 30. If you alchemize back and forth, you'll just destroy gems. The only way to undo some moves is to redo your entire turn, which isn't a true "undo" at all, but merely a complete disregard of the data written into your 2h, which thus reverts everything back to what's in the .trn, that is never written to in the course of your order-issuing.

What I suspect is actually happening to those blood slaves is that values are imprinted onto them which differentiate them from the standard "Blood Slave". So when the game attempts to collect the blood slaves and repackage them back into the red Xes, it compares the blood slave to the standard blood slave, and a blood slave which fails to match exactly cannot be collected, such as if it were to be wounded and have to heal, or acquired an affliction, or othersuch which rendered it "incompatible" with existing blood slaves. It's just like when you attempt to gift-of-reason a unit, sometimes, you get a single unit representing a stack of completely identical units, but other times, the same unit is listed multiple times despite being the same type: Some data it contains somewhere is somehow different, and thus it is no longer a part of the stack. I suspect that it is this latter behavior which is controlling the blood slave issue, rather than anything relating to how province defense purchasing or alchemy behaves.