[Jurri]

Well, while knowing beforehand that you'll get eaten by a grue if you get to the HoF certainly makes for a quaint environment, it's not necessarily tremendously unbalancing even if some nations benefit more from an active pretender than others and thus are at a disadvantage from the condition. You could still risk it with an awake pretender on research-duty until the next patch I guess (It could come early and thus give you the advantage over those who didn't risk it)... But that would be quite costly a gamble if you only got research (and not provinces as usual) out of your pretender in the first 12 turns. Nations like Niefelheim and Yomi and others that have expensive commanders that are in danger of getting into the HoF easily might want to rethink their strategies also.

That said, the bug makes for a silly game no matter which way I look at it, so I'd prefer to play unpatched. You need to reinstall the game to a temp directory to get access to the unpatched executable, but that can't be so big a hassle as to prevent anyone from doing so if they are willing to commit to a game that will probably last for several months. Also note that as far as I know the only problems you'll be likely to encounter if the host has a different version of the game are battle-replay related and only under certain rare conditions at that. So it shouldn't be impossible to play the game with the host running unpatched and the lazy part of the players running the patched version.