The scale bug is caused by province neighbors

[vfb]

Summary:
The scale bug occurs when you have more than 6 foreign (indy or hostile) neighbors attached to your home province, and those neighbors have inferior scales to your home.

This includes "ghost" neighbors. "Ghost" neighbors exist in provinces with less than 6 real neighbors, when you create a new game without exiting the dom3 application. They are left over data from the previous game.

If you have less than 7 neighbors attached to your home province, including having no "ghost" neighbors, you will not get the scale bug.

Once your dominion spreads to neighbor #7, this bug will be temporarily squished in the game. If it spreads to neighbor #1 but not #7, you will only see partial scale loss.

If you acquire an additional province which also has more than 6 neighbors, once you have positive dominion in the province, it is also vulnerable to the bug.

There may of course be additional bugs which cause the scales to start vanishing later in the game.



I stepped through the application, specifically the host_scales() function. The scales for the home province are adjusted based first on a comparison with the 7th neighbor (esi register is initially 6, and is used as an index into the geo table, whose neighbor entries are offset from 0). If the home province has any positive scale (which is represented as a negative number) better than the neighbor, that scale is incremented (made worse). Then the process loops up to 19 more times comparing to the first neighbor (esi=0), each time sucking away scales.

It will not compare the scales to provinces under the dominion the nation. I realize this conflicts with reports of scales also disappearing in the late game. I could be misinterpreting offset 0x41 in the land table, I think it's the province owner (nation number) but I'm not sure. Edit Nope, 0x41 is the offset for the id of the nation whose dominion the province is under.

I was able to reproduce no initial scale loss by creating random MA Rlyeh games where the home province had 6 or fewer neighbors. And I was able to reproduce initial scale loss by creating random MA Rlyeh games where the home province had 7 or more neighbors.

But since my assembler is a bit rusty, I'm not entirely sure this is 100% correct.

So I'd appreciate it if people in games where the home province has 7 neighbors and no scale bug, (or 6 or less neighbors and the scale bug) could post their saves to this thread.

Edit: More testing: I created a few more games with O3P3 scales, all nations (all human), random starts. All nations with 6 or less neighbors at their home province did not lose scales. All nations with 7 or more neighbors lost scales.

[Edratman]

I've got one at home I will submit that I started last night. It will be about 10 hours before I can get there. It is a province with 9 (that is correct)neighbors, MA Tien Chin, I put #poptype 30 in it last night and have not had the problem through about 6 turns.

[vfb]

Edratman: Can you please tell me the map, the province you started in, and the scales you chose? I'd like to run turn 2 in the game. Or I can just wait.

calmon: Can you pelase email me a zip/tgz of your game at turn 1? I can't reproduce the bug on Silent Seas wrap with a land nation.

[calmon]

Sure i attach my test games to this post.

There 3 testgames.

For "Pretender Test1":
Provinces bugged:
35, 30, 11 and 52

For "Pretender Test2":
Provinces bugged:
30, 49, 11 and 1

For "Pretender Test3":
Provinces bugged:
35, 49, 15, 44 and 28

The bug has a 50-75% occurance chance in this provinces.

Well like i said in the other tread, i also had the feeling that provinces with a lot of neighbors are prefered for the bug but for example province 35 had a 100% bug occurance in all of my tests in "Pretender Test1" + "Pretender Test3". And this one has only 4 neighbours.

[Edratman]

It is a randomly created map. I map editted everything to ensure that I started in that 9 neighbor province, so all scales are at the top of the map file. I will send the map files and the save game.

[vfb]

Thanks calmon. Your map is slightly fuller than the ones I was testing with .

I'll run it through the debugger and see what I can find. 35 and 28 border each other, there could be another bug with that. But I see the bug in 49 too, so I'll have a look.

[vfb]

Oh no! The geo table is polluted!

Code:

---

0xad6bc14 <geo+2356>:   0x002b0001      0x0033002d      0x00000032      0x00390035

0xad6bc24 <geo+2372>:   0x00000000      0x00000000      0x00000000      0x00000000

0xad6bc34 <geo+2388>:   0x00000000      0x00000000      0x00000100      0x03f10331

---

The above is for Marverni, neighbors:
0x01 = 1
0x2b = 43
0x2d = 45
0x33 = 51
0x32 = 50
0x00 --> no more neighbors
0x35 <-- Ack! This is neighbor #7, the invisible neighbor.

I'll see if I can find where the 0x35 gets inserted into the geo table.

Edit: It's from the save file itself. The getfatherland() function loaded the value into the geo table.

[calmon]

This morning i had absolute the same thoughts. I tested on orania and found the bug only in provinces with more than 6 neighbours.

Well than i did mass tests on silent sea (wrap) and got the bug in provinces like 35 which has only 4 neighbours!

[Lord_Bob]

Very convincing testing and answer.

As far as I can tell, you have run down 2 seperate bugs.

The Scale Bug and "Ghost Connections" to provinces all over the map.

[IndyPendant]

Heh. Wow. I go away for less than a day and it's (practically) all done! Very cool.

Tip my hat to vfb and Lord_Bob for tracking this down. I got the ball rolling by being able to reliably reproduce the scale bug--but there's no way in *hell* I would have been able to figure out what vfb just did!

(Heck, the first time I read his post I was going "Uh, what? Invisible neighbours? Is this a spoof on all the sudden excitement about the scalebug, like that spoof of the Scorched Earth thread a while back?" *reads on* "Nope, it's serious. Wow, that's...bizarre..." : )

Congratulations!