Cause of scale-loss bug found!

[IndyPendant]

Edit: It turns out my conclusion in this post is wrong. See my third post further down this thread for details.

Hi all.

Please forgive me if this has already been discovered, and please note it may not be the *only* cause of the bug, but...

Certain players, myself included, have occasionally been the victims of a bug where positive Order and Growth scales would disappear after you end the first turn. Sometimes they would start coming back right away, sometimes they would take years of turns to return. So far as I know, no one ever found the cause.

I was putzing around with a modded map, playing with magic sites, so on and so forth, when I hit the bug after making one single change: I added in the "No IndyPendant" (heh) lines. (#setland 1 #poptype 99 #setland 2 #poptype 99 etc etc)

Hmm!

Some experimentation later, and I discovered that if a player's starting province has a specified #poptype in the .map file, then nearly every time the Order and Growth scales will vanish after the first turn!

This is reproduceable. I've just spent the last hour or so creating dozens of games, all with the starting province containing a #poptype. I've tried different maps, poptype numbers, nations, eras, loaded mods, pretenders, land and water starts, etc etc. Every once in a while the Order and Growth scales would remain, but if I recreated the game with the same settings, they would always vanish again.

I'm not a programmer. I can't find the reason *why* this happens. But this is what causes it to happen--or, at least, it's one of the causes. About the only other variable I can't account for is that I'm playing on an WinXP computer. It's possible that Linux or Vista does not reproduce the bug.

Hope that helps!

--IndyPendant.