Bug: Bug Thread: Discussion

[calmon]

Smiling_Spectre said:
I live in Russia, and there is no Dominions 3 in the shops. But recently I receive Dominions 3 with version 3.00 as a gift from my friend. It works good, but I want patches, of course. After any patch (I have already 3.04 and 3.06) game stops working! I still can do anything - from map making and game starting to issue orders and look into parameters. One turn. After pressing "end turn" game randomily hangs on any shown steps. It can be "AI thinking", "battles (turn 1)", "horrors" - you name it. It cannot name "true hang" - I can do Task Switching, and music in game still playing, changing melodies, and game eats approx 85% of my Athlon 2000+. But that's all. I waited approx 20 minutes - without result. I bring game to work, and install it on my P4 Duo - it's the same. On the same time non-patched game work as expected, without any hangs. What it can be?

Looks like you use a bad cd key. Doublecheck the key on your manual with the key in the key file in your game directory.

[Smiling_Spectre]

calmon said:
Looks like you use a bad cd key. Doublecheck the key on your manual with the key in the key file in your game directory.

Yes! Keys in the manual and printed on the disk are different! And key from manual work! Thank you!
But how can it be different? It seems, I have fake disk, yes? How pity... (

[Szumo]

Numeric keypad arrows seem to have stopped working in 3.06 (they no longer scroll the map for example). They worked fine in 3.04.

[Sandman]

The Atlantean national summon, the monster fish (1664), doesn't have any darkvision, despite it being strongly implied in the unit description.

[Edi]

Pending addition to the bug shortlist, commentary on some already reported bugs so that I won't have to deal with those questions later.

WAD = Working As Designed

PAY ATTENTION:

Taqwus said:
Thematic bug: it's very odd that, after capturing a capital, one can recruit troops there based on the underlying indy poptype that the owner of the capital could not recruit. If I capture Ulm and can recruit amazons there... why couldn't Ulm have done the same?

WAD. All provinces are assigned a random poptype during map creation. Nobody can recruit the indies of their own province. If there were some routine in the game that assigned poptype 88+ to home provinces after their locations were determined, then NO independent units would be recruitable.

A trivial enough issue that it is hard to justify using programming time to do anything about it unless the devs feel that way.

NT Jedi said:
Rejuvenate spell does not work on undead which cast the spell. The spell is still casted yet the age for the undead doesn't decrease.

WAD. Undead do not seem to be affected by any age related effects of either nature or fire magic or presumably other age increasing/decreasing effects. At all.

NT Jedi said:
Victory Point Provinces with 2 or 3 Crowns only shows one crown on the map within randomly generated games. Not sure if the same is true for premade maps.

Fixed in 3.06 or earlier

GrobRim said:
Shift-click for selecting multiple units doesn't work when army setup screen is called up using 'y' rather than 't'

Fixed in 3.06 or earlier.

Frank Trollman said:
Map Bug: Parganos: Province 31 is not marked "no start".

Ygorl said:
In the Cradle of Dominion map, provinces 120 and 167 should be tagged as water provinces

Will be fixed in next patch. I will provide Illwinter with fixed map files for these two maps so that they can devote their time to more crucial issues instead of bothering with such relatively minor things.

cthulhu said:
independants have temples. happened in dom2 also, but seems much more common now

WAD. Independent provinces can suffer/benefit from random events just the same as the provinces of any nation. One event builds a temple in the province. Indie temples do not spread any dominion nor do they decrease the dominion of surrounding nations. They will be destroyed upon conquering the province.

Thematically, they can be regarded as temples to now vanished deities or some minor local god whose worhsip is stamped out by the invading nation to make room for the True God.

cthulhu said:
vampire lords can't use water breathing items, but national troops can? I guess this is probably intentional, one of the many, many ways that vampire lords have been nerfed

WAD. Vampires in mythology tend to be stymied by running water and are bound to land and the earth, specifically to the earth of their own graves in certain folklore. Therefore it is thematically inappropriate for them to be able to enter the sea.

cthulhu said:
vaetti hags start old age at 50. vaette cheiftains start it at 100. vaette at 50.

WAD.

cthulhu said:
vaetti hags don't require a lab to build

WAD. Due to the mechanics of the game, only mages who have one magic of a specified path require a lab to build. Mages who have no magic to begin with but who have a chance to get a random magic (no matter if that chance is 100%) do not. Thematically this can represent hedge wizards and witches who are not formally trained but stumble upon the gift of one magic path or another and puzzle their way to some basic understanding of it.

With the vaetti hag, this is especially appropriate given the starting age of the unit. A whole lifetime of practicing whatever it is such hedge witches practice to learn a single level of a single path and without any formal training. Doesn't need any expensive labs for that.

Lasu said:
This occured to me recently: I summoned an unique Demon Lord and prophetised him. A while after he died in combat, so I summoned him again and he had retained his prophet status, even though I was able to appoint another prophet, so in effect I could have had two prophets.

WAD. Unique summons in Dominions 3 are unique. Aside from experience, they seem to retain the characteristics they acquire during games. If a unique creature such as a demon lord or arch devil is placed on a map by map command and modified via map commands (renamed, magics removed with #clearmagic etc), then those characteristics will persist throughout that particular game. Even if killed and summoned again, they will keep their original name and will not automatically reacquire stripped magic. This has been verified with a test map.

cthulhu said:
hamas dryads still have flavor text that says they can't leave their home provinces... and still are perfectly capable of leaving their home province

WAD. Hamadryads can leave their home province, just as they could in Dom2, but will lose 1 hit point per turn as long as they are away and will eventually die. In that sense they are unable to leave their homes.

B_Bond: said:
I don't know if anyone has commented on the Colossal Fetisch. <snip reference to another fixed issue> maybe "Fetisch" should be "Fetish" as in "an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a spirit" (Dictionary def)?

Fixed in 3.06 or earlier

Cainehill said:
Equipping magic weapons on commanders with 4 arms is very buggy : for example, the Destroyer of Worlds has 4 hand slots, starts with 4 weapons (2 melee, 2 ranged). Equipping a Thorn Spear costs _all_ 4 slots, while adding an Enchanted Shield gives back the Plague Bow and Lightning ranged attacks.

Same thing happens if a Serpent Kryss or Enchanted Sword is equipped. And, if two magical weapons are equipped, _plus_ a shield, the pretender now has 2 melee attacks, 2 ranged, _and_ a shield. In fact, a Black Steel Tower Shield can be added, for 2 (forged) magical melee weapons, 2 magic shields, and 2 missile weapons equipped. Take away the 2 weapons, he doesn't get the original equipped items back, instead gets a useless kick. And of course, equipping the shields _before_ the weapons takes away the missile weapons.

WAD. This is related to the behavior of non-bonus missile weapons in the game. Non-bonus missile weapons behave as if they were bonus weapons with regard to intrinsic melee weapons. If a unit is not assigned an intrinsic melee weapon but is given a non-bonus missile weapon in a mod, they get weapon 92 Fist as default melee weapon. It is possible that they would keep any previously assigned intrinsic melee weapon, but I've only tested with units whose intrinsic weapon was fist, so the point is moot. In any case, addition of the missile weapon will leave the unit with both melee and missile weapon.

Giving the unit a shield item only will not affect the missile weapon. Giving the unit a weapon item only will eliminate ALL non-bonus weapons it intrinsically had. Giving both weapon and shield items will also eliminate all intrinsic items. IF the unit only has 2 hand slots, that is. It is NOT confirmed, but my speculation is that units with 4 arms will check after the first weapon and shield if there are any empty arm slots and keep missile weapons if there are. The case with two shields would probably work according to similar logic. A test case with three 1-handed weapons and 1 shield could be used to fully test out this behavior. Possibly as long as the last hand slot contains a shield, the DoW gets to keep both missile weapons due to their peculiar status as de facto bonus wrt melee weapons if they are intrinsic.

These are all of the things that I have gleaned from previous posts in the bug thread that seem to be completely WAD or which have a logical, consistent (if sometimes strange) explanation in light of observed game mechanics.

Unless the devs personally intervene to pronounce one of these issues as bugs, I DO NOT WANT TO SEE THEM REPORTED AGAIN.

Thank you for your time.

Edi

[Gandalf Parker]

Of course any of these probably can be discussed as suggestions, wishlist, even debated as "it should be this way" on threads other than the bug list. Personally, I think I would recommend it even since calling something a bug, wrong, broken, etc etc can act against you on items which the devs dont agree are that way. Pushing a bug title onto something is not always helpful to getting it changed IMHO. It can speed things up, but only if the devs agree that its a bug.

[Edi]

True that, Gandalf. Anything and everything is always a valid topic of discussion as feature requests, improvements (as much as these can be agreed upon) and such as long as those discussions are conducted appropriately. My posts in this thread are going to be strictly from the bug management point of view, which is why I'm going to take a fairly strict approach to what gets included.

I should also clarify one of the points in the above post in light of some new information: undead, inanimate creatures and demons apparently do benefit get increased maxage (=oldage), but nature magic is not a factor. Instead they use death, earth and blood magic respectively with the same mechanism.

Edi

[Johan K]

1000yd_stare said:
Using the latest patch 3.06, on a win2k box, this attached game consistently fails with a nagot gick fel message:

acc: bad unr

All the players bought via shrapnel games, and we have been playing this game with the patch for at least a couple turns (i'm out of the game, but i host).

It turns out that it was Mind Hunt that made the game crash. Remove that order and it should work ok. It will be fixed in the next patch.

[lch]

Check The 3.06 patch thread for some strange bug regarding the strategic overview and looking at commanders vs. army view and looking at commanders. It seems as if some return values are giving problems there and the interface vanishes...

[BigDisAwesome]

Whenever I have iTunes running Dom3 won't load up. It'll stick on the Please Wait screen. Then when I close iTunes and try again, it works fine. Any ideas?