The scale bug is caused by province neighbors

vfb · #1 November 29th, 2007, 07:28 PM

Thanks! I started the game on this map and immediately lost all my good scales. So I made a stealth prophet and sent her to province #7 (159) to preach. Province 159 did not have friendly dominion. As soon as I got one candle in #159, all my order (and some productivity and growth) came back in the capital. Two turns later and the scales were back at full strength.

Edit: I started a new game because I didn't have the save. I'll have a look at that now.

Lord_Bob · #2 November 29th, 2007, 07:46 PM

The Monkey King will erect a massive statue of vfb made from astral pearls!

Really, I think your thread should be stickied!

Sticky this thread!

vfb · #3 November 29th, 2007, 08:10 PM

Edratman, I looked at your save game. You had positive dom in 159 and 113. Probably the high initial dom set up in the map caused early spread. So, I killed your prophet, researched const6, and sent a bunch of stone idols to province 159 (neighbor #7, the trigger province) and province 113 (neighbor #1, the leech province). Dom hit zero first in 159, but I didn't see much of a scales change, since there's only one possible scales decrease for neighbor #7. When Dom hit zero in 113, all the positive scales vanished in the capital.

I then removed the idols from 159 and parked them in 113. Scales then started to recover in the capital. It took about 5 turns for them to get back to full strength, but they did recover and stay there.

Thanks for posting the test case!

Edratman · #4 November 29th, 2007, 08:18 PM

You have it all figured out. You can always create the problem and make it go away. That is positive proof.

Arralen · #5 November 30th, 2007, 11:27 AM

I have told the devs for over 2 years that there's at least one bug with dominion spread and province neighbours,
but no-one ever really listened to me .. .
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

Maybe you want to check if it's really the same one ?!

Good to see it tracked down (what was beyond my technical ablities, as I must confess).

vfb · #6 November 30th, 2007, 11:51 AM

Well, when I was reading about the scales bug, I kind of had a couple of ideas, and I got curious, and I fired up the debugger, and then it was all reminiscent of life several years ago and I kind of got swept up in the whole thing and got a wee bit compulsive and couldn't stop until I figured it out. But I didn't actually ask anyone for permission to examine the object code. I'd hate to accidentally divulge any secrets of the game, and I could possibly spoil the fun of playing for myself too. So I don't think I'll jump in and look at host_spreaddominion() right at the moment.

But the idea of the "Ghost" province connections causing mysterious dominion spread is certainly possible. The "Ghost" province connections are definitely the cause of the scale bug when the scale bug occurs in a province with less than 7 real neighbors.

To avoid "Ghost" province connections, if you have been playing Dom3, do not create a new game without first exiting the application. Exiting to the main menu is insufficient, you need to close the program and start it again.

Edit: Oops, forgot to mention ... Arralen, that's great you figured out the cause too! I'm new to Dominions this year, so I wasn't around during the previous thread you linked to.