Bug? Diseased Undead + Burden of Time

[Gandalf Parker]

That would be interesting. But probably abused. Especially in long games.
Bad enough we have things like Eater of the Dead

Not really. I get a kick out of that one.

[Nick_K]

There are a few other units like this - in particular the atlanteans. However, it would be quite a big change and it's rare that units would grow old enough for their growth to have an effect.
In fact, the only way it could happen in a dominions game time scale is through 'decay' or similar aging magic. One could say that this sort of death magic is different from 'natural' aging in that it provides the deterioration of age, but not any growth or increase in power.

[TirAsleen]

The ilithids alone can be 3000 years old before they get old

And wihle Ancient Kraken might get abused by burden of time its not that easy as it seems only Rlyeh can have it. Especially LE. And its aquatic, very slow on the global map, cannot use all slots as a humanoid pretender and does not start with any magic path. A nice Old Age bonus would just be fair.

[Amos]

Surprising that it's taken this long to come out, since this is the first instance of it that I can remember seeing.

I reported the issue a few month ago but someone replied that it was a game function and although the undead were affected by disease they were not dying from it. While I found it weird that undead were afflicted by old age, I took his word for it and didnt test it. Some times its hard to know whats a bug and whats a proper game behavior.

[Foodstamp]

Amos I remember that thread. I believe the person that responded said "Undead can acquire afflictions through old age but cannot die from it."

[Wish]

some agartha troops are also supposed to get bigger with age. unfortunately this functionality seems to be in description only, and not in game functionality.

[Sombre]

I'd think it was obvious that it was description only. Anyway, this is a fairly serious bug isn't it? I mean burden of time is supposed to combo well with undead, not kill them all.

[TirAsleen]

Powerful undead will not die just collect afflictions.

[Shasarak]

Playing Late Age Ermor

Undead Old Age Bug Caused by the global Burden of Time enchantment.

Diseased + Afflictions seem to happen to the Arch Bishop first since they are "old" at 500. The Dusk Elders don't get old until 3000. The afflictions don't seem to hurt the more powerful undead except for Mute which halves the magic skills (now my prophet is only a level 2 priest instead of level 4 ouch!) The Undead trait states they are not affected by disease or old age. Could this be fixed by adding a few zeros to the old age limit for Ermor undead?

[Squirrelloid]

It should be noted that Winds of Death has the same problem - it ages undead when its only supposed to effect living creatures (and undead are supposed to be immune to aging!)

I'm guessing Decay has the same issue.

(In fact, my guess is BoT is decay applied to every unit on the map).

The disease interaction happens because decay accelerates the effect of disease on the affected unit, and apparently happens separately than the normal disease mechanic, and the separate implemenation doesn't check to see if the creature is undead or not.

Suggested fixes:
-Implement a special 'age' value which is no age, and give it to undead and certain other units that don't age. This special value needs basically only one defined operation: NoAge + n = NoAge, for all n.

-Instead of letting undead gain the disease affliction, but it not having any effect in normal situations, why not just prohibit undead from getting diseased in the first place. Same amount of code, and it'll actually be less processor intensive because you just have to check for the exception when assigning the affliction, not every month when you try to reduce the hp of every unit with disease.

Both of these fixes of course assume that JK can be bothered to fix the problem. Its been 3 years since it was reported, apparently...