Bug Report (RTW:BI)

Ezboard ate my account a while back (I don't really feel like opening up a new mail addy just for another forum account on that junk), and I don't seem to be able to post on the real bug report thread, so hopefully a mod can move/edit this somewhere that it will be useful.

Anyway... I have observed a couple bugs in BI that I haven't seen described yet. Numbers 1 and 3 are the big ones.

1. State is not properly saved/restored in the "battle imminent, choose manual/autocalc/retreat" scroll when looking at opposing armies by right clicking their banners. I have observed the following two problems: A. I had a two star general with a three star ambush bonus pull off an ambush on an invading ERE army. Initially, he showed as having five stars. I right clicked the ERE banner to see what I was up against, then closed the popup when I was done looking. He then dropped to a two star general (lost his ambush bonus). B. I had a night-attack capable general attack a Sarmatian army, with reinforcements for both sides. I selected "attempt night attack", which greyed out all reinforcements. With "attempt night attack" still selected, I right clicked the Sarmatian banner, and closed it when I was done looking. This caused all reinforcements to be dropped from the battle entirely. They weren't greyed out, they just weren't there anymore, even when I toggled "attempt night attack" a couple times.

2. The trait names for the first level of loyal and disloyal seem like they should be switched. Right now its something like Publicly Loyal/This man's loyalty is quietly admired, mostly by others (+1 loyalty), and Apparently Loyal/This man's loyalty is loudly trumpeted, mostly by himself (-1 loyalty). It would make more sense if the trait names were switched: Apparently Loyal/This man's loyalty is quietly admired, mostly by others (+1 loyalty), and Publicly Loyal/This man's loyalty is loudly trumpeted, mostly by himself (-1 loyalty).

3. I had a "Flash Flood" random event happen in my campaign. This event seems to kill a small number of soldiers from any unit that is outside a city in the affected province, as well as imposing a large movement penalty in the province for that turn. It also adds a rather good looking lake on top of some of the roads (I assume to show that the roads have been washed out by the flash flooding, hence the movement penalty). During the course of the turn where this event happened, I alt-tabbed. This caused the lake to disappear from the campaign map. I later saved and exited for the night, still on that turn. Resuming my campaign the next day, I found that the movement penalty in the province which was affected by flash flooding seems to have become permanent. I assume this is a state problem similar to #1, caused by either the tab or the save/load.

4. Occasionally when I have an agent's movement interrupted on the campaign map (usually a spy), the character will start twitching instead of going back into his "relaxed" animation.

5. This might not be a bug, but wall towers are not capturable from below. You can only capture the tower if you enter it from the walls. This makes sap points pretty useless, as your troops end up pretending they are controlled by the AI and getting slaughtered by inward firing wall towers while they march toward the town square (unless you have siege towers or onagers in addition to the sap points, but that makes said sap points rather useless).

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Sally battle exploit/another reason to nerf siege tower ballistae: As everyone knows, when you have siege equipment built when the AI tries a sally, it will be present on the battlemap so it can be destroyed. This is all well and dandy, except that the new repeating ballistae of everything killing mounted on the siege towers are active during sally battles, and can depress enough to fire at the sallying troops. I will leave you to imagine what it looks like when an AI attempts to sally into four siege tower ballistae on fire at will. Wasn't the AI already bad enough at sally battles in RTW?

Finally, the BI AI doesn't look like its improved much, if any. I am still seeing many many stupid AI tricks. A couple gems from recent battles that I feel a burning need to vent about:

I am attacking an AI ERE army across a bridge. The AI begins by charging all its light cavalry (merc camels, merc heavy camels, equites auxilia, equites veteranii, 6-7 units total) across the bridge at me, then that cavalry makes a hard left turn in front of my archers without attacking them and starts charging parallel to the river toward the edge of the map (on my side of the river). This results in a rather large number of horse kebabs as I sit here trying to figure out why the AI decided to do something above and beyond the call of idiocy. I am then able to move my general alone across the bridge and walk around the mass of AI infantry to kill off a couple units of AI archers and its remaining light/missile cavalry. The AI infantry and general stay at parade rest, as my general massacres their buddies 5 feet behind them with the entire rest of my army on the opposite shore.

AI handling of missile cavalry is still awful, especially in numbers. When attacking, or as your army nears when the AI is defending, the AI sends out a single unit of missile cavalry to attack me, which is promptly slaughtered to the last man by my archers. It then sends another single unit of missile cavalry, which is promptly slaughtered to the last man by my archers. Repeat until the AI runs out of missile cavalry. This is especially bad when I have onagers in my army, because all the time that those single units of missile cavalry take to walk up slowly to my archers and die, my onagers are... pwning (there's just no other word for it) the AI infantry line. Hordes are much less frightening because of this.

The AI still seems to have no concept of massed charges. When under missile fire the AI will charge, but it's only the specific unit which took losses from missile fire that charges. This means I have to slaughter them piecemeal instead of slaughtering them all at once.

On the strategic map the hordes seem to be horribly brain dead. I have so far had the Sarmatians and Vandals invade my lands. They both wandered around on my border with the goths for about 15 turns, then moved into my territory and wandered around in the same two or three provinces in Illyira for about 15 turns, and then I got tired of waiting for them to do something, declared war, and wiped them out because they were interrupting my supply lines. The goths were forced into a horde by the huns at one point, they wandered around in circles for 20 turns and then settled back into the province they were forced to horde from.

TMM

A. The Berserker traits should exclude romans. One of my WRE generals became a shieldbiter from a stopover in a captured barbarian settlement that had a tavern.

B. The LeaderDestroyedFaction and GeneralCaptureSettlement events might not be firing properly, though I can't be sure since the inner workings of how BI handles Loyalty seem a bit screwy to me.

The following triggers *should* cause generals to hemmorhage loyalty if they are even moderately successful:

;------------------------------------------
Trigger triumphs2
WhenToTest GeneralCaptureSettlement

Condition CultureType roman

Affects VictorRomanVirtue 1 Chance 100
Affects Disloyal 1 Chance 66

;------------------------------------------
Trigger triumphs6
WhenToTest LeaderDestroyedFaction

Condition CultureType roman

Affects VictorRomanVirtue 10 Chance 100
Affects Disloyal 1 Chance 100

;------------------------------------------

However, in my WRE game I have only seen generals lose loyalty because of field battles, not for any other reason. However, the exact effects can be difficult to gauge because title ancillaries appear to give some kind of hardcoded resistance to loyalty decreases. Specifically, I have observed the following:

1. A general with the "Dux Brittanum" title ancillary completed his entire career and died of old age without having his loyalty change either way from the LoyaltyStarter trait of 4. He wiped out the Celts and Saxons (which should have forced a -1 to loyalty for each one if the above triggers worked and were not blocked by the title ancillary). He also won a number of good sized battles over his career, but never lost any loyalty. I might just have been lucky, but it feet like his title ancillary was blocking loyalty decreases. I have seen loss of loyalty in a character with the "Magister Peditum" title ancillary however.

2. A general with no ancillaries and no visible traits affecting loyalty eliminated the last Hun without becoming disloyal. However, the threshold for the first visible level of the Loyal line is 5, so its possible he had a non-threshhold level of loyalty. I doubt this however.

3. My generals lose loyalty from large field battles, which is correct as the same triggers which award good general traits now award disloyalty as well, but I have captured strings of weakly defended settlements without causing any disloyalty, so the "double jepoardy" doesn't seem to be functioning. I actually favor this because its hard enough to keep generals loyal as is.

I also captured a wonder without causing apparent disloyalty (the GeneralCapturedWonder event should also cause an automatic shift of 1 to Disloyal), though that general had the second level of the Loyalty trait, so it could very easily have been a shift which didn't show up as a threshhold.

C. This is more of an addition than a bug, but it seems to me there should be a hidden trait "Nicene" along the lines of the "Sane" trait which would block the various heretic traits for Romans and Nicene barbarians like the Franks. More or less every single one of my governors is a heretic of some stripe or another, but it seems to me that most of them would/should really be of the official Nicene faith, since that is what is coming from Rome.

Similarly, the Christianized barbarians that were coverted to Arian Christianity, like the Goths, should not be able to get the ArianHeresy traits (since that is their majority faith, and they can recruit Arian priests), instead they would have an "Arian" trait which would block heresy traits, and be able to gain a new "Nicene/Catholic Heretic" trait for those family members who covert to the Roman Catholic version of Christianity.