That seems to be the case. I've figured out the problem....and yes, it's my own stupid fault, not a bug.

I did step by step what it says to do here, like I've done for every EB since 1.0:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showp...3&postcount=85

As you can see, it doesn't involve changing anything in descr_strat, only copying the folder it's in. However, after checking the EB 1.2 files, they do have the correct descr_strat.

So what happened was that I did this BI setup guide when only EB 1.1 was installed, and then when EB 1.2 was installed over it, it obviously didn't overwrite the new barbarian_invasion folder created in order to let me play BI. Checking the EB\Data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign folder which contains descr_strat confirms that the descr_strat in that folder is correct like yours, but the one in EB\Data\world\maps\campaign\barbarian_invasion is not correct, since it was copied from the EB 1.1 install.

Whoops, sorry.