Strange CTd and a ghost General

[bovi]

You won't have any problem until he enters a battle I think. It's a ticking bomb and you should revert to a savegame before you did that teleport.

[burn_again]

There are safe ways to transport characters whose internal name you don't know (especially Romans, but also all factions like Carthage, Sweboz and the Nomad factions whose internal names often differ from displayed names).
If you play Rome and you want to move a character, you should test it first with a cheat that can't cause any harm, like "character_reset", which gives movement points back. You type character_reset "Gaivs Romanvs", then GaivsA till GaivsK, until the character you want is selected. Then you know his internal name and you can use move_character safely.
If you play another faction and want to move a roman character, you should save your game before you use move_character. If the right FM is moved, everything is fine. If it is another FM or a ghost general, you can try again until you find the right name, then you reload and move only the FM you wanted to move.

[anubis88]

Damn, i still can't get to teleport the roman characters. They have like 3 full stack armies sitting in Corsica, and god knows they need them elsewhere.

I tried for i guy named Spvrivs Avrelivs Cotta, but i've moved only a general of the same name who was probably in a city, since he's a ghost and had to exit the game.

I've tried all the letters, from SpvrivsA Romanvs to SpvrivsZ Romavs, but it never found the character. Could someone explain precisly what i must tipe?

i go like this:
move_character "SpvrivsA Romanvs"39,39 what do i do wrong? Without the A it works great

[macsen rufus]

Interesting, I just found a 'ghost roman' whilst trying to de-crash my Saba game. Long story short, Saba game was crashing during Roman AI turn so I took control of the Romans from the year before and had a look at what they're up to. Whilst doing this I happened to move a Roman FM out of a city (in the old-fashioned, walking-on-his-own-two-feet way) so I could raise some mercenaries - soon as I hit the raise-troops button, he faded away before my very eyes! And funnily enough, it wasn't the mercenary panel that came up but the troop-training from the city he used to be in

After that I could only find him through the characters list, and guess what, there were three Roman FMs of the same name. So, I ordered him back into the city (though he refused to move) and next turn, after a reload, I got a message saying he'd heroically died.

From that point it CTDed if I tried to get control of Saba again, or if I even scrolled the map as Romani... Most peculiar, but if it's any help to anyone trying to debug this, that's my 2c worth

[Cute Wolf]

Just curious, what region did the Roman generals was abducted by alien? (become a ghost general)

Maybe both of you just found some glitchy area at the map

[macsen rufus]

Good question... I can't honestly recall the exact name - it was something like 'Burgita', just to the north-west of Tolosa and south of the Loire. I'm not familiar with that end of the map yet

However, I don't think it was the location - there was another FM in the stack (ie the governor) and he came out and raised mercenaries and successfully broke the siege of Tolosa. And it probably wasn't the duplicated name either, as both of these two FMs had two namesakes each, according to the character list

[bovi]

Actually this might be a clue to why the campaign starts becoming more unstable as the campaign progresses. The odds of having multiple characters with the same name obviously increases as time passes, both due to having more characters around and because of sheer probability: you need to be lucky every time, and only need to be unlucky once.

The Romani have a particularly large chance of getting duplicate names because they only have one last name. Perhaps we should consider adding a number of other invisible last names too. This would obviously make it even harder to figure out the internal name of a Romani, but if it can avoid late-game crashes it ought to be worth it.

This should be comparatively easy to test by removing all names (except those specifically used in descr_strat) for any faction, and just ending turn repeatedly. If crashes occur earlier than usual, this would be evidence in favour of it.