Faction leader dies at 56/57 bug - in vanilla (and random seed condundrums)
Long story short: the 56-year bug is not due to generals dying as introduced in Viking Invasion.
Short story long:
I have never bothered to install, or even buy, the Viking Invasion expansion pack. The main reason, I must admit, is because I don't want my generals dying of old age (though I do not let that bother me in RTW or M2TW). Nine star generals don't grow on trees!
Anyway, I first encountered this bug playing the Byzantines, and I started noticing a trend: yes, you guessed it from the title no doubt, my faction leaders started dying, with unerring accuracy, the year they should have turned 57. I now recently experienced the same with the HRE. Like I said, this is MTW vanilla (v1.1), so it is absolutely not the fault of the generals dying feature. This bug is clearly older than that.
Now, MTW is usually very generous with random seeding: reload a save, end turn, get different results. Perhaps now there won't be a flood in Milan, or there will be but nothing is destroyed, or there's a flood somewhere else instead. Perhaps now the assassin will succeed in his mission, perhaps this time a son won't be born. Perhaps the Aragonese won't reappear this time, perhaps the Almohads won't invade Portugal. Sometimes I have experienced identical results upon loading a save, but in those cases I have found that simply moving a couple of armies/agents on the map, even within the same territory (so there's no actual change), will cause the game to generate new random seeds.
Now, with the 56-bug, however, it seems that random seeds are locked. Here's the thing:
In TW games, I always have three saves per campaign that I rotate, just in case some bug renders a save useless. And each time a faction leader dies, I make a backup save of the last year of the old king, if he was older than 57. This means that if the new king has brought the 56-bug into the campaign, I have a backup to revert to.
The year before my faction leader dies, one of my inquisitors takes it upon himself to start an inquisition in Pomerania. I can't disband him, and moving him only causes him to start an inquisition in the new region. (I don't care about his fanatical escapades, I am just trying to see if I can cause events to change - but no new random seeds, no dice).
So I go back to my old back-up save, with a faction leader at 62 (three or four decades back). I notice two things: I go to the next turn, and one of my generals gets the "greed" trait and the Almohad kalifah dies. As I reload, both these things happen again, and again, and again. I check the kalifah's age, and sure enough: he's 56. I was beginning to think it was a random seed problem, going back to around that turn and affecting the campaign from that point on, but then after moving a few pieces back and forth (yet again), that general I talked about finally did not acquire the "greed" trait. Phew! The Almohad kalifah still died, though, and the random seed process is unusually stubborn.
So my old back-up is worthless. The game has progressed nicely from 1080 to around 1320 without faction leaders turning suicidal at 56. Or actually ~1270, seeing as the bug was introduced by the AI and not myself.
If someone has more information to add, please do so. I wish I knew what triggers this bug. It seems to be fairly rare, as I have played countless campaigns without encountering it, but it is extremely annoying when it happens.
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Originally Posted by Brandy Blue
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