Lately, I've been playing BTS for the first time with two others in a Play-by-Email game via Discord, but we've been having an issue that hasn't come up in our OG Civ 4 games. I'm playing a 3v3v3 game where all the human players are on one team, and sometimes we get a file where the player is asked what to build in cities, but it's for the previous player's cities. After choosing what to build, the game gets stuck on a "waiting for [previous player] to take their turn" notification. We've been able to get past this a few times by having a previous player take another player's turn for them, but this time is hasn't gotten any better. I asked about this on the Steam forum for the game, and someone told me to ask here. Does anyone know how to fix/prevent this issue?
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Civ 4 BTS Play-By-Email bug
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Hmmm. We don't play many teamers here, but we do have a long history with PbeM, and there's a known bug that may be related, and might even be the cause:
In a PbeM, if you play with the "Minimize Pop-Ups" option on, play through part of your turn without clearing all the pop-ups asking you to select builds in cities that just completed things, then save the game to come back to it later and leave the game, then load your mid-turn save, finish your turn, and pass the game along normally, each of the other players will get the pop-ups that were still minimized, awaiting your selections, in your mid-turn save. If the 3v3v3 then gets further confused because these "ghost pop-ups" belong to someone on your team, that might be the problem. If so, one thing the player can do is make sure to deal with all the pop-ups before saving, even if only by setting the builds to something they'll recognize as a placeholder so they can come back to it later on. (You can do this with or without "minimize pop-ups" enabled, of course.) A more extreme measure would be for everyone to always queue a build behind anything a city's working on (again, even if it's just a placeholder to come back to later) so the what-shall-we-build-now popups never appear at all. Hopefully one of these will work; if not, if you can post a save game or two (preferably the latest one that had no known problems and an early one where the problem exists) in a zipped folder, it's possible someone can look at it and see if there's more we can learn.
Possibly related, but we've seen problems in our PBEMs with stuff not being initialized properly when you load the game. You should *always* exit to the main menu before loading the PBEM save. So your turn should always start with selecting Multiplayer->PBEM->Load game. Never use the Ctrl-L shortcut to load a game.
I've always loaded the PBEM save from the main menu myself (it's the only BTS game I'm playing so I'm not going to that game from another game), so I assume that's not the issue. And I for one always clear any pop-ups by doing what they want me to do. But I'll ask the group about the other ones.
I know the person who pointed me to this forum to ask about the bug also suggested using the PBMod (https://github.com/civ4-mp/pbmod), but I'm not sure how to set it up, if it'd even help our issue, or if adding a mod mid-game would force us to make a new game
Only just now noticed the "zip two files and share them" bit. Here's the last file where things were working fine and the one right after where the bug showed up.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A2CUcb4...sp=sharing |
