Scale Bug:Please Post Nations you have had it with

[Edi]

I've had the scale bug with both Arco and Pythium at 0 temp adjustment. At least those two, that I can remember. Arco was both EA and MA and in both Dom2 and Dom3. I think Kaljamaha had the scale bug with Sauromatia in one of our games and he's also had it with normal temperature nations. So it is not necessarily tied to the heat/cold scale. It must in some way be tied to scale mechanics, but that's a fairly wide field, seeing as how sites, events, spells and pretender Dominion all affect scales and there may be several types of different mechanics there.

I do notice that most people who report the bug have 3 picks in at least one scale, but does anyone have any experiences with this bug when they do not have any scale maxed out? I have a hazy recollection that one of my Arco games in Dom2 would have been that way, but I cannot be sure and more data on this might be helpful.

Lord_Bob said:
Yes. And this does two things that could trigger the Scale Bug.

First, it is very likely that the busy little min/max'ers have selected Cold-3, which makes a Cold-4 overrun more likely. It also means that the standard income/scales calculation code IS NOT USED FOR Ry'leh. ANOTHER, ALTERNATE, EVIL FUNCTION is used. This EVIL FUNCTION was not properly tested, and has resulted in all these problems.

Nice hypothesis, but I do not like the way you state it as if it were a confirmed fact when it is unknown, especially the part about testing it. As far as I know, nobody has asked Johan about that. So let's stick to the actual, verified observations and known facts, shall we, and mark speculation clearly as such.

Lord_Bob said:
Remember, we are only talking about single INITIALIZATION function anyway(turn 1). So this is an alternate second initialization function. It most certainly was not adaquately tested.

Again, see above. Do not make statements of fact from your speculation about things where we do not have full information on.

The mere fact that we got a public statement to the effect of "Most interesting!" from Johan speaks volumes. For him, that's being verbose. So he's going to look into it and I'm sure he will tell us in good time what he found. I'm also going to point out that the scale bug may not be down to just one thing, but may require certain unusual combination factors to coincide before it manifests and if those factors are not obvious, hunting it down may be very difficult.

One of the more unusual (non-Dominions) bugs I've seen was in Age of Wonders (the original) by Triumph Studios. In the first version, if you recruited units and sent them on a multiturn movement path and later box-selected several units when new ones kept appearing in the following turns, so you could give them all the same destination, the last unit would move the sum total of the movement points of all the preceding units instead of just its own allotted movement. The intervening units would all move the sum of the ones before them. That one was caused by some very specific things and required very specific behavior and had not come to light in beta, since box-selection was a feature added later. Because it was so specific, Josh Farley had no problem squashing it as soon as it was described, but the Dominions Scale bug may not and probably will not be as cooperative, since there is a lot more ambiguity here.