I lost?

[Iron Duke]

I'm playing in MP game kickabout, battled ulm and the battle report says I lost but when I watched the battle, it's the other way around, me defeating ulm. What's up with that? I've watched it 3 times just to be sure...

[K]

Originally Posted by Iron Duke

I'm playing in MP game kickabout, battled ulm and the battle report says I lost but when I watched the battle, it's the other way around, me defeating ulm. What's up with that? I've watched it 3 times just to be sure...

Sometimes it happens. It's a rare bug.

[Epaminondas]

Originally Posted by K

Sometimes it happens. It's a rare bug.

Ah, that explains it. I just lost to Helheim in a battle as Nifelheim, but the battle replay said Helheim units have been "routed."

[Endoperez]

See these two threads:
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=40804
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=40845

For some reason, there has been lots of discussion about this recently. Has it really become this common? I hope not.

Any way, since most of the questions you might want to ask are probably answered in those two threads, I suggest reading them. Here's what I wrote about the bug in one of them.

The fights are calculated once while the new turn is hosted, and the results of that fight are used for determining which units died, who controls the province etc. The fights you see are replays of that fight, using the same random seed (i.e. all the random rolls will come up in the same order as in the original fight). If, for any reason, there's a calculation in a wrong place, the replay doesn't turn out as it should. There have been many problems that caused this, and they've been fixed when they've been identified.

The only example I can remember right now is that in DomII, the comparison used to determine who wins a Magic Duel (random roll A + astral level A vs random roll B + astral level B) was handled differently in Linux and Windows distributions (Windows: first A, then B; Linux: first B, then A). When the random roll was high enough to change the result, the battle went differently from that point onwards. It didn't matter as long as the hosting and playing happened on the same operating system, which caused even more confusion.

As you can see, it is difficult to find the exact bug that causes the symptom in your case.

[ArkkiMeisseli]

I've never had this happen to myself, but once when I started a game, I had that "here was a battle recently" sign (crossed swords) show up on a province on the other side of the randomly-generated map. It wasn't even under my dominion or anything.

[Endoperez]

That's when you create a new game that shares a name with an old one. If you replace the old "Ulm Game" because you lost fight at province 137, on the first turn of the new game you can view the same battle taking place on province 137. The maps don't even have to be the same, so you can see a land battle taking place in sea etc.

[Edratman]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

That's when you create a new game that shares a name with an old one. If you replace the old "Ulm Game" because you lost fight at province 137, on the first turn of the new game you can view the same battle taking place on province 137. The maps don't even have to be the same, so you can see a land battle taking place in sea etc.

I see that all the time because I just use numbers to name games. One more addition to the "I never knew that" list.

[ArkkiMeisseli]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

That's when you create a new game that shares a name with an old one. If you replace the old "Ulm Game" because you lost fight at province 137, on the first turn of the new game you can view the same battle taking place on province 137. The maps don't even have to be the same, so you can see a land battle taking place in sea etc.

Looks like I finally ran out of creativity with game names, then.
I suppose I'll start adding numbers to them

[coreyh2]

So this problem probably happens more often then people notice? It just doesn't get noticed unless it leads to a completely different outcome? Having a different RNG on linux and windows seems like it would cause problems constantly.

[Gandalf Parker]

Often this is from a mismatch between the versions of the player and the host. We almost never see it from a solo player