Oh, the frustration!

[BigAnorak]

I have been playing a PBEM game of EA, and have posted the niggly bugs that had occured along the way - units not disbanding, Sweden's armed forces withdrawing for no reason etc. But my opponent and I have agreed house rules to work round these annoyances, as we think the scenario is great.

To cut a long story short we have Got to Turn 40 with me as the Axis undertaking a non-stop blitz strategy, Taking out Poland France and the Low countries in 1939 to get the Italians in so I could invade Egypt and do a Sealion in Early Spring 1940.

In turn 39 I get to Alexandria and invade and unoccupied Plymouth to gain a bridgehead in Operation Sealion.

I receive the turn back from my opponent with the message that I have received reinforcements.

I open the recent reinforcement message box to see that every single German Unit in the regular OOBs has been withdrawn!. The only forces left on the map are the bonus units.

I am the most patient man in the world usually,but this is the limit. This scenario has clearly not been converted to TOAW3 as is claimed.

I am not blaming you Mark, but everyone knows the amount of time each turn takes, and therefore how much of one's life is commited to playing a game with 300+ turns.

I know that you are working on a version that is more compatible with TOAW3 and that Matrix are waiting for their part time programmer to be able to spend time on fixing the event bug, but I beg that sufficient testing is done before you post the "final" version, so that players of this fantastic scenario do not get as frustrated as me and my opponent.

[Mark Stevens]

All I can do is apologise - I wasn't involved in the conversion and I'm as disappointed as you are if the TOAW III version is unstable since I've spent a lot of time on this scenario, and if no one has the confidence to play it it'll just die.

For what it's worth - nothing in this case - I've let the patched version run against itself at least twenty times, triggering the events in a different sequence each time, and I've never had the Germany surrenders bug that you've hit.

If you've got the previous turn saved it might be worthwhile playing it again, but not doing exactly what you did - maybe not occupying a town, or triggering a particular event? That might let the next turn play OK, although it's hardly a satisfactory solution. If the problem's turn related it won't do any good of course, but then why doesn't the bug trigger on turn 40 when I run it?

Do try replaying it if you saved the previous turn, even if you just move one unit one hex, and let me know if turn 40 plays OK - at least that'll give me a clue what to look for.

Sorry again, it was a decent scenario for CoW.

[Veers]

I wonder who else has had problems. Polynike and I hadf the Poles not withdraw...you've had, well, numerous bugs. HAs anyone else tried EA in TOAW III and experienced bugs?

[Merf]

I have had problems with the withdraw army event in a scenario I'm working on. When looking at events in the scenario editor all seems fine, with the correct strings (unit names) in the event fields, but from time to time the withdraw army event seems to work incorrectly. When this happens the game will produce a file with the same name as the turn's save file, with "EVENT ERRORS" tacked on the end of the file name. The file is a text file and can be easily examined with notepad, etc. The scenario I have been working on had no problems with the withdraw army events while running under ACOW, but has had several under TAOW III. I have noticed that in the "event errors" the engine is trying to fix, it is often trying to withdraw an army from the wrong force. For example, the Poles surrender, the game tries to withdraw their army, and gives an error message about "axis cadres" withdrawing. I would be curious to see withdraw army events in EA are producing similiar results.

Also, this may be off topic, but try this: start a new scenario in the editor. Reset the map size so it's less that 300x300. Put a hex feature or two along the left edge of the map, so you can see later changes. Then try adding or removing 1 hex column from the left map margin. Nothing happens.

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