Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

So, I've gone through the SP game again, and just finished Mission 9, the Coastal Assault mission where you assault by water with 12 GEVs to take out two command posts. I took out the two coastal howitzers in the city hexes, then faded back to city and water, and went forward again to take out the two antennas. Once I did that, I got my Mark IV reinforcement, played one or two more turns to get the Ogre on land, and still had more than half my GEVs.

Satisfied with my progress, I saved at that point to go grab some lunch. I then come back, and load the saved game only to find that the two coastal howitzers had respawned, a stack of three GEVs were frozen, and the next turn, another set of howitzers spawned on top of the originals.

This next part is actually harder to believe, because I managed to take out the extra howitzers, and actually won that game by steamrolling my Mark IV over the command post.

That, and the AI seemed to roll awfully high.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but typically howitzers don't magically appear on the map. Is that correct? >:)

I was tempted to file a Steam report against the AI for hacking, but begged off. The only thing that could have made the experience complete was if a Cthulu Ogre appeared on the map.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

You should still file a report. It's related to the save's inability to work properly and has been the bane of my existence. It's fairly consistent in it's inability to allow for taking breaks. :-(

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

Oh really, it's the save game feature that's all buggy? I thought I hadn't read the setup correctly, or missed a rule somewhere, but the stack of three GEVs not moving should have been a tip off.

Otherwise the game seems to be fine if you play a scenario from start to finish.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

Yeah, it's been pretty good with straight plays, but stopping and starting tends to have all sorts of ghosts, invisible units, missing turns, etc. I've heard rumor that it works better if you save and completely log out and close Steam before trying to start the game back up, but I haven't seen that to be any more reliable, personally.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

I'll try that after I post.

I'll note that when I came back to a save for mission 10, that there were all kinds of what looked like "developer tools". There were things like "place holder for hidden units" and various other non-player oriented interfaces. Stuff that you would use if you were either editing a scenario or creating a campaign.

I'm going to try the save thing now, and will brb.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

Confirmed. Completely logging out of Steam seems to completely shut down the game and dump everything. I tried that previous save game, and it worked perfectly, whereas the previous time I loaded it I had all the problems I posted in the opening post.

Interesting. I'm guessing Jake knows about this. Very strange.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

To confirm; are you running the game and Steam, then you leave the game running but log off Steam? Thanks.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

Complete shot in the dark, but that makes me wonder if there's not an issue where the local save and the Steam Cloud save end up dueling with one another.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

I shut down both game and Steam. If I just shut down the game, then when I load up a saved game all kinds of developer tools appears. Or they did. When I shut down both game and Steam this seems to reset or clear the game for correct non-developer use.

But essentially having the AI's firepower doubled after loading a saved game ... I don't know how I won that. I seriously don't know how. The dice gods were with me.

Re: Mission 9, spawning howitzers
 

We've made some changes to the save system in recent updates - could you confirm whether this issue is still present?

Out of interest, did you see this behaviour consistently or just with one specific save file?

Thanks as always for reporting :)