Weird superposition bug

[Hierophant]

I can say I have never seen such a bug in all my years of playing SMAC. I am playing Peacekeepers. The square below UN Enforcement Base contains both one of my formers and a Hive scout. As you can see, I am at war against the Hive. When I attack the scout on that square with an infantry unit located inside the base, my former takes splash damage! But it can re-enter my base without problem to heal.
It seems that some bug caused my former to be temporarily classified as Hive. It is so rare that I see such bugs that I thought it was worth a snapshot. I never saw the transport either, which is weird because I have units that should have been able to "see" it. Maybe an early failed Hive experiment in teleportation, and the scouts were too frazzled to attack my former! 

[bvanevery]

Your Former isn't Hive.  Your Former is in a square where there's combat going on, so it's going to take splash damage.  Doesn't matter that you were doing the attacks.  Your unit isn't magically immune to the splash damage just because it's you that's attacking.  Realistically, your unit is experiencing "friendly fire". 

Unrealistically, having friend and enemy units in the same square is a bug, and the combat resolution doesn't expect that to happen.  But, it does happen from time to time.  I'm not sure what can cause it, but recently I had a game crashing because a city contained AI units from both AI factions that were fighting.  I solved the problem by cranking up the Scenario Editor and editing the errant unit to be on the same side as the city and I rehomed it to that city.

A circumstance that isn't a bug at all, is having enemy and neutral units in the same square, because they're allied.  The neutral unit will also take splash damage if that's possible.  I can't remember whether you get a warning about provoking a war, doing this.

[Hierophant]

Yeah, I know about attacking squares with neutral units. You can bombard them with no problem, but attacking them directly, of course, is a big no-no. I don't know about land stacks though.
I just thought this bug was funny, I've never encountered it before. I didn't know that could actually happen.

[bvanevery]

The thing to remember is in addition to being 'funny', if it happens between 2 AI factions it can crash your game.  And it won't be obvious at first what's going on.  It's one of the 3 'major' bugs I see I in a plain vanilla unmodded binary.  Not very often but when it does happen, it's a lulu.

The other major official binary bugs in my experience are the "Interceptor bug" and the "fungal tower transposed to the wrong square" bug.  Again, game crashing.

[Hierophant]

Never heard of any of that. Is there a web site explaining these?

[bvanevery]

You're reading it!  I'm the fount of wisdom.  There's not that much more to say.

Interceptor bug is when someone attacks with a Needlejet, your Interceptor flies out to greet it, and the game crashes.  It was so bad for me several years ago, that I deliberately would not have Interceptors on my front line, so that they would never intercept.  I'd just counterattack on my turn and wear out the enemy's air force that way.  For some reason, the problem went away.  I suspect that Microsoft had some kind of underlying emulation layer problem that quietly got fixed.

Fungal Tower transposition is pretty exotic and weird.  Lots of map spaces can become basically corrupted.  I've only seen a lot of this in long games with a whole bunch of global flooding and Fungal Tower explosions, triggered by all the nifty chemical attacks I made to make it happen.  I think I wrote some of that up in one of my After Action Reports.  Or maybe someone put something in the Bugs forum.  Anyways, you're not going to casually run into this.  It's some kind of "heavily loaded late game" phenomenon.

[Hierophant]

Huh. I think I've only ever had SMAC crash on me once. I don't even remember what caused it, it was a long time ago. For a game that complicated, SMAC seems pretty dang stable. Clearly there are some bugs and exploits, but nothing really bad. That reminds me, I wanted to ask about a bug: is it true that Golden Age doesn't work in vanilla SMAC?

[bvanevery]

For a game that complicated, SMAC seems pretty dang stable.

This is why I basically don't care about unofficial patches from a bugfixing standpoint.  I've only seen a teeny tiny number of things over the years that make anything crash.

That reminds me, I wanted to ask about a bug: is it true that Golden Age doesn't work in vanilla SMAC?

In SMACX I guarantee it works just fine.  I'm in the middle of a game now where I'm getting my +2 GROWTH and other benefits out of my Golden Age, in order to pop boom the Peacekeepers to something absurd.

When some people say "plain vanilla" they mean just SMAC, not SMACX.  However it's confusing because other people mean an unmodded binary.

I really don't know about plain SMAC.  I haven't played it in forever, and since I did my mod for SMACX I am unlikely to ever do so.

[scient]

Did the scout move into the tile with the former after war was declared? Or were they already in same tile and then war was declared? Or did it just appear in the same tile as former? I agree with bvanevery that I don't see so much an issue with how former is taking splash damage. I think issue is more how did that tile end up with former/scout to begin with if you are at war.

Not 100% sure about Fungal Tower issue but the interceptor crash was fixed by my unofficial patch. At the time, I didn't really understand what was going on. I recently revisited it, the issue stems from two global coordinate variables being used before they are set. Essentially, it's possible for vehdraw_scoot_start() to attempt to use globals before veh_lift is called to set them. My unofficial patch just set them further up in the intercept code.

009B2278 ; int VehLift_xCoord
009B2284 ; int VehLift_yCoord

[bvanevery]

Cool, if I run into the Interceptor bug in the future, I'll try to use your patch to resolve it.  I'm not sure why I haven't encountered it much lately.  It could be that my mod makes the Needlejet chassis more expensive, so there isn't as much Interceptor warfare.

[scient]

Also, if you come across any more details about fungal tower issue or an existing thread I can have a quick look. I've seen/fixed some buggy behavior with towers already (ex. fungal missiles over ocean squares) so wouldn't be surprised.

[bvanevery]

After a lot of searching, I found the AAR where I recorded a lot of this fungal tower weirdness.
https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21354.msg122612
Fungal towers showing up in my cities!  Also units being transposed to Monoliths in the ocean IIRC.