Is anyone else experiencing these issues with gorgon's alliance?

[Question]

I am running patch 1.04 on win 10.

-Game randomly crashes during adventures with some kind of exception error. Happens just as i enter combat and the camera starts pulling away from my character. Chance of crashing increases the longer i play without restarting the game, and playing two adventures without restarting almost always guarantees a crash in the second adventure. Tried various compatability modes, seems to make no difference. Large address aware on WINBR.exe doesnt help either.

-After the first few turns, I no longer receive the popup message when another realm assassinates one of my units. The AI still assassinates my units, but i just dont get the popup, and they always seem to succeed every turn. When im at war, that effectively means that one of my units just gets deleted with no warning every turn, and it always succeeds. Extremely annoying.

-The AI can always move diagonally on the battlefield even if their unit only has 1 move. For the player, moving diagonally requires 2 moves.

-Enemy regents on the battlefield do not die when their unit is reduced to 0 hp. They permanently occupy the square and can continue to use missile attacks and cast spells, which is very dangerous if they are an awnshegh. The AI will try to move units into that square but since its occupied by a zombie Regent, the other unit will get automatically sent back to reserve.

-Combat results seem ridiculously random. Blessed elite infantry can lose to pikemen in a straight up fight even though the elite infantry should have the advantage. Blessed Knights can charge infantry and lose even with the charge bonus. Etc, etc.

-If you get a vassal, you can control both realms, but the game seems to skip one realm every action. E.G. Instead of letting you take action 1 for Realm A and B, the game seems to let you take action 1 for realm A, followed by action 2 for Realm B, then action 3 for Realm A. Castle maintenance is not paid properly either, resulting in your castles decreasing in level each turn.

[Oqlanth]

-Game randomly crashes during adventures with some kind of exception error. Happens just as i enter combat and the camera starts pulling away from my character. Chance of crashing increases the longer i play without restarting the game, and playing two adventures without restarting almost always guarantees a crash in the second adventure. Tried various compatability modes, seems to make no difference. Large address aware on WINBR.exe doesnt help either.


Yes, that adventure bug happened once and it is the second adventure which i played in my last play.


-After the first few turns, I no longer receive the popup message when another realm assassinates one of my units. The AI still assassinates my units, but i just dont get the popup, and they always seem to succeed every turn. When im at war, that effectively means that one of my units just gets deleted with no warning every turn, and it always succeeds. Extremely annoying.


A bunch of characters i lost similar way. They just disppaared.


-If you get a vassal, you can control both realms, but the game seems to skip one realm every action. E.G. Instead of letting you take action 1 for Realm A and B, the game seems to let you take action 1 for realm A, followed by action 2 for Realm B, then action 3 for Realm A. Castle maintenance is not paid properly either, resulting in your castles decreasing in level each turn.


It also encountered that one too.


Moreover, i encountered another annoying bug which somehow choose auto-battle without asking me after I vassalised an country.

[Question]

I dont remember the assassinate bug on earlier versions to be honest, i wonder if 1.04 broke more things than it fixed.

I would test with a 1.03 installation but for some reason the 1.03 windows patch cant be extracted with 7zip, the 1.02 and 1.04 windows patch files can be extracted.

Has anyone been able to get the 1.03 windows patch files out?

Tried using the 1.03 dos patch with the windows version and it complains about some string table mismatch when i try to run the game...

[Oqlanth]

I dont remember the assassinate bug on earlier versions to be honest, i wonder if 1.04 broke more things than it fixed.

I would test with a 1.03 installation but for some reason the 1.03 windows patch cant be extracted with 7zip, the 1.02 and 1.04 windows patch files can be extracted.

Has anyone been able to get the 1.03 windows patch files out?

Tried using the 1.03 dos patch with the windows version and it complains about some string table mismatch when i try to run the game...

I also don't remember. but i remember i played 1.04 quite a lot, and i don't remeber similar bugs but it was decades ago. May be some of these bugs -auto choosing for auto battle, adventure crash to desktop bug and no assination message- are due to windows 10.

[Question]

I also don't remember. but i remember i played 1.04 quite a lot, and i don't remeber similar bugs but it was decades ago. May be some of these bugs -auto choosing for auto battle, adventure crash to desktop bug and no assination message- are due to windows 10.

I managed to test using a 1.03 installation by using this 16bit windows emulator : https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

Just run the install shortcut and you will be able to run the 1.03 windows patch now.

From my short testing, it seems the missing assassination message is because they tried to fix the bugged "X has assassinated a unit in [blank space]." message. But instead of making the message display the province name, the box just doesnt appear at all.

From my limited testing, it also seems the AI assassinates much less frequently in 1.03 and also seems less dumb. I noticed that in 1.04 you would have big realms like boeruine and avanil just stop doing things, they dont even muster troops while being invaded and their regent often ends up in hostile territory and stays there forever. This SEEMS to be less of a problem in 1.03.

1.04 also prevented a vassal from having multiple overlords...the problem is that the overlord cant select "oath of fealty" when performing any diplomacy with their own vassals and they either have to select no alliance or downgrade their oath to a normal alliance.

1.04 also added the option to play multiple realms as either the player or the DM...but this is extremely buggy, one realm often ends up having their turn skipped and maintenance for castles is automatically turned off for all realms each turn. It looks like 1.04 also gave you control over your vassals.

Another change that 1.04 seems to have made : In 1.03 and earlier, giving gold via diplomacy improves relations by 2% per GB, up to a max of 20 GB. In 1.04, you can give gold up to a max of 45 GB, but only the first 15 GB improves by 2% each, the rest improves by 1% each.

[Question]

I noticed something very interesting. Using the 16 bit emulator here : https://github.com/otya128/winevdm i tried installing the game properly using the setup.bat file in CD:\BIRTHRT\setup.bat. I chose to skip the machine testing and then installed the 1.02 and 1.03 windows patches. I selected the largest 256mb install method.

I noticed that the game seems to run at its proper speed now. Previously when installing by copying the files from the CD to the HDD, the game would run at very fast speeds, which was most noticeable during battles in which archers and wizards could fire every 3 seconds or so. After installing the game via the setup.bat file, archers can only fire every 6 seconds or so so its not super fast anymore.

Would be interested to know if anyone else can replicate this.

Something that i have never been able to figure out is why the SYNHEAL cheat doesnt seem to work in adventures...tested on 1.03 and 1.04...it just seems to do nothing. I do remember being able to use it before at least. Does it work for anyone else?

Edit : Figured out why it doesnt work, you need to go into the inventory screen and use SYNHEAL 1 to heal the character, and SYNHEAL 0 to reduce the character to 0 hp (oddly enough it doesnt seem to kill them outright).