11-07-2004 10:52									#1
	RED FRONT 1.5 Bug report Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

There is a potentially fatal bug in Red Front 1.5 , Colwyn’s revision of Captain Nemo’s classic Red Front 1.4.

The bug is in EVENTS4 (Winter 1942-43) and will crash the game under certain circumstances (it did it to me). Specifically, when the Germans kill a Red Guard unit, EVENTS4 creates a Partisan unit at one of the following locations:

38,98
37,96
39,99

If a German unit occupies square 38,98, the Partisans are created at 37,96 and the game will crash on the next turn because the co-ordinates 37,96 are invalid. There is no such square. Valid squares on the game map have x and y co-ordinates that are either both odd or both even, like the top and bottom ones in the list.

The symptom of an illegal Partisans unit is that the unit is invisible until it is its turn to move. Then a misaligned grid appears on top of the normal game map as you move the unit. If you disband the Partisans before finishing its moves, there will be no problem on the following turn. However, if you finish its moves, the unit again becomes invisible. Then, after you finish the Soviet turn, the Finns and Germans have their turns, and your next turn begins with the automatic display of cities that have built units or improvements, the game simply shuts down. I suspect that the invalid unit co-ordinates screw up something when the game updates itself at the end of a turn.

A permanent fix is to open the EVENTS4 file, use the FIND function to locate 37,96 and change it to 36,96 or 37,97. This will not alter the course of the game as the nearest German unit inevitably clobbers the Partisans.


I should mention that this is not a scenario for the faint of heart or the inexperienced. RF 1.5 makes RF 1.4 look like a Sunday school picnic. It’s a great scen if you want to feel that you are in a desperate fight for survival and cannot afford any mistakes.