I don't blame you for not wanting to spend any more time on such an obscure bug! I'm not disappointed at all. Looking forward to 2.0, sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun.

Yay! I'm glad you were able to reproduce it.

Ok that wasn't it, I tried running it from my SSD and the behaviour was exactly the same. I think I'll leave it on my SSD though, the faster loading times are nice!

I realised what you meant in your earlier post about pathfinding over lava. When I tried setting a rally on the bombards there was a brief slowdown followed by most of my army turning around and going home, which was quite amusing. The way I've been doing it is to set the rally on the closest accessible tile to each bombard, causing the units to gather next to the lava and the ranged units would then attack automatically. Maybe this is why it didn't replicate for you, if most of your units had wandered off due to not being able to pathfind? Try using either a beast rally or a titan rally to take out the bombards before selling a main rally inside the base, see if it triggers then.

Interesting idea. I'm not sure how to check how fast my HDD is, but obviously it will be a lot slower than an SSD. Tomorrow I'll try moving the game over to my SSD and see if anything changes.

I actually didn't notice any performance drop when trying to path to the bombards (beyond the general low framerate from having so many units on screen anyway), it was only when entering the enemy's area that it froze.

It's a shame you weren't able to replicate it. That suggests it only occurs on certain system configurations - those are the worst bugs to track down!

OK I tried again and was able to reproduce it! And this time I've kept the save file so you can try it too. It seems to be related to having a large army and - strangely - destroying the bombards outside the entrance.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Move the rally point to take out the 6 bombards - mining the sand opposite them makes this easier.
2. Move the rally point behind the gates as shown in the screenshot.
3. As soon as your units start bashing the gates, the game freezes.

If you skip step 1 and rush straight in, there's no problem. It only triggers if you kill the cannons first. That seems really strange and I suspect it's a red herring - probably it's because doing this causes your units to bunch up so that when you attack the gates so they all hit at once. Without knowing how your code is structured, my best guess is that a large number of creatures attacking a gate at the same time causes some kind of race condition or deadlock. It's possible that this only occurs with portcullises as I wasn't able to trigger this bug with either the wooden doors in the east or the wide metal doors in the center, however it's more likely that in both of those cases the attackers just weren't bunched up enough.

Actually forget the previous paragraph - while I was reading back what I wrote I had an idea to do an experiment, so I tried having my Archon take out the bombards while the rest of my army waited at the rally point, then had them rush in. The bug triggered even though they weren't bunched up, so it does look like it has a problem with the missing bombards. The last few lines of the output log seem to support that. I then tried a different experiment - I had only my beasts attack, taking out the bombards and then breaking down the gate and entering the forge. It was fine up to that point. Then I had the rest of my army run in and it froze. So it has nothing to do with attacking the gates, it happens when a large number of units try to enter the area after the bombards have been destroyed.

It's really weird that two seemingly unrelated conditions are required to trigger the bug. If it were one or the other I could guess at the cause, but for it to only happen when the bombards are destroyed and a large army enters the area - I have no idea. Good luck with this one.

output_log.txt

13 equilibrium_20161218214029

13 equilibrium_20161218214029.meta

Well I replayed the level and wasn't able to reproduce the bug. My army is much smaller this time as I decided to only convert the level 10 enemies and use the rest for spirits to level up my own creatures (love that mechanic btw!) and later as vampire food.

Yes, that fixed it!

Thanks Stefan.

I wonder if this is related to an issue I had with the previous level, where you face off against 3 keepers. It didn't break and I was able to complete it without issue, but the intro went on for ages and some of the dialogue seemed strange and out of order. Like the gold woman mocking others for being attacked while I was destroying her core for example. I might replay that level after the next patch and see if anything changes.