Twilight Struggle: two issues

Module Support
1

Hi Michael,
I am continuing to enjoy your TS Deluxe implementation - thank you for your work.

We hit two issues along the way:

  1. With the Formosan Resolution in play, the Asian region domination marker does not reflect the actual count of Battleground countries. I wondered if it’s possible to augment the code with some logic to handle this (US controls Taiwan, event has not yet been cancelled by US play of the China card)?

Scoring was correct however - which is of credit to you! :slight_smile:

  1. The second one was much more difficult: we arrived at a situation where the US player was holding the Puppet Governments card in his hand. However, the card in his hand had no right click options to play it. Alas I don’t recall how we arrived at the situation and it may be that us users arrived there in an odd way or a small bug.

None the less, this was enormously frustrating. We agreed that the US should play the card manually by dragging the card to the board and implementing the effects (effectively bypassing the rules structure that the module enforces - but we had no other way of doing this). But we couldn’t end the action round because of a lock that says “The US player has not played a card” or something to that end.

We tried numerous workarounds:

  • extensive undo’s to try to get back to the point where the problem started,
  • save and relaunch in the hope that the state would no persist through the reload,
  • using the controls to manipulate the action round with Turn (clock icon) dialog and the right click controls on the action marker itself,
  • and again with both players attempting same.

But no joy - the US player has not played a card but the card in his hand was not playable via a right click.

What do you think?

Perhaps a mechanism to force the action round forward?
A means to “reenable” a card within the hand to make it playable?
Or sending the source so that I can run one client in the debugger in case of such blues again?

Should the problem reoccur (and we saw a couple of other odd things with Bear Trap and Missile Envy in the headline phase), I’ll try to capture more info on the sequence of events - or does the .vsav have enough in it for you to see the state? In which case I could send you the save state whilst the problem was in evidence.

Thanks and regards,

matt

2

Hi Matt,

Responses below.

We hit two issues along the way:

  1. With the Formosan Resolution in play, the Asian region domination
    marker does not reflect the actual count of Battleground countries. I
    wondered if it’s possible to augment the code with some logic to handle
    this (US controls Taiwan, event has not yet been cancelled by US play of
    the China card)?

Scoring was correct however - which is of credit to you! :slight_smile:

This came up on BGG. I haven’t really come up with a proper way to do
this. The Formosan Resolution card only applies to scoring cards and
nothing else (for example, Kitchen Debates). If you have any suggestions…

  1. The second one was much more difficult: we arrived at a situation
    where the US player was holding the Puppet Governments card in his hand.
    However, the card in his hand had no right click options to play it.
    Alas I don’t recall how we arrived at the situation and it may be that
    us users arrived there in an odd way or a small bug.

That can happen in a number of situations. For example, if your opponent had
played Missile Envy in the previous round or Headline Phase, you cannot play
Puppet Governments. If you only have enough rounds left to play Scoring
Cards, you also cannot play Puppet Governments. If you are the US player
and DEFCON had just dropped to 2 in the previous round, you can place an
Influence and then you must advance the turn tracker again (it says so in
the chat window).

If you are absolutely sure that none of those apply…

None the less, this was enormously frustrating. We agreed that the US
should play the card manually by dragging the card to the board and
implementing the effects (effectively bypassing the rules structure that
the module enforces - but we had no other way of doing this). But we
couldn’t end the action round because of a lock that says “The US player
has not played a card” or something to that end.

You can click on the turn counter and manually set it to whatever round/turn
you like. Just right-click it.

Perhaps a mechanism to force the action round forward?
A means to “reenable” a card within the hand to make it playable?
Or sending the source so that I can run one client in the debugger in
case of such blues again?

You can always send me a saved game and I might be able to figure it out. I
haven’t seen this happen before. I have been frustrated that I can’t play a
card until I realise why, however; that has even happened to me and I should
know the rules backwards and forwards by now.

Should the problem reoccur (and we saw a couple of other odd things with
Bear Trap and Missile Envy in the headline phase), I’ll try to capture

Those should work fine but let me know what you experienced.

more info on the sequence of events - or does the .vsav have enough in
it for you to see the state? In which case I could send you the save
state whilst the problem was in evidence.

It has quite a bit. Also, you can cut and paste the text in the chatter
window.

Let me know if anything else comes up.

  • M.
3

Thanks Michael… I will think some more about what you said and look back through our saved games…

Just prior to reading your post, I saw in the “play notes”:

“If you need to override the current turn because you think there is a bug, you can always right click on the turn tracker and select Set Turn.”

That feature helps a lot. Mea culpa - i should have read it before.

As for the rest, it may be that the module is doing much better with the rules than we are! :slight_smile:

matt