The Scared to Death Bug

Game Play Examples
- GOTM9 Japan Campaign
- Index
- List of recent updates

Known Bugs and Glitches

- The Corona Bug
- The Scared2Death Bug

The "scared to death" bug as a condition that occurs in between moves in the human turn of single player CIv3 games.

It is important to note that we think this bug occurs a great deal of the time, it is just that most people do not know to look for it. A key part of this bug is that population count in some of the enemy cities will drop during the middle of the human player's moves with no apparent immediate result, benefit, or explanation.

The bug occurs when the human player starts a war with an enemy civilization by attacking one of the enemy units of committing some act of aggression. It is important that the event that strats the war should be a single move or attack. Then when the human player moves the next unit after a state of war exists, population points will seem to die randomly in some of the enemy cities. This does not appear to be related to starvation or unhappiness and there is no evidence to support that the AI players are using the vanishing population points to draft of pop rush new units or improvements. We cannot find any new units or extra shields in the towns after the person vanishes.

This bug has been discussed in the CivFanatics forums and we have confirmed at least two independent examples from other players and other computers and random game generation sources.

The best documented example we have at this point can be found in the Japan Campaign web pages by reading the description of the Fukushima attacks. You can also duplicate this problem by carefully reading the initial pages of the Japan Campaign replay. Then download the 170AD replay save file and carefully repeating key moves to open a war with Japan by attacking Fukushima or Toyama with war chariots. Just be sure to watch Fukushima closely to see it drop from a population of 2 down to 1 for nor explanable reason. You have to watch closely or you will miss the events.

I'll post more examples and a better description of the bug features here in this document as we can confirm some more independent examples.

Other related topics:
Cracker's unofficial CIV3 skills toolbox - some favorite tips and tricks
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