AndrewT

Actually his maths isn't out. Given a 25% chance of an advance every turn he can expect one every 4 turns, on average. Certainly it is not guaranteed exactly every fourth turn, as you correctly point out, but if a 1/4 chance means anything it is that it happens 1 time in 4 overall! It is not unreasonable to suspect a problem in remote play that doesn't happen in solo play, things can get out of sync between machines very easily. I wonder if if your worst example there the Allied player was the host? If this hypothesis is correct it would happen to the client player but not the host. I also agree that it makes sense for the chance to increment if nothing happens in a given turn; say just add a percentage - perhaps quite small, 1 or 2 % points - to all chances for every turn when nothing at all happens for a given player.

How embarrassment! And we're both computer professionals too ... it certainly never occurred to us that one bad save file would stop the whole dir from being read. I'll get him to re-apply 1.06 and try again. Is there some simple way a non-programmer can tell a 1.06 sav file from an older one, to save bothering you any more? Thanks.

'fraid not. Mine is certainly 1.06, I can see it. I even deleted the whole pbem dir and recreated it, no dice. Very strange. My suspicion is it's to do with the date on the file, which is 10 Dec, in non-US format that is 12/10/02, which if read in US format would be 12 Oct, before 1.06 was released.

Thanks Hubert, I've sent you problem saves in a file pbemfail.zip, one from my friends machine and one from mine. Both fail on both machines. My SC certainly says v1.06 in the startup screen and he assures me he installed 1.06 too; in any case my SC can't even read a .sav it itself creates.

My friend and I have the problem where as soon as we clicked on "load a PBEM game" the game crashed. Came on the site here and found 1.06 seemed to fix exactly that bug so we both applied it. We both started new games, zipped them and sent to each other. When we hit "load a PBEM game" now it pops up a message about bad or old game files. I deleted the old files so there is only his new game and mine in there, it still says this! I can't even read a file I generated in the same game a few minutes ago. Any idea what the problem is? I can't see anyone else here reporting it but we're both having this problem. BTW we're in Australia and we use a different date format than the US, could the game be trying to read the dates and judging the games are old from that?