Caution - Regarding Ceasefire with PBEM+

[Andrew Kulin]

This has happened to me and my regular playing partner 3 out of 4 times we have agreed to ceasefires playing CMCW with PBEM+. 

After the second person agrees to the ceasefire, all of the game files disappear from both of our computers.  And neither of us has access to scoring.  

It happened with a couple of games about a month ago that we were playing and my partner asked for a ceasefire in both.  After I agreed to the ceasefires in both games he e-mailed me to say that both games had disappeared entirely on his system.  He asked me to resend.  Unfortunately I could not.  No saved files on my system, and from my side, I could see the send files from me to him listed in PBEM+, but could obviously not do anything with them.

So we thought this could be a bug, and decided we'd run a test and start up a couple of small matches, run them for a turn or two and then request ceasefires.  One match in CMCW, and the other with CMSF2 (which we both had, and was also set up with PBEM+ so we wanted to see if it was a game engine thing).  In any event, both these cease-fires worked out and we both got game results.  So did not report anything.

A couple of days ago we found ourselves in the same situation with CMCW.  Two games underway, my partner calls for cease-fires in both.  Me be leery if this, I make the effort to make a save game file of both turns before I send them back to him.  Just in case.  As it turns out, we got our results for the smaller match which we only went in about 10-15 minutes of game play (the scenario was pretty stupidly unbalanced).  But for the larger scenario, that we had invested something approaching 90 minutes of game time on, we lost everything.  All files lost on his PC.  The specific save files I went to the trouble of saving before sending were also disappeared.  All I could see on my side was the file I sent to him, unplayable by me.

I would be interested to hear if anyone else has experienced something like this.  We have only seen this in CMCW, but honestly, I have not been playing much of the other CM titles lately, except for a couple of mirror games in the CMSF2 tournament.  And I have told my tournament opponent about this and we are not going to risk a cease-fire in either of our two matches.  Just in case.

Edited May 9, 2023 by Andrew Kulin

[CanuckGamer]

My friends and I have been playing CM for 20 years.  Last year two of us bought Cold War from Matrix Games using their loyalty coupon.  However we do not use the PBEM++ because it goes through their server.  We are playing and have played a number of their games where the only option is through their server and there are a couple of negatives.  First their server seems to go down periodically.  Second if you attach your moves to an email or use something like dropbox when the file is too large you both have all the move files on your PCs.  If you want you can even back up and view earlier moves which you can't do using PBEM++.

[snarre]

i had this same problem on black sea , turn files tjust disaphere .

[IdontknowhowtodoX]

Yep PBEM+ has such trouble. Try classic PBEM. It's more stable.