When trying to purchase the 750 crown Water Elemental at the The Wild Coast -> Calm The Desert, the game freezes then crashes. The same happens when I try to add the rank 5 Leprechaun unlocked from the Banker of Gildur mission to my retinue.
Nothing happens, but no money is spent (thankfully!)
It is a bit annoying though, it's implied that a new area will open up if I buy the Deluge water elemental.
I'm playing The Protectors on Windows 10, running the game under Windows XP Service Pack 3 compatibility mode because I heard that's the most stable setup. Changing the compatibility settings hasn't helped so far, so I'll run around and do other missions in the meantime.
Oddly enough, when I buy Myrtle the Turtle from the Gift Shop in Tongu and add the Turtle my retinue,
the game does not crash, and instead proceeds happily onwards with no harm whatsoever! I can even bring the pet to a match with no problems... the turtle was a good scout, until some stupid High Elf Iceguard murdered it during the Sundered Rift mission...
RIP Myrtle 2018-2018
There are other times the game can crash too - I once saved a game in the Ambush before Silvermyr battle where I killed a hippy treehugging Wood Elf Tinker and they dropped the Lysean Sceptre - a quite good caster item!
... And then I somehow stupidly lost my lv 50 Ancient Treant, reloaded, then found out the game would freeze indeterminably every time I opened the save. I nearly threw my coffee cup across the room!
(I got it later from a shop sale, crisis averted!)
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Other nitpicks;
The AI is quite strong in the The Protectors, and it puts up an excellent fight a good deal of the time. Heroes seem to be better at watching their asses and protecting themselves, the AI switches up its unit compositions to counter yours (I literally lost the Zhur 1v2 invasion while playing on Hard Campaign difficulty because the Demon opponents, after losing several insanely large hordes of Pit Fiends and Salamanders, dramatically switched up their style and began to use exclusively fliers to stop me turning their enormous armies into Flying Swords using the Knights' Sword Shrine (because fliers don't leave corpses), and they used swarms of Harpies to mana drain my Grand Oracle's Augurs/Mages to stop me from clearing the screen with Hand of Ice/Ring of Fire spam, meanwhile throwing in consecutive Chaos Dragons mixed in between screen covering plagues of Firebats - which soaked up all of the tower fire, protecting the dragons.
I got to a point where I had two summoned Augurs (Black Mages) that even hit level 50 because of the ridiculous number of firebats they killed, but they left me no respite and no time to recover - 4 Augurs, a Sage, and a Mage + a heavily injured Ancient Treant behind 6 towers vs literally thousands of demons... I held on for 40 minutes, but to no prevail.
Not bad! It's the first time I've legitimately lost to the AI in WBC3. and they did it because they switched up their unit composition and left me no room to maneuver, while razing my unprotected mines denying me the resources I needed to pump out the Archons I desperately needed to win the match.
Something that's holding the AI back though in other matches is that all too often
I see their mercenary help/retinue units just sit in a tightly packed blob in their bases doing nothing the entire game. Not only do they not accomplish anything, I think they might be screwing up the pathfinding of other units in the AI's base when this happens, because after this happens the AI often plays like a passive handmaiden waiting for their master to bend them over the table - they don't produce units or buildings fast enough, they don't contest my mines as much, they don't breathe down my throat with swarms of fliers and mid tier armies at 8-10 minutes into the game, what armies they do have sit in their bases instead of contesting territory, etc.
That's a shame, because the AI in The Protectors otherwise plays a standout game of aggressive map control, coordinated attacks instead of trickling in units, razing unprotected mines, etc.
They also need to target my hero more. He's a squishy Grand Oracle with absolutely no combat stats and garbage movement speed, you'd figure the Dark Elves might try to throw a few Dark Riders/Assassins/Blackguards his direction to run him down or something. They won't actually succeed because a level 50 Ancient Treant's Entangle can slow almost all units to 0 speed and I usually surround myself with Black Mages (now called Augurs?), but I'd appreciate the attempt
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The other bug, semi-serious, is that on my main hero, my level 51 Grand Oracle, I've recently been able to produce buildings and units even when I have no resources, and even sometimes research upgrades I shouldn't be able to unless they're completely blacked out. So I can basically play like a level 200 Tinker/Merchant hybrid with effectively infinite resources, use my level 50 Ancient Treant to summon 12 Oakmen every minute or so as builders, and fill a quarter of the map with Garrisons, Stables and Eyries in 8 minutes flat. While playing like a Demigod level AI is funny the first five times, being able to swamp the map like this and get to Keep level 5 while they're still on Keep level 3/4 even on max difficulty, while still simultaneously pumping out huge armies, is a little bit unfair lmao.
How this bug emerged, I'm not sure. It emerged around the time I was doing missions in and around Yrm and spanking the Dark Elves like the edgy little teenagers they are. It's an odd bug because I still spend normal amounts of resources
if I have them, but I'm still able to purchase units/buildings upgrades
even if I don't!The only thing I can't do with effectively unlimited resources is spam special abilities on buildings - if I'm pumping out Pegasi from 10 Eyries at once, draining my crystal to 0 constantly, I can't use Rites of Dawn (50 crystal per cast only from the Cathedral) to stop those ridiculously annoying Warlocks from turning the weather to night over and over again.
Most other things I can do. I can't produce units I don't have the prereq building for (can't produce Cavaliers with no Sword Shrine, no Paladins without Cathedral), can't build buildings I don't have the prerequisite Keep level for, but oddly enough I can still max out Crusade at Keep level 1 and research Full Plate Armor straight from Keep level 1 as well.
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EDIT: Forgot to mention that of course I'm playing on the latest patch, The Protectors 0.88b.