Anyone playing this game is familiar with the message "you can't control more than 9 units in combat".
Yet, casting possession allows you to control more!
How is that working?
The real limitation is 18 units for the two players together - the game most likely insists on the 9 each for fairness otherwise one could take up all the slots with summoning and then the other would be unable to summon.
What this implies, if a unit is possessed, resulting in 10+8 units, is the person with 8 units is able to summon. And when they do the game crashes.
I've looked into this bug and the situation is not very good.
-The procedure that reserves the 1-18 ID for units at summoning has no return value. If all 18 are taken, a random value is returned. This might be possible to fix but...
-The summoning procedure itself - obviously, since there was no return value - does not check for it being successful. Adding a check here would be hard but the problem is, then there is the procedure that called this, and then the one above. Editing them all is...let's just say not an option. Even if I did, at best the game would fail the summoning and the player would still lose the turn/mana crystals/etc and get no warning message - not any better than a crash actually.
-Checking for 9 units controlled is done at many separate places, at least 4, and space isn't very available. Changing the checks to look for the "owner" of the unit instead of the "controller" could in theory fix the bug, but I doubt this is reasonably doable. This would be the only way to fix it without altering gameplay. ("owner" is the person the unit belonged to at the start of the battle)
-Finally, altering all checks to look for 18 total units instead of 9 own is probably way easier and eliminates the bug...but that does change gameplay since it means you can keep summoning after 9 if the enemy doesn't have enough units.
Or we can do nothing since how often does the situation come up? Almost never, since the possessed unit usually kills something or dies trying before the player who can trigger the crash even gets a turn. I only discovered it because I was testing demon lord's summoning vs the 9 limit.
Yet, casting possession allows you to control more!
How is that working?
The real limitation is 18 units for the two players together - the game most likely insists on the 9 each for fairness otherwise one could take up all the slots with summoning and then the other would be unable to summon.
What this implies, if a unit is possessed, resulting in 10+8 units, is the person with 8 units is able to summon. And when they do the game crashes.
I've looked into this bug and the situation is not very good.
-The procedure that reserves the 1-18 ID for units at summoning has no return value. If all 18 are taken, a random value is returned. This might be possible to fix but...
-The summoning procedure itself - obviously, since there was no return value - does not check for it being successful. Adding a check here would be hard but the problem is, then there is the procedure that called this, and then the one above. Editing them all is...let's just say not an option. Even if I did, at best the game would fail the summoning and the player would still lose the turn/mana crystals/etc and get no warning message - not any better than a crash actually.
-Checking for 9 units controlled is done at many separate places, at least 4, and space isn't very available. Changing the checks to look for the "owner" of the unit instead of the "controller" could in theory fix the bug, but I doubt this is reasonably doable. This would be the only way to fix it without altering gameplay. ("owner" is the person the unit belonged to at the start of the battle)
-Finally, altering all checks to look for 18 total units instead of 9 own is probably way easier and eliminates the bug...but that does change gameplay since it means you can keep summoning after 9 if the enemy doesn't have enough units.
Or we can do nothing since how often does the situation come up? Almost never, since the possessed unit usually kills something or dies trying before the player who can trigger the crash even gets a turn. I only discovered it because I was testing demon lord's summoning vs the 9 limit.
