Early saving

[Joseignacio]

Hello, guys.

After years of inactivity, from some days ago, another guy and I are trying to play MWIF.

We have spent two sessions for nothing, first because of connection problems with the netplay (Matrix) platform, but later, when the server finally worked okay, because if for some reason the game falls, for instance a microcut of the wifi in any of the two ends while we are still making the deployment, we would not be able to connect again with any savegame.

I believe I read somewhere you cannot save while scrappingg and deploying (setup), but this task can easily take 1 hour or more and in this period it's easy to lose connection for some seconds eventually.

So my questions are:

Is it possible to save the game if your mate drops from the game within the deployment phases?

If not, should it be possible to load for example previous stages, like a savegame made at the setup of a power made earlier (like CW before China)?

Else, how can we manage not to lose 1 hour of "work" once and again when we try to set the game?

Thanks in advance, and would love an early response, because we are playing fridays and saturdays only, we lost yesterday and we will try again in a couple of hours.

So Double Thank You in advance. [:)]

[Centuur]

On your first question, I don't know. I've never done this. But perhaps it is possible to make a gamesave, send it to your opponent using mail (don't forget to zip the file). Perhaps he can reload it after he has unzipped it and has put it in the right folder. Of course you both have to be reloading the gamesave at the same time to get it to work.

It is possible to reload from previous stages, using the autosaves (for Netplay they all start with the prefix NP).

[Joseignacio]

Double thanks.

We could try the email savegame system if needed now. We did try the NP files and it didnt work (by now).

[Centuur]

ORIGINAL: Joseignacio

Double thanks.

We could try the email savegame system if needed now. We did try the NP files and it didnt work (by now).

That's strange. What you can do is to check the next entry number of the saved games before you load it. They should be the same.
But perhaps one of you did overwrite the gamesave when ending it? The game asks if you want to make a gamesave when you exit the game, but that's something which you should not do. Always make a gamesave manually when your opponent is part of the game. And only one player needs to make the gamesave, the other gets it automatically.

[Joseignacio]

Thanks again. For the record, its fair to acknowledge that we were doing it wrong, I had very few times played MWIF so I didn't think I had savegames from previous games but it came out I had savegames from a game with you in 2017 (that we couldnt really play on because the game was giving problems) and I was selecting the game with the wrong entry number all the time. [8|]

Also I always made the savegame while exiting, overwriting.

Once we realized this, everything went fine. Sorry about the disturbance. [&o]

[Centuur]

ORIGINAL: Joseignacio

Thanks again. For the record, its fair to acknowledge that we were doing it wrong, I had very few times played MWIF so I didn't think I had savegames from previous games but it came out I had savegames from a game with you in 2017 (that we couldnt really play on because the game was giving problems) and I was selecting the game with the wrong entry number all the time. [8|]

Also I always made the savegame while exiting, overwriting.

Once we realized this, everything went fine. Sorry about the disturbance. [&o]

No problem. We are here to help one another...

[CanInf]

When we have issues, we simply go to a fairly recent autosave. They are quite frequent. On Skype (or some such program), find a recent autosave, then check with your opponent to ensure three digits are the same for "next entry" and restore. That invariably works for bugs both human and otherwise.

[Joseignacio]

Hi, we couldn't load those, it seems I was confusing older games saves with the ones of this game so I wasnt using the same version. I thought the reason why it was not working was related to not being allowed to save in the scrap+deploy process, which I thought I had read somewhere.

[paulderynck]

All the Netplay auto saves contain "NP" in their names. Steve added that so players would not confuse Netplay saves with other saves.

[Joseignacio]

Yes, the problem is when a netplay autosave game is named like "NP-CW deployment" for example and you have another with exactly the same name from a previous game. They are both in the list, the only difference being the date afterwards. If you don't know this, you will load the first one called "NP-CW deployment" and will not realize there is a second one.

[paulderynck]

That seems strange. I was under the impression all the auto-saves overwrote files with the same name.

That way the autosave folders don't grow into taking a monstrous amount of disk space (if you played a lot of games).

[Centuur]

The autosaves folder looks like this for netplay games. So there is more than one autosave per phase, however never more than the number of major powers in the game.

[Joseignacio]

When you play a different side, but there is a saved game of the same Power, I guess that's when this happens.

Of course I realized now that the very end was different, but IMO the name similarity is enough to ease mistakes:

[Joseignacio]

As you can see it happens more times with that game in 2017 and the one in 2020