Can't continue after winning Galactic War battle

I've tried this four times now, three times on OS X and once on Windows. Every time, I go into Galactic War, win a battle, wait for the triumphant music to stop, and... nothing. There's no way to progress. The only thing I can do is go into the menu & quit, which of course doesn't result in campaign progress.

If I save the game after winning & try to resume it, loading fails and kicks me back to the galactic war campaign map. When I tried this on Windows, I got a popup saying that 'server.exe has stopped working', which seems suspicious. Saving and loading *does* work normally before the battle is won (e.g. at the start).

Am I missing something obvious here (some hidden command/dialogue), or...?

Have you ever installed mods? If so, you might want to try running PA with the --nomods parameter to rule out any old mods still lingering about.

No, I just installed the game two days ago - never used any mods.

Can you post the PA logs for that session? You can find those in "~/Library/Application Support/Uber Entertainment/Planetary Annihilation/log", where "~" is your home directory. They are named as PA-<year>-<month>-<day>-<time>.txt, so you should be able to find the relevant ones, I hope.

OK. Here's all the logs I have, attached.

Thanks! You may have stumbled on a bug there. Every time you win, the log has these entries:

Code:

[21:18:25.621] ERROR Error decoding message from server: malformed UTF-16 sequence
[21:18:25.621] ERROR Error decoding message from server: malformed UTF-16 sequence
[21:18:25.629] INFO setMusic /Music/Music_Gameover_Win

It shouldn't matter for Galactic War, but does you Steam name have "weird" characters in it? By weird I mean letters that are not 0 to 9 or a-z. If so, could you temporarily change it to something containing only simple letters?

Good eye! My steam name is " Jοhn Ѯzzınව⨔οrd [ꄓ]", which basically has as many obscure unicode characters as I could find. I'll try changing it to something more bland and seeing if that helps.

Excellent, that worked! Patch notes & social stuff show up in the bottom-left of the menu now (I didn't even know that was supposed to be there), and I get a victory screen when I win. Thanks for the quick response!

Thanks for the bug finding.

(@mkrater : Bug for your list. )