Civ: Rising Tide's alliance bug has been fixed, Firaxis says

Rising Tide, the first expansion for Civilization: Beyond Earth, launched last week with an impressively far-ranging set of changes and new features - but also a rather serious bug, as Christian Donlan found when playing the game for review. The bug meant that AI civilizations allied with the player might not automatically join them in declaring war on others - which, according to the new diplomacy rules introduced by Rising Tide, they should do.

Firaxis has now announced that the bug has been addressed in a hotfix to the game. "Previously, there were some cases where a player would go to war, but their allies would not join them in the fight," the developer said. "Now, when a player declares war, all the player's allies will also declare war on the target. If you are at war, and then you form an alliance with a faction that has not yet met your opponent, your new ally will not join the war automatically, since they don't have prior diplomatic contact. This change will not apply to existing save games with an active war or alliance, but will apply to all games going forward."

This will be welcome news to players, since the new alliance system is one of the most significant under-the-hood changes to how Civ works in Rising Tide, but the bug made its impact hard to judge. "My workaround so far is simply not to go into alliance with anyone - and in truth, I think this gets at a problem that goes deeper than the bug anyway," Christian wrote last week after deciding to withhold a final review rating from Rising Tide. "Old Civ diplomacy could be confusing, but it was also flexible. Here, I've spent a lot of time being yoinked into wars I didn't even know were brewing. It's hard, as of yet, to get a sense of how successful the reimagining of diplomacy is, in other words."

Chris is inconveniently on holiday this week, but he'll be checking out the hotfix and reporting back on his return next week.