[Rails-devel] Bug (and patch): THB cannot lay home token with track already in hex

[Bill R. <ro...@gm...>]

Playing forward an 1856 game I am in, I have encountered a bug: when a railroad's home hex has multiple cities (THB in 1856), and there is already track in the hex before it operates for the first time, rails does not know how to lay the home token.  This is only a problem if there is a choice: if one of the cities is tokened out, Rails correctly deduces that the home token is force into the other city.

Erik has left a comment in layHomeBaseTokens() in PublicCompany that indicates this should be fixed in some clever way, but there seems to be a slightly newer comment in setPossibleActions() of OperatingRound with a work-around for this situation (when a company gets to the lay track step and doesn't yet have a home token, it is forced to lay one).

Unfortunately, in at least the instance I encountered, this workaround doesn't seem to work.  The problem is that the layBaseToken action that would force the company to lay the home token is created as a 'LOCATION_SPECIFIC' layToken and not a 'HOME_CITY' layToken.  This causes the action not to be presented to the user, as regular (i.e. 'LOCATION_SPECIFIC') token lays are not allowed during the LayTile step of the operating round.

I've attached a patch that fixes this: it's a matter of passing only one hex to the constructor of LayBaseToken, so that the resulting action has the right type.  I've tried to handle the case where there are multiple home hexes, but I'm not sure that it will work, and I'm not sure what game I could test this with.  It at least resolves the problem with 1856.

I've also attached a savegame that demonstrates the problem: the THB can't act, which stops the game from continuing.  Using the patched version of the code, Rails correctly asks the user which city the THB wants to lay a home station on.

Bill