ame Version: 2.31 

Issue:  PeaceTurns variable (which is the prerequisite for Galactic Challenge Awakened Urges) apparently resetting on reload/relaunch

*dusts off old account*

Been a while since I posted here as I took some time off from 4x gaming, but with GC4 on Steam and in a pretty feature rich state I recently decided to re-take the plunge for a while.

While doing some investigating on why it was so hard to unlock the Galactic Challenge Awakened Urges (and by extension the Breeding Season achievement), I ran into something strange.  After I successfully managed to finally unlock the Challenge (more on this below), I made a save for future reference and then went on to do some more testing to try to isolate what was causing it not to appear in my other playthroughs.

I thought I had found the culprit and made a few more saves and started some fresh games to test out my theories.  I was about to report my findings in the Feedback Forum when I decided to reload some of my old saves as part of last minute checking.  To my surprise, Awakened Urges was no longer available on my Challenge list, despite it being there before:

Before loading exact same save:

After loading exact same save:

I then decided to load up several other saves I had made during my second and third rounds of testing and discovered that not only did none of them successfully have Awakened Urges unlocked, my near-term setups (saves made a few turns away from unlock) also were no longer good.

After eliminating several avenues, I have come to the conclusion that the culprit likely is the variable PeaceTurns as I strongly suspect that is being reset on any save game reload or restart of the game. 

For those who don't know, to qualify for Awakened Urges, the player needs to be "at peace" for fifty turns.  This is tracked by PeaceTurns, which is defined in PrerequisiteDefs.xsd:

      <xs:element name="PeaceTurns" type="xs:int" minOccurs="0" default="0"/>

 as seen at the end of the following code block:

  <GameEvent>
    <InternalName>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason</InternalName>
    <DisplayName>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason_Name</DisplayName>
    <Description>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason_Dec</Description>
    <BackgroundImage>event_colony_3.png</BackgroundImage>
    <Type>CrisisEvent</Type>
    <ShowImmediately>true</ShowImmediately>
    <Weight>0</Weight>
    <Choice>
      <InternalName>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason_choice_0</InternalName>
      <Description>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason_Liberty_Bonus_Name</Description>
      <BonusDescription>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason_Liberty_Bonus_Dec</BonusDescription>
      <Trigger>
        <OnEvent>OnEventChoice</OnEvent>
        <Target>
          <TargetType>Faction</TargetType>
        </Target>
        <PerformAction>
          <Action>BeginTrackingQuest</Action>
          <StringParam>Display_Quest_GA_BreedingSeason0</StringParam>
        </PerformAction>
      </Trigger>
      <Trigger>
        <OnEvent>OnEventChoice</OnEvent>
        <Target>
          <TargetType>Faction</TargetType>
        </Target>
        <PerformAction>
          <Action>SpawnEncountersAroundShipyards</Action>
          <StringParam>FACTION_SPACEMONSTERS</StringParam>
          <StringParam>SpaceMonsterMediumEncounter</StringParam>
        </PerformAction>
      </Trigger>
      <Trigger>
        <OnEvent>OnEventChoice</OnEvent>
        <Target>
          <TargetType>Faction</TargetType>
          <TriggerGroupTargetType>SpecificFaction</TriggerGroupTargetType>
          <StringParam>FACTION_SPACEMONSTERS</StringParam>
        </Target>
        <PerformAction>
          <Action>SetFlag</Action>
          <StringParam>Flag_ShipLeashDisabled</StringParam>
        </PerformAction>
      </Trigger>
      <Trigger>
        <OnEvent>OnEventChoice</OnEvent>
        <Target>
          <TargetType>Faction</TargetType>
        </Target>
        <PerformAction>
          <Action>SetFlag</Action>
          <StringParam>Quest_GA_BreedingSeason0</StringParam>
        </PerformAction>
      </Trigger>
    </Choice>
    <Prerequ>
      <PeaceTurns>50</PeaceTurns>
    </Prerequ>
  </GameEvent>

(ETA: Apologies for the ugly formatting above, as I've forgotten how to make code blocks appear in a nice format on this board)

On several different rounds of testing I have *ONLY* been able to unlock Awakened Urges after playing 50 rounds (well, technically 51 as it shows up the turn after 50 turns of peace) consecutively with absolutely no reloading whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, I did enable the console to see if I could print the value of the variable to try to confirm my theory.  And while I couldn't figure out how to do that, I did note that in my saves where Awakened Urges had previously been available for unlock, but no longer was, I had the pacifist counter set correctly (Counter_Pacificism 1), which I presume is tied to this somehow as that counter isn't set before the 50 turns timer goes off.

Now I've already run into some false positives, so I could still be wrong here.  But after poking at this for about two straight days and no less than four separate Turn 1 to Turn 50+ playthroughs where I would more or less beeline to Cultural Influence to unlock Galactic Challenges while doing various different things to try to figure out what was going on, as I said above the ONLY time I can have Awakened Urges available to be chosen is if I play 50 turns straight.  While at peace, of course. 

I have some different savefiles over a few different games (all with no mods) that can be provided, though if I'm correct all they might do is show I /should/ be allowed to unlock the Awakened Urges Challenge if I was already allowed to do it.

Let me know if any savefiles are needed for this and I'll be happy to provide them when I can. As well as providing any other feedback about various game states I tested.

===

As a side note, as far as I can tell, the only other portion of the game where "PeaceTurns" is currently called is in the Leader Event "Call For War" [Event_CallForWar in LeaderEventDefs.xml] where a Warforged Governor possibly offers a mission/quest (also set to 50 turns of peace).  If I'm right about this variable resetting on reloads, then that mission/quest will have a similar difficulty in unlocking.