Bugs:Syndicate Wars (DOS)
This page details bugs of Syndicate Wars (DOS).
Contents
Finger Guns
If the player has their agents holster their weapon, but then right clicks near other NPCs (which results in nothing happening), the NPCs will behave as if they had actually been fired on with a weapon.
Equip Screen Exploits
There are at least two exploits here to sell items that are not actually owned:
- Buy or otherwise acquire a single instance of an item. Now select All Agents and press sell. The game will sell four copies of the item regardless of how many were actually owned.
- Save the game. Buy a single instance of an item. Click on it in the equip list so Sell is visible. Load the saved game from the menu. The item can be sold even though it is not owned. This can't be comboed with the All Agents button, and it also only works if the item is researched and available for purchase in the save that is loaded, otherwise the sell button doesn't appear.
Infinite Clone Shield
The clone shield item constantly drains weapon energy to limit the duration of its use. However, if the player equips the clone shield and then changes to a persuadertron, the clone shield remains in place, but the energy behaviour switches to that of the persuadertron and stops the drain. This means the player can have a permanently camouflaged agent and the persuadertron weapon works as normal, making it easy to persuade all enemies in a level, who will consider the player neutral (although they will attack the persuaded units).
Munitions Duplication
This is a notorious bug that causes serious problems on the penultimate Eurocorp mission. If the player collects any kind of the multiple use munitions (Nuclear Grenade, Explosive, K.O. Gas, etc) in a level and then restarts the mission, then it appears the collected extra munitions are visibly removed from the player's inventory, as expected. However, while the icon is updated, the game itself still considers the items present in the player's inventory. These extra munitions cannot be dropped or used. Multiple restarts and collections means eventually the player's inventory will fill up and the limit hit for these objects reached, preventing the collection of any more even though the game is not indicating this is the case. On mission 88 "High Sierra", the player must collect explosives from defeated enemies quickly before they detonate and destroy the space station, failing the mission. If this mission is failed several times in a row, it's very easy to get into a situation where the all of the player's agents have their explosives inventory permanently filled with invisible items they collected off of enemies, making the game impossible to complete.
Returning to the equip screen on completion of a level and buy/selling the items seems to fix the total.
Scientist Deaths
There is a chance that overworked scientists performing research can die between missions following lab disasters. However, this feature seems very buggy, with possible outcomes including double the number of scientists reported on the post-mission screen dying in actuality, or scientists mysteriously disappearing with no report they have died at all.
Text Errors
- Bahrain is listed as a city when it's a country and should be named Al Manamah after the real-life capital of Bahrain. What is notable about this is the city has the correct name in the pre-release beta demo created around 6 months before the final game. Even stranger, this is also corrected in the post-release demo of the game that was based on the final build. Only the actual final game itself has the wrong name of the city.
- Mission 43 is the only campaign mission in the game that has no mission name when viewed in the pause screen. Checking the ALLTEXT.WAD file reveals that this is due to a mistake and in fact the name that should be used here is wrongly set on the cut mission 40. This is corrected in the foreign language versions of the game, and the official strategy guide also confirms that "Deadly Harvest" is the intended name for mission 43.
