The wave of violent use of plagiarism algebra has hit the RoN “scene” (if one can call whatever we have a “scene”). In a now-deleted markdown file, someone’s subsidised compute noted an oddity in how the string portion of the balance parser was working and then mentioned a workaround (which I didn’t get to look at since the file was deleted and the git commit history squashed (!)), but it did give a promising lead to consider on my own.
Long story short, whoever worked on this part of EE decided to1 treat strings made entirely of spaces as empty strings:
So instead of assembling the string Flag_H_OBJMASK_HEAVY_INF, EE was instead assembling the string Flag_HOBJMASK_HEAVY_INF.2 There is, of course, no mention of the mangled string in the balance.xml file, and so the game would use the default value (100% damage, i.e., no special modifier) instead of whatever value BHG put in the balance.xml file, ruining the game’s carefully tuned unit balance and leading to the awful, braindead EE meta we have today outside of CBP.
That’s it. Not even an exe bug. Just a fucking incorrectly re-parsed XML node value.
Fuck my life.
Shoutout to Alpha 11’s stupid fucking CtW localization work for helping me to make this connection.
Fuck. My. Life.