Mobile artillery load game veterancy bug

I can't find any similar reported bug but that really surprises me because this has been a problem for years now.

In COH2, when you load a saved skirmish game, almost always the veterancy range bonus for mobile artillery is gone. Other veterancy bonuses such as reduced cool-down are still there but the range bonus is not.

The conditions to repro this bug might be a bit complex.

I only play skirmish against the AI. I play with a max popcap (999) entered as a scar command and usually on a custom map with some sort of defense mod. There's no way I'd still be comp-stomping in COH2 without new maps and mods.

That said this bug manifests with all factions on all maps and with all mods that I've used. I'm pretty sure I verified it occurs with no mod. I've never verified with the default popcap because it would be too boring to bother reproducing.

Static artillery does not have this problem and the range bonus is correctly preserved.

I suspect this could be an interaction with the large popcap -- clearly the max veterancy required to obtain the range bonus would only happen well into the game with large numbers of units. But I've observed the problem pretty early in games that are saved.

This bug really bites hard because playing with the max popcap means the game will crash at some point and I have to load a saved game to continue. But I'll have lost all the mobile artillery range bonuses. For example, I just reached max veterancy on 10 sextons and saved before a crash and all the range bonuses are gone in the loaded game. This is more than a little annoying.

In OKW the range bonus does not get restored again when you go past level three which makes sense since you only gain the range bonus once.

For some reason I think this may be a depersistence issue where the flag is not being set correctly on load but that's just a impression I have.

I wasn't even aware you could save custom games in the first place.

If you need an easy way to reproduce - try cheatcommand mod.

If you need an easy way to reproduce - try cheatcommand mod.

I'm looking at cheatcommands now. The only thing I can't do is use it to reset items to base veterancy which would allow me to then step the vet level up and see if the range bonus returns.

Still, very cool mod/scar tool.