Watch towers and watch tower failure

[The Painted Man]

Thanks, Mike. I appreciate the response. Sounds like best guess is I hit the sweet spot where the program thinks I have a dire wolf so removes a recon, but I didn't yet have the dire wolf because of timing of the orders/spells.

Underworld gets Dire Wolf Familiar (as an intrinsic spell) at level 5. That means, the spell effect automatically triggers every turn for you. So if you have a pwr-5 wizard in one of your groups with a Watch Tower building enhancement, it may cause an issue.

Since we're past the "lets keep the details out since its an active game" point, I went back and dug into details and will share here. 

The last time I raised a p5, I had the same result (and must not have noticed at the time). So, something about the dire wolf and watch towers don't work together. The following turn I made the p5 a p6, and the issue went away. The p6 then left the capital for reasons that are his own and I raised a new p5. And received the same error. 

My guess remains that the system says "oh, p5, you have intrinsic dire wolf, I should cancel the other recon" but then because of timing around spells (211) vs. magic research (799) means that I didn't actually have an intrinsic dire wolf to do the recon. Interestingly, I got the message indicating nothing to report by the dire wolf, which shouldn't have happened due to it being L4 per the spell description.

Lesson here: If you have watch towers and raise a wizard to where you get intrinsic dire wolf, don't plan on watch towers working that turn. 

Spoiler alert: I will be raising that p5 to a p6 per UM's suggestion, so won't be able to report if this is a one-off due to timing or if the two in the same square (dire wolf and watch tower) always stinks.