That is interesting, I'll try playing around with it tonight and see what's up. To clarify, these are not custom maps, but the stock game maps, correct?

Ahh. Do other ones work? Any map that doesn't have the "no pirates" thing? Ironclad removed these maps from distribution since they included the no pirates option a while ago, so you still have the non-updated ones. This latest patch did something to the maps, so earlier version ones do Very Bad Things.

annatar11 the changes in the map files are as follows

quickstart & normalstart homeworld upgraded levels, quickstart & normalstart upgrade levels on each planet and the infrastructure upgrade level listed on each planet all while keeping the map version at 2,

I found out these things by compareing the old ancient gifts with the new ancient gifts

if the devs had bumped the map version to 3 & required it in maps the map issue would not have happened & players would have bitched about their custom maps not working/being found, personally I would have preferred the versionnumber to change.

I am just starting to write a map update program that should be able to correct all of these changes and allow for any future format changes.

harpo