cheated out of Secrets of the Human Brain

[bvanevery]

In my mod, as the Morganites, I was the 1st faction to research Secrets of the Human Brain.  In my mod it gives Knowledge and the Virtual World.  It's basically a replacement for Cyberethics.  I got asked about whether I wanted to choose new government models, so I said yes and fiddled with that for a minute.  I didn't actually make a choice though.  However when I got done, I didn't ever get my free tech, my "burst of research".  I went back and looked at my alphax.txt file to see if I'd made some kind of editing mistake.  No reason to believe I would have, and nope, no inadvertent edits to turn off the free tech.  I just got cheated.

The original game didn't have the possibility of selecting a government model at the same time as gaining a free tech.  I think this is a bug in the game state that was never anticipated, and thus overlooked.  The good news is it's specific to my mod, or to other mods doing something similar.  The workaround is probably not to fiddle with government models until after you've gotten your free tech.

I cashed an Artifact in order to get this tech.  My goal was to gain a Secret Project that I could work on.  Since I actually got about the best project I could have hoped for, I'm not inclined to save scum my turn.  Who knows how long it would be until I got that result again?

Weirdly... did I get cheated after all?  Next turn, I got Centauri Meditation.  I had another 7 turns to go before getting another tech.  I guess it wasn't the disaster I thought, I just got delayed for 1 turn.