There have been posts about this game breaker dating all the way back to release month (november). That was 4 months ago and there have been all sorts of patches and texture release, yet they turn a blind eye to a huge game breaker like this?

Really, I guess there isn't going to be a fix then?

I've scoured the interwebs trying to fix this. Nothing works. No amount of cooking pot activations, attacking Rikke, sleeping in bedrolls, CWObs or CWMission04 console commands work. When I hit this bug I thought, ok I'm on the computer, there hasn't been a bug yet that I couldn't fix with a console or a mod. Boy was I in for a surprise. Spent 4 hours searching the web and trying all sorts of things to get this quest along. When that failed, I reloaded a save from before I started the Civil War and replayed all the way back up to this point, only for the same thing to happen.

Until someone can tell me some sure fire way to fix this, or preferably Bethesda fixes what it probably a tiny little script change, I'm going to leave the questline at just before you talk to Tulius, where his idea of a "blade" is a iron banded shield, right before he sends you to "Regain Winterhold Hold" Until this is fixed that's where I'll be. Hopefully if they do fix it, that will be at a point where the script error wont be permanently bugged in my savegame

Can you be more specific I just finished the Imperial Civil War questline last night(and the stormcloak version closer to release). The only issue I can see that would occur is if you were on the Regain portion of the questline and then do the ceasefire quest attached to the main storyline. In this occurence you would bug out the Civil war quests.

as far as I know the stormcloak side of the Civil War has very little bugs. On the imperial side however, there have been reports of the problem I'm running into all the way through till the end. Leget Rikke wont give orders for the next mission when you talk to her.

I didn't do the cease fire in the middle of the Civil War quest. I've already finished the main quest line. In fact, I play all the questlines all the way through with out starting any others. I do this mostly to avoid any bugs like this as much as I can. It is still possible that the cease fire from the main questline could of some how screwed things up, it's as good a guess as any. There was a general consensus that you should save the civil war and DB quests for last as to avoid any conflicts from other questlines. That logic seemed to serve well up until this point

Yep doing that will bug her and she won't give quests for instance I had regain the Pale but the ownership change during the ceasefire talks led me to be unable to continue that quest. Basically saving the Civil War until then end or doing it all early on are the best bets. The latter would possibly lead to other quest issues.

I am experiencing this bug as well, and I've been going over everything related to this quest in the CK and the script source trying to find a fix. I think I have a partial solution.

By enabling story manager logging, I found that this quest (CWMission04) timed out while trying to fill its aliases. Unfortunately the log does not show which specific alias(es) are the problem. As an experiment, I used the CK to set every alias on this quest to be optional. Additionally, I found is that the various script commands that set up the civil war quests happen when you enter the cell containing the friendly army camp, which means that after applying the fix it is necessary to exit then re-enter the cell to "refresh" the script.

It seems to have worked. After exiting then re-entering the cell with the aliases set to optional, I was able to get the quest from Rikke.

There are possibly some side-effects from this. The prisoners at the fort said the guard had the cell key, but there was no guard. I just had to pick the locks instead. Also, the soldiers I rescued started fighting with their fists instead of using weapons. There might also be other side effects I didn't notice, but at least the critical path works and allows the quest to be finished.

Due to the problems mentioned above I hesitate to call this a "proper" fix. But if none of the other fixes are working for you and you want to try this anyway, I've posted up the mod here: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=13315