[Bug] A few issues, Sorry if they're already known

Just some stuff I've noticed

Hello all,

First, I'd just like to say that I've been playing this game for about a week now, and it's probably the first strategy game since Red Alert to give me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside from playing ;)

But anyway, I have noticed a few issues that tend to be rather irritating, if not totally game-breaking.  My apologies if these are known, and I imagine that most if not all of them probably are.

1)   When loading a saved game in Single Player, my Fleet supply drops.  I will leave having maybe 12 open logitics spaces, and when the game loads I'll have more like -28.  I'm not sure about the actual numbers, or how much the drop is, because I have not done extensive testing on this.

2)   When loading a saved game in Single Player, locked teams are unlocked.  This can pretty much break a single player game if now my closest ally starts asking me to perform raids on a highly inconvenient target.

3)   Far-away images of distant stars don't always show up.  It's pretty hard to find that neighboring star system when it appears as black.  This is using a geforce 8800 GTS 320Mb [forceware 169.28], on all highest effects settings, 1280x1024 and 2x AA.  The resolution and AA don't SEEM to affect this, but I would need to do more extensive testing.  This is particularly a prevalent issue on custom maps with multiple planetary systems.  In games with just 2 stars, the distant one (thus far) has always shown up just fine.  Sometimes it works with even 3 or 4.  I have tried with a 6 star system, and ony 2 of the stars actually had graphical representations from a distance.  These were also very small, unlike the large blobs that usually show up.  Maybe this is all by design, but it seems very inconsistent.

4)   On the endgame summary charts, there is no longer information on the number of ships LOST in the Combat tab?  All I can see is the number destroyed; to find out how many of each ship type I lost I must use the Fleet charts and go over them with a fine-toothed comb.  This was not the case in 1.0; there were a lot more categories in the Combat tab. 

5) [Edit]  When ships that are created auto-join a fleet, they don't always seem to stay in formation.  Sometimes they'll jump back and forth between planets when I subsequently try and move the fleet through the system.  As far as I can tell, selecting the fleet and then clicking "Create Fleet" will remedy this, but I always click stop and reissue any move orders at the same time as doing this, so I haven't figured which of these steps actually fixes the issue.  Issuing a move order just to keep the ship in the right system, without redundantly reassigning the fleet, does not permanently fix the issue, and then at the next star said ship will tend to go off on its own and phase jump again.

6) [Edit]  Fleets don't always show pips next to their icons in the Empire tree.  Sometimes there will be no pips whatsoever, and sometimes only the ships that were in the fleet on its original creation will be visible.  Ships that auto join the fleet are never visible as pips until reassigning the fleet (see bug 5 above).

7) [Edit 2]  Sometimes when issuing move commands, the blue phase lane illumination will appear to take the ship in a circular or otherwise highly roundabout path to reach its destination.  For example, I'll have a ship move to a planet right next door, but when I issue the command, phase lanes turn blue in a path that goes through about 4 planets before coming back to the adjacent destination.  The ship's actual movement seems to be correct, however.

Well, that's everything I can remember right now, there might even not be anything else.  There were some other things I'd noticed, like sometimes capships, upon being created, would drift out to an arbitrary location outside the planetary radius of ANYTHING, up above a phase lane somewhere.  This has not happened since 1.3, however.
3,524 views 6 replies
Reply #1 Top
1) and 2) are the same bug with game loading not preserving the custom options you selected. It's fixed in 1.04, but until then you can apply the options again before you click Start on the load game screen.

3) Can you post a screenshot? It doesn't sound normal.

4) It was removed, don't remember why off the top of my head.

5) Not sure what you mean. If you have a rally point set on a fleet and it's camped at planet A when the ship is built, its waypoint will be set to planet A. If your fleet then jumps to B while the ship is en route, the ship will go to A first and then to B. This can create some back and forth movement until the ship retraces some jumps, but I've never seen ships joining fleets jumping out of the grav well they're built in unless their rally point is set on another.

6)The pips are not a 1:1 match with the ship count, so sometimes ships joining the fleet won't increase the number of them. Still, I'll try this out and see if I can confirm, never saw this brought up before. It's possible that your ships never actually joined the fleet initially, thus only when you re-created the fleet did they join and the pips properly updated?

7) Is this specific to scout ships? I've noticed sometimes they do this when they pick a planet to auto-explore and you force them to fly to another destination, the blue phase lane travel path is a bit funky (my guess is due to the ability), but yes they do travel properly. I've never seen this with any other ship.
Reply #2 Top
Thanks for your reply. The thing with 1), though, is that (and I just tested this) fleet supply starts at 125 with the options I have set. When I load the game, with the exact same options manually set, the supply is only 100. 5) is not exactly easy for me to explain, and you're right- they don't jump out of the planet they start in and are rallied to. It seems like an issue with when they rally to a different planet and auto join the fleet there. After a few jumps, they'll apparently just decide to backtrack, I think because they may have jumped in to a planet early and decided to reverse to meet the fleet they're with. For 6, i am actually selecting them to reassing the fleet by SELECTING the fleet, so they were definitely already members. It's pretty minor, though. And your reply for 7 is correct, it is only with scout ships and appears to be an issue with auto-explore (sorry I forgot to mention that in the OP).
Reply #3 Top
7) Is this specific to scout ships? I've noticed sometimes they do this when they pick a planet to auto-explore and you force them to fly to another destination, the blue phase lane travel path is a bit funky (my guess is due to the ability), but yes they do travel properly. I've never seen this with any other ship.
End of quote


From what I've seen, if you give orders to a unit in phase space the displayed lines tend to misbehave, but they do fly correctly.
Reply #4 Top
1) That's odd. 125 is the Large setting, so you're saying if you start with Large, save, and load (you have to do the work-around by quitting to the main menu, AFAIK) making sure you Accept again the Large setting, you'll still load with 100?

But still, the whole thing is fixed for 1.04 which is due on Thursday ;)

5) That does sound like what I tried to describe. Their waypoints aren't dynamically updated, so that's probably what it is.

6) Okay, can you come up with a series of steps that can reproduce it 100% of the time? If you want to take the time :P (I'm a perfectionist when it comes to bug hunting ;))

Reply #5 Top
Okay, so the issue with fleet size WAS when I had it set with Large in the game options when I loaded the game, but apparently even though it SAID large, the game still thought it was medium. This is similar to something I noticed with Launching and Docking strike craft - sometimes the button doesn't update correctly, and Dock will display when they're already Docked, or Launch will display when they're already launched.

When loading the game, toggling through the fleet sizes from Large, through small and medium and back to Large, fixes that issue :) I think it's the same as the problem with Locked/Unlocked teams, but I haven't checked that (sorry, I am a perfectionist about bugs too, since you can't properly diagnose or fix them otherwise :)).

And 6), no, sorry, I can't reproduce it. I will definitely keep trying and let you know if I can, however. It's probably the thing that's confounded me most, to be honest :)

Edit: Forgot to mention, that strike craft bug hasn't appeared since 1.3 in my experience.
Reply #6 Top
Yep, it's the same bug for the teams and fleet points (and all the other options). Basically what happens is the game saves what options you selected (that's why they show up properly), but it doesn't actually apply them until you hit Accept on them again. You don't actually have to toggle, just hit the accept button again :)