Ships With Minds of Their Own

from Sins Forums
It's fairly common for my fleets to just pick up and warp halfway across the galaxy without any orders from me.  I'm talking about fleets that were just left to guard a planet, which suddenly show up at another star.  I never have any rally points set, I haven't given any stacked orders or special fleet orders, and these are fleets that had been static for quite awhile before suddenly taking off on their own, so it's not a matter of making a mistake in giving them an order.  Anybody else see this?  I'd say I see this maybe 10 times in an average six-hour game. Sometimes it can be very painful if I was counting on the fleet to stay in one spot for defense.

On a related but different issue, later in the game, when there are lots of refinery ships and trade ships running about, it is often very difficult to select a planet in order to give a fleet move order. This can be a big problem if one needs to order the fleets to respond IMMEDIATELY to an invasion of siege craft somewhere.  Is there any way to avoid this?  Is it possible to turn off the animations for the little economy ships?
technical
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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Is it possible to turn off the animations for the little economy ships?
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Yep, in the interface settings there should be a check box for toggling display of civilian ships :)

As per your issue with ships not behaving properly, do you have a save and/or replay? If not, make sure you get it the next time you see it happen and mail it off to [email protected] with a description for them to look at.

Ships definitely shouldn't be jumping around on their own :P
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Sometimes I have this problem too. Each time, though, I think that it is just a misclick...ie accidentally drag-selecting a member of a fleet when clicking around the planets, etc. I usually catch them before they jump to another planet though.
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I've had something like this happen before, but only in a huge game that's been running for several days, it's like the game starts losing track of which ship is where and who is in what fleet. Worst time was when I was sending in a backup fleet to assist another when it suddenly disbanded and shot off in all directions.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Hi. I haven't been using the replay feature yet. I'll try to remember to log a save the next time I notice that behavior. I suppose someone could determine what orders a fleet was executing. But you'd have to take my word for it, I think, that I didn't do that by mistake!
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Replays are actually saved automatically in your user path when you quit a game, so it's just a matter of finding the right one ;) A save game in progress while it's happening, if you can catch it, would probably be more beneficial since they can run it with their debug builds to figure out what the ships are trying to do - but a replay would still be useful :)
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
On a related but different issue, later in the game, when there are
lots of refinery ships and trade ships running about, it is often very
difficult to select a planet in order to give a fleet move order. This
can be a big problem if one needs to order the fleets to respond
IMMEDIATELY to an invasion of siege craft somewhere.  Is there any
way to avoid this?  Is it possible to turn off the animations for
the little economy ships?
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You can also find the planet in the empire tree and then click on the ships/fleet to give it orders. Or, if they're organized into an actual fleet, you can click on the appropriate fleet icon at the top of the empire tree to give it orders.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
I'm probably the only Sins player who doesn't like the Empire Tree. I wish I could minimize it entirely. I mainly don't like the fact that you can't scroll it while paused, which is an annoyance I keep running into over and over. I also hate the way the pip boxes dominate the screen when there are large fleets.

In general, I find it awkward to rearrange fleets in this game. I dread the thought of having to split a large fleet in half. I've experimented with that quite a bit, and I just can't seem to find a comfortable way to do it.

But the game is still very cool despite such annoyances.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
Scrolling the tree while paused has been fixed in 1.04 ;)

By pip boxes, do you mean the dots for the relative number of ships in the fleet shown on the empire tree?

Splitting in half also shouldn't be too bad, you can stack the icons by 10s on the tree, then just select the stacks/capitals you want to split off, and form a new fleet. That should do what you'd like, I think?
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
I've had this happen a couple of times too in larger games. What seems to happen is that an enemy ship of some sort, normally a light frigate, comes into a defense fleet's gravity well to scout it out rather than sending the actual scout frigate. They target the hostile ship, it jumps away, and then they pursue rather than sitting there following defend orders. This never happens if the fleet engagement orders are set to hold position or local area. When they're on gravity well mode they do sometimes take off. Normally I catch it before there's harm, but sometimes a couple of ships will just go off pursing the enemy and they'll get wiped out. This only seems to happen in larger games were I can't be everywhere at the same time.

If you monitor a ships where an enemy light frigate just jumped in to scout and hold down alt, you'll notice that your ships will auto-attack that ship and then when it jumps out they will commonly auto-pursue. Normally the auto-pursuit blue line gets canceled before your ship gets to the jump point there, but not always.

I'm probably the only Sins player who doesn't like the Empire Tree.
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No, you're not the only one. I don't like it either, but that doesn't mean I don't use it. It's rather annoying to have to minimize each planet. I want them there to click on, but I wish they were spaced closer together and didn't automatically expand unless a battle was going on. At any other time I normally don't care to see the structures around the planet since I manually place all my structures. I do use the pinned fleets option all the time and I also use the expanded view of an enemy planet to prioritize targets.
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Annatar, I have 1.04 installed and apparently running fine, but the Empire Tree is not scrolling for me while the game is paused. I can minimize planets, etc., but I can't get to planets that are off the screen to the bottom. Hmm. I'll try again. Maybe there's a different way to move the scroll bar.

Yep, pip boxes (a term I hadn't heard before) are introduced in one of the tutorials. They're the colored pips representing ships in the box right to the right of the Empire Tree planet icons.

That's a good idea about using stacking when dividing fleets. I do use stacking most of the time, but haven't relied on that for dividing fleets. It seems I always have trouble dividing groups in games, even in one as smooth as GalCivII, before some practice. It would be nice for Sins to have a fleet-splitting screen like GalCiv.

Dragon, thank you. I think you solved my issue with the fleets taking off on their own. I do remember seeing enemy light frigates skulking around. I didn't realize my fleets would pursue so far. I will start setting them to hold, when that's what I want.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
I'm probably the only Sins player who doesn't like the Empire Tree. I wish I could minimize it entirely. I mainly don't like the fact that you can't scroll it while paused, which is an annoyance I keep running into over and over. I also hate the way the pip boxes dominate the screen when there are large fleets.In general, I find it awkward to rearrange fleets in this game. I dread the thought of having to split a large fleet in half. I've experimented with that quite a bit, and I just can't seem to find a comfortable way to do it.But the game is still very cool despite such annoyances.
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I never use it, and you can get rid of it, just unpin everything from it in the game options and it goes away.

I may use it more in online play, to quickly identify which system is being attacked etc... but you can just zoom out and look for hostile colored blips on your planets.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
By the way, for all my griping today, this is after a day where I played Sins all day, up to 3 a.m., thought about it all night while sleeping, and have been following this forum all day and ignoring my work. It's actually a little rare for a game to get under my skin like that.
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
Annatar, I have 1.04 installed and apparently running fine, but the Empire Tree is not scrolling for me while the game is paused. I can minimize planets, etc., but I can't get to planets that are off the screen to the bottom. Hmm. I'll try again. Maybe there's a different way to move the scroll bar.
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To be honest I rarely pause so I was going off the patch note. Did you update from SDC, or standalone? I know some folks were reporting issues where they applied the patch off SDC and it showed version 1.04, but not all of the proper changes were made. Kind of a shot in the dark, but if you didn't use the stand-alone patch, try it. Don't need to uninstall or anything, updating over what you have should work. It'll likely reset your settings again, though.

I think you solved my issue with the fleets taking off on their own. I do remember seeing enemy light frigates skulking around. I didn't realize my fleets would pursue so far. I will start setting them to hold, when that's what I want.
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If this is what happens, then I would call this a bug. Ships have never actually jumped after their targets before.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
Hmm. I did update off of Stardock, and my game says it's 1.04, and I certainly have the feeling that the AI is goosed up a bit from 1.03. I'm not sure where to find the standalone, but I'll figure it out. Thank you.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
I updated with the standalone and it still won't let me scroll while paused.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
Hmm, well, I guess it's half way there ;) The note says the tree updates when paused, I had assumed scrolling would be considering updating :P
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
https://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/update

There ya go :)

Download/patch... I had issues with the SDC version, all it did was change the version number


Also, I had the same issue with an entire fleet chasing a scout out of the gravity well they were in, in fact they chased it 2 full systems before they killed it(small fleet, not many strike craft) and I finally noticed where the heck they were.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
I updated with the standalone and it still won't let me scroll while paused.
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I updated via the "update button" (which takes me to the Sins website) and it scrolls just fine when paused (which v1.03 did not)
Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
Ironhandx, thanks for the link! Actually, I did get 1.04 from that link on this website. I wasn't sure if that was the "standalone" version mentioned above, because the download link on that page actually downloads from stardock.com (but not through funky "Stardock Central").

Anyway, I checked, and it turns out that I sorta can scroll the Empire Tree while paused in 1.04. Sorta. Sometimes it works fairly (but not very) smoothly. Sometimes it balks, which is why I had the impression it doesn't work at all.

I'm intrigued by your comment that you can unpin everything on the Empire Tree and make it go away. I tried to do that several times and couldn't make it happen. I'll try again! I think it desperately needs to be more "context sensitive" instead of pushing itself into my face all the time. I'd like to have a key command toggle that would just disappear it, but let me turn it right back on when wanted.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
Regarding the opening post:

Once, I had a strange situation where both I and an AI were controlling the same force. I would find my factories producing units I never created, my forces heading directions I had never sent them, and my research teams diligently working on projects I most assuredly had not asked them to study. The problem went away, I think, when I reloaded the game, but it was jarring.

Ben