Official v5.42 Bugs Thread

[sloanjh]

Nope, still getting the same error. Going to have to start a new game.  

I was going to say "roll back to a saved game from before you ran into problems, and see if that helps" but was waiting for someone else to chime in.

If you haven't been saving your DBs you should read the thread in FAQ; it gives a strategy that gives you a chance of recovering the game in situations like this.

[Cavgunner]

New game... I haven't even LEFT the Sol system yet... same error as I posted above occurs for no apparent reason, a few years into the game.

Very, very discouraging.

If anyone has some insight into what might be happening here, that would be helpful.

[Thiosk]

hm-- save aggressively.

For an evening of gaming, I save:
three times per session, and every time i generate a new system.  that way, if something goes to hell in a handbasket, i can 'undo' that system and reload a fresh one instead.  My first game similarly crashed and burned, but my current game has been chugging on for some time.

Its just a quirk of the way the game works, and not every bug can be squashed, but aggressive saving (i keep 6 backed up copies of the DB in separate folders) can save you.

[Charlie Beeler]

I think I've found a serious bug in point defence - it looks like multiple beam fire-controls firing at a single salvo only register the hits from the last fire-control to fire. 

I've got a single laser-DD and 3xFFG (AMM) defending a TG that's getting sandblasted by an NPR AMM DD.  The DD has 2x AM fire controls, each with 4x10cm C3 lasers in point-blank mode.  The NPR missiles are coming in in volleys of 12x; the DD is engaging the leakers.  Twice now, I've been told the DD got enough hits to destroy a salvo of leakers, only to see damage being registered.  I looked at the SM mode event log and saw the following messages (amidst a lot of other clutter) when engaging a salvo of 7 leakers (one of which was killed by AMM fire before the salvo attacked):

Terran Federation: Firing Summary: 4 weapons fired, 3 missiles destroyed.
(other Terran Federation messages, but no Empire of Kabili messages)
Terran Federation: Firing Summary: 4 weapons fired, 4 missiles destroyed.
Empire of Kabili: Missiles Destroyed: 4x Santa Cruz Anti-missile Missile destroyed by point blank point defence fire.
Empire of Kabili: Chance to Hit: Salvo of 2x Santa Cruz... has intercepted its target...
Empire of Kabili: Damage: 001 hit by 1 points of damage from Santa Cruz Anti-missile Missile.
Terran Federation: Damage: Arthur W. Radford hit by 1 points of damage from Santa Cruz Anti-missile Missile
...
Empire of Kabili: Damage: 001 hit by 1 points of damage from Santa Cruz Anti-missile Missile.
Terran Federation: Damage: Arthur W. Radford hit by 1 points of damage from Santa Cruz Anti-missile Missile

There's 3 things I see wrong with this picture:
1)  Radford claimed to hit 7 missiles when there were only 6 in the salvo (after AMM).
2)  Radford's 1st 3 hits seem to have been ignored - only 4 missiles were removed from the salvo.
2b)  Note that the first announcement of PD hits for Terran Fed. didn't have a corresponding announcement for Kabili.  This says to me that it was ignored by the system.
3)  Radford doesn't have a class name for the NPR (the "001").  Not sure if this is intentional since it's a computer-controlled NPR so there's no human to read the name....

The other time this happened it was a salvo of 4x and Radford got 1x then 3x hits and took 1 damage - same pattern.

John

I can confirm that there is an issue here.  So far it has been intermitent in my games. 

It appears that the count holding the missiles destroyed in a salvo is being reset at times when switching between multiple fire controls on multiple ships engaging the same salvo. 

I'm not seeing a consistant condition triggering this reset and it's not occuring every time a salvo is engaged.  When it does happen only the last fire controls results affect the salvo targeted.

[Harmonica]

I think the 'Build Time (yrs)' estimate on the Class Design screen is buggy.  Depending on how you add things to your design, and whether you then remove some (ie, add in blocks of 10 then remove some), you will get a different time to if you simply add them 1 item by 1 item.  I've had varying estimates of 1. 33 years, 1. 23 years and 1. 85 years for exactly the same design, during when I was playing around with removing and adding elements.

Although I am sort of inclined to find it hilarious, because maybe because whichever contractor we're talking with is haggling around on the days! (It's not a bug, it's a feature)

[Sotak246]

I lost my homeworld.    I was exploiting some ruins and discovered 60+ shields and transported them to my homeworld to disassemble.  I disassembled approximately 30 of them and check my research tab to see the number of research points I received in shield regeneration 1.5.  I had that project cued to be researched at the time.  It showed I needed about 900 more points so I go back to the industry tab to disassemble about 10 more shields and get the no further benefit notification.  I check the research tab again and realize I had forgotten to remove it from the cue and it was not updated with the new points.  I close out of the whole industry/research screen.  I open it up again and discover that my entire homeworld colony is gone.  Every building, person, stockpiled mineral, and shipyard, everything is gone like it never existed.  The being built are gone but the next ones built are numbered as if they were.  I would send in my database but I waited till just before going to bed to save it and accidental deleted the thing, arrrgh.

Mark

[sloanjh]

I lost my homeworld.    I was exploiting some ruins and discovered 60+ shields and transported them to my homeworld to disassemble.  I disassembled approximately 30 of them and check my research tab to see the number of research points I received in shield regeneration 1.5.  I had that project cued to be researched at the time.  It showed I needed about 900 more points so I go back to the industry tab to disassemble about 10 more shields and get the no further benefit notification.  I check the research tab again and realize I had forgotten to remove it from the cue and it was not updated with the new points.  I close out of the whole industry/research screen.  I open it up again and discover that my entire homeworld colony is gone.  Every building, person, stockpiled mineral, and shipyard, everything is gone like it never existed.  The being built are gone but the next ones built are numbered as if they were.  I would send in my database but I waited till just before going to bed to save it and accidental deleted the thing, arrrgh.

Mark

Unfortunately, this is a known issue that's been around forever (I got burned by it a couple of years ago in real time).  The problem occurs when you're researching something and you get it granted to you by RP download or (now) disassembly.

The steps to avoid it are:

1)  ALWAYS save immediately before either doing disassembly OR before a TG with research points stored (typically a salvage ship) enters a system where the research points will be downloaded (I suspect that the criterion for this is if you have research labs).  Note that it's when the ship enters the system, NOT when it hits orbit that the research points download.
2)  Unassign any researchers working on tech you think you'll get from disassembly or research point download until the research points have been granted  This should be done at the same time as the save.  This should keep your planet from going into the phantom dimension....

John

[Brian Neumann]

Those are the steps to prevent it from being a disaster.  The other place it seems to crop up is if you get more than 1 tech from either of these sources in the same time cycle.  Even a 5 second turn seems to break the pattern and prevent you from losing the planet invovled.  It will only be 1 colony even if there are multiple colonies in the system. 

If you remember enough about the colony you can use sm functions to recreate it.  To get your officers back you will need to do a global unassign all officers (bottom row of the officers screen).  You can get the ground forces that were present by being in sm mode and going to the ground forces tab of the (F2) population and production screen.  Change the view at the top from current colony to all ground forces and then reassign them using the transfer button on the lower right side.  You will probably want to do this before you recreate the colony, and then assign them to the colony itself.

Good Luck
Brian

[Cavgunner]

Well, I think I'm done for now.

I really appreciate that Steve has created a free game with such a massive scope.  And I have to tell you, I really, really wanted to like this game.

However it shouldn't be necessary for me to worry about every situation where the game has a programming hiccup.  When the best solution to known problems is "save more often" that's not a good solution.  I'm just tired of having those damn error loops.

Unfortunately, in it's current form I'd say this game is only semi-playable.  Not knocking anything.  Just my opinion.  I certainly got enough enjoyment for what I paid for.

I might try again after it's been updated a few more times.  Until then, thanks for everyone who answered my questions.

[Sloshmonger]

Bug: Can bypass the 180 day activation period of an inactive industry
Steps:
1) Deactivate an industry.
2) Reactivate the industry
3) Cancel reactivation.  This can be done immediately, or any time in the 180 day period
4) Industry is now activated.

Guessing that canceling the reactivation resets it to the default state, rather than the last state.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I lost my homeworld.    I was exploiting some ruins and discovered 60+ shields and transported them to my homeworld to disassemble.  I disassembled approximately 30 of them and check my research tab to see the number of research points I received in shield regeneration 1.5.  I had that project cued to be researched at the time.  It showed I needed about 900 more points so I go back to the industry tab to disassemble about 10 more shields and get the no further benefit notification.  I check the research tab again and realize I had forgotten to remove it from the cue and it was not updated with the new points.  I close out of the whole industry/research screen.  I open it up again and discover that my entire homeworld colony is gone.  Every building, person, stockpiled mineral, and shipyard, everything is gone like it never existed.  The being built are gone but the next ones built are numbered as if they were.  I would send in my database but I waited till just before going to bed to save it and accidental deleted the thing, arrrgh.

Mark

Not that it helps your current situation, but this is fixed for v5.50. It was a copy/paste error where I had a loop to delete research queues and current projects but forgot to rename the database reference from rsPop to rsQueue.

Steve

[Marc420]

Error in SetClassObsolete

Error 3021 generated by DAO.   Recordset
no current record


Error in CreateDesign

Error 3201 gened by DAO.   Recordset
cannot add/change a recod because a related record is required in "TechSystem"

got spammed by this, first one 5 times, second one 5-7 times, happened when I incremented by 30 days, 3 ships had just finished their overhaul, after this it turned out Terraforming Rate 0.  0025 had finished it looks like

Got the RecordSet error, but with the 'required in' being first "fleets" then "ships"

Cause was that somehow I'd gotten a couple of ships into my shipyard que's with no target fleet assigned.  The bad news was that the two new survey ships vanished into the Luna Triangle and have never been heard from again.   Except in many B-rated 3-d Holo Vids.

Can't tell you how I got the ship's into the que that way.   Although, I do seem to be good at disappearing the Shakedown Fleet that I try to keep stationed at the shipyards.   Never quite sure how I do it, but I look up and its gone again.  Probably renaming it, or getting it mixed up somehow as I reassign ships and TG's after construction.

[Felius]

I assume this was a bug, as there wasn't even an announcement telling me of it.  

On a precursor system, after I seemly cleared it, I made the excavation post and got my warships back to Terra.  But so it seems that there were more precursor ships, and they landed a few troops, who destroyed my anti-robot force there (only a mixed brigade, plus one engineer battalion).  So I sent back my warships, and diverged a troop transport to take a full brigade of heavy assault battalions there.  The warships arrived much faster, so after destroying the precursor ships, I parked the ships on orbit and shot a couple missiles at the precursor ground troops to properly weaken then.  So far so good.  Advance a couple months in game and a few days out (playing other stuff) I go check my battle group to shoot a couple more missiles at them while I wait for the troop transport to arrive (it's pretty slow, plus it was picking up the garrison in a far away asteroid that used to have a civilian mining station).  When I open the TG window all my ships had vanished.  After wondering about it for a while, I spawn back my warships using the SpaceMaster, since my last DB backup were a couple in game months old, with quite a lot of NPR combat in between there and my current date, and when I turn on the sensors, it shows 8 ships with the exact characteristic of mine (which are pretty rare, ridiculously high armor, low thermal emissions, exact same sensor range, etc.  ).  

Right now I'm in the process of cleaning them up with my newly spawned ships, and they don't seem to be doing anything (except fire the anti-missile missiles, but I had launchers set to PD mode).  It's also quite annoying to destroy, as I don't have any meson weaponry, and each of my ships take around 50-60 missiles (WH 16 each.  Yeah, I seriously exaggerate on the armor department.  It is 12k tons, with 20 thick armor).

So any idea of why my ships suddenly and stealthy became became precursor owned ships?

[sloanjh]

My best guess would be that a "planetary surrender" routine got invoked.  I'm pretty sure I've seen people mention ships in orbit changing sides (surrendering to the winner) when a planetary population is conquered.  It sounds like your ships got hit with that subroutine.

John

PS - Please try to avoid setting up potentially lengthy discussions in the official bugs thread by asking questions like "why is this happening".  Steve uses this thread as his "filing cabinet", so anything that can be done to keep it focussed is a good thing.  One way to do this in your case would have been to make your post in a new thread in The Academy, and then post a link to the thread here in the official bugs thread.

PPS - I took the liberty of adding spoiler tags to part of your discussion - it was talking about a surprise that was recently added to the game.

I assume this was a bug, as there wasn't even an announcement telling me of it.  

On a precursor system, after I seemly cleared it, I made the excavation post and got my warships back to Terra.  But so it seems that there were more precursor ships, and they landed a few troops, who destroyed my anti-robot force there (only a mixed brigade, plus one engineer battalion).  So I sent back my warships, and diverged a troop transport to take a full brigade of heavy assault battalions there.  The warships arrived much faster, so after destroying the precursor ships, I parked the ships on orbit and shot a couple missiles at the precursor ground troops to properly weaken then.  So far so good.  Advance a couple months in game and a few days out (playing other stuff) I go check my battle group to shoot a couple more missiles at them while I wait for the troop transport to arrive (it's pretty slow, plus it was picking up the garrison in a far away asteroid that used to have a civilian mining station).  When I open the TG window all my ships had vanished.  After wondering about it for a while, I spawn back my warships using the SpaceMaster, since my last DB backup were a couple in game months old, with quite a lot of NPR combat in between there and my current date, and when I turn on the sensors, it shows 8 ships with the exact characteristic of mine (which are pretty rare, ridiculously high armor, low thermal emissions, exact same sensor range, etc.  ).  

Right now I'm in the process of cleaning them up with my newly spawned ships, and they don't seem to be doing anything (except fire the anti-missile missiles, but I had launchers set to PD mode).  It's also quite annoying to destroy, as I don't have any meson weaponry, and each of my ships take around 50-60 missiles (WH 16 each.  Yeah, I seriously exaggerate on the armor department.  It is 12k tons, with 20 thick armor).

So any idea of why my ships suddenly and stealthy became became precursor owned ships?

[Felius]

Makes sense. I guess next time I'm about to temporarily lose a planet, I'll leave my blockade fleet away-ish from the planet.