3.2 Bugs

[Erik L]

Don't forget smaller equals harder to hit, harder to see and faster.

Of course you could use that mass savings and add more weapons.

[Father Tim]

A minor display bug:  a world with a colony cost of more than 20 requires more than 100% of its population to engage in Agricultural and Environmntal work to keep everyone alive & fed.  The F2 Population & Production window 'Summary' tab therefore displays the A&E sector employing more people than are actually on the planet, and the Service sector employing a negative number of people.  Apparently the robots really have taken over.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

A minor display bug:  a world with a colony cost of more than 20 requires more than 100% of its population to engage in Agricultural and Environmntal work to keep everyone alive & fed.  The F2 Population & Production window 'Summary' tab therefore displays the A&E sector employing more people than are actually on the planet, and the Service sector employing a negative number of people.  Apparently the robots really have taken over.

Fixed for v4.0

Steve

[welchbloke]

I've just had a civilian non-jumpp capable survey ship suddenly come up for sale in a new system.  Two new systems have been created and I have not built my first jump tender yet.  One of the systems showing on the Galactic Map is not connected to any JP in my home system (the only system my race was aware of until this glitch).  Any ideas what caused it?  I'd just run a 5 day step after starting running the game for the first time today.

Edited to add:
I'm also getting an Error 11 report everytime I advance the timeline.

[Father Tim]

Either a bug or a bad  Random Number Generator.  A five ship cargo fleet was hanging out on the far side of a newly built jumpgate, waiting for the construction ship to build them a way home when a aintenance failure occurred.  Actually, five maintenance filures occurred.  Each ship suffered a failure of its No. 2 engine.  Five ships, all with identical time on their maintenance clocks, identical amounts of fuel & spares on board,in the same location in the same Task group all suffered identical failures in the same five-day increment.

Earlier in the game a three cargo ship task group also suffered identical engine failures simltaneously.  I origianlly put that one down to coincidence, but now either there's a bug in the maintenance code, or Aurora is calling the RNG so quickly in succession it hasn't updated between calls (as happens frequently with clock-based RNGs).

[Father Tim]

The civilian spaceport in a dead-end system built a (non-jump-capable) geo survey vessel which, having nothing to survey, moved through the jump gate into the next system.  Since this system is also fully geologically surveyed, it then turns around and goes back.  This ship spends all its time going back and forth through the same jump gate rather than continuing across this second system to the next jump gate 168 million km away.

[Hagar]

A minor display bug:  I had a cybernetic team restore a Mass Driver on Mars.  The event window text just says "... Cybernetic Team has restored an abandoned on Mars".  The text "Mass Driver" is missing.

[jfelten]

I've just had a civilian non-jumpp capable survey ship suddenly come up for sale in a new system.  Two new systems have been created and I have not built my first jump tender yet.  One of the systems showing on the Galactic Map is not connected to any JP in my home system (the only system my race was aware of until this glitch).  Any ideas what caused it?  I'd just run a 5 day step after starting running the game for the first time today.

I've not seen that but I had something odd happen recently with civilian freighters.  Early on in my test game a couple civ freighters came up for sale in an adjacent system.  They were not jump capable and at that time the adjacent system was accessible via a 1-way jump gate.  I'm guessing they wandered through, couldn't get back, so then came up for sale.  For the next ~25 years of game time not a single civilian ship came up for sale.  Then suddenly there was a civilian ship fire sale.  I think about 20 came up for sale within a 1-2 month time frame.  All in the home system so they were not "trapped".  Since MCr are a lot easier to come by IME than minerals I started scarfing them all up.  But after buying more than a dozen I got more choosy and only bought the cheaper ones since the price seemed to vary by a factor of about 2.  I have no idea what triggered this civilian fire sale.  It came out of the blue and then soon stopped.  Most of them I have to refit so they'll still cost me most of the cost of a new freighter (upgrading engines which are the biggest cost of a freighter) but I save a few minerals at the expense of a lot of MCr.  I'm not 100% certain it is a good deal.  Has anyone ran the numbers to check whether it is more economical to scrap and rebuild rather than refit in such a situation?  When refitting do I get any credit for the old engines that are being replaced?  

I have yet to notice a civilian geo survey ship actually do anything useful.  I see them moving around a lot but I've never seen one survey anything.  Perhaps I just missed it but they seem totally useless as is.  

BTW, you have to be careful when refitting freighters.  You can accidentally pick a civilian freighter and give it a free upgrade.  Is there any way to abort a refit?

[jfelten]

Background:  This is from my test game where I early on discovered a pre TN NPR which for 25 years have been trying to claw themselves up to TN tech.  They just recently built their first ship and are researching Jump Theory which will take them about 12 years at their current research pace.  

While they were trapped on their HW I formed a geo team on the slim hope it would find some additional minerals on their HW.  Once it had made its attempt the event log was cluttered every turn with that geo team reporting in that they couldn't do anything.  After several hundred times seeing that I tried to get rid of it by assigning the team to a PDC they had built.  That worked for muting that message but now I can find no way to get that first team off of the PDC.  It is trapped there as far as I can tell.  I can't order the PDC to offload the team as that is not a valid PDC order.  And the teams tab of the econ window I used to assign them to the PDC doesn't seem to have a way to reverse that assignment.  

Later, when they finally researched engines and built their first geo survey ship, I formed a new 2nd geo team to go along since the 1st geo team was trapped in the PDC's brig.  But when I created the 2nd team, it showed as "[unknown species] rating 0" and I can't load it and it keeps giving geo reports that it can't find new minerals on the HW but with the team's name blank.:

"29th September 2035 20:05:06,New Home,New Home,The  does not believe any new mineral deposits can be found by the further geological survey of New Home-A III"
(note the double space between "The" and "does", that is where the team's name is supposed to go).

I can not load this no-name team on a ship.  And I could find no way to disband this dysfunctional team.  Is there any way to disband a team?   I even looked on the F4 officers window and could find no way to see who was on this team or how to remove them from the team.

I then formed a 3rd team which formed O.K. and that I was able to load on a ship.  But I still have that no-name team sitting on the HW and I'm back to getting that message every turn cluttering up the event log.  And I still have the original geo team stuck on the PDC.

[jfelten]

These pop up now and then after I hit the "5 Day" button but I can't figure out why.  I get a mixture of the 3 which come up one after the
other totaling approximately 50 total.  Once I "O.K." past all ~50 the program then goes on normally.  Nothing special seems to happen that cycle so I don't know why the occur.  I think they occur about once or twice a year, but they do not seem to occur in the same month every time.  

---------------------------
Error in MoveFleets
---------------------------
Error 3021 was generated by DAO.Field
No current record.
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

---------------------------
Error in MoveFleets
---------------------------
Error 3020 was generated by DAO.Field
Update or CancelUpdate without AddNew or Edit.
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

[jfelten]

Stevefire.mdb was getting up to 56MB in my test campaign so I tried the compact database option.  It failed with a series of errors (below).  It had left a backup .mdb file but I had made my own backup so I restored that and tried again.  It failed again with different errors.  The 2nd attempt though did not create a backup .mdb so if I had not made my own backup copy, I would have lost everything.  

---------------------------
Error in CompactDB
---------------------------
Error 429 was generated by Aurora
ActiveX component can't create object
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

---------------------------
Error in CompactDB
---------------------------
Error 3024 was generated by DAO.Workspace
Could not find file 'Stevefire.mdb'.
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

There was a backup .mdb but no Stevefire.mdb after this series of errors.


Tried compacting a 2nd time after restoring Stevefire.mdb from a backup copy I had made.:

This one came up twice:
---------------------------
Error in CompactDB
---------------------------
Error 429 was generated by Aurora
ActiveX component can't create object
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

---------------------------
Error in CompactDB
---------------------------
Error 3024 was generated by DAO.Workspace
Could not find file 'Stevefire.mdb'.
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

No backup and no Stevefire.mdb after this 2nd attempt.  If I hadn't made a copy, I would have been screwed.

[welchbloke]

A minor display bug:  I had a cybernetic team restore a Mass Driver on Mars.  The event window text just says "... Cybernetic Team has restored an abandoned on Mars".  The text "Mass Driver" is missing.

I've just had the same thing for one of my colonies except i have no idea what was recovered as I cannot see anything new on the summary view.

[welchbloke]

I've encountered an issue with shipbuilding.  I have 3 ships 99.5% completed that should have been completed the following day.  Advance by one day and the ships are still 99.5% and due tomorrow.  I repeated a single day advance 4 times and still the task hasn't completed.  In the end I had to advance by a fifth day and the task then completed.  Is shipbuilding managed in 5 day increments?  If so why was the completion date reported as 4 days earlier?

[jfelten]

I've encountered an issue with shipbuilding.  I have 3 ships 99.5% completed that should have been completed the following day.  Advance by one day and the ships are still 99.5% and due tomorrow.  I repeated a single day advance 4 times and still the task hasn't completed.  In the end I had to advance by a fifth day and the task then completed.  Is shipbuilding managed in 5 day increments?  If so why was the completion date reported as 4 days earlier?

I can't authoritatively answer your question and I will be interested in the official answer, but until Steve answers I can say that in my own limited experience there does seem to be some sort of 5 day breakpoints to the game.

[Charlie Beeler]

Background:  This is from my test game where I early on discovered a pre TN NPR which for 25 years have been trying to claw themselves up to TN tech.  They just recently built their first ship and are researching Jump Theory which will take them about 12 years at their current research pace.  

While they were trapped on their HW I formed a geo team on the slim hope it would find some additional minerals on their HW.  Once it had made its attempt the event log was cluttered every turn with that geo team reporting in that they couldn't do anything.  After several hundred times seeing that I tried to get rid of it by assigning the team to a PDC they had built.  That worked for muting that message but now I can find no way to get that first team off of the PDC.  It is trapped there as far as I can tell.  I can't order the PDC to offload the team as that is not a valid PDC order.  And the teams tab of the econ window I used to assign them to the PDC doesn't seem to have a way to reverse that assignment.  

Later, when they finally researched engines and built their first geo survey ship, I formed a new 2nd geo team to go along since the 1st geo team was trapped in the PDC's brig.  But when I created the 2nd team, it showed as "[unknown species] rating 0" and I can't load it and it keeps giving geo reports that it can't find new minerals on the HW but with the team's name blank.:

"29th September 2035 20:05:06,New Home,New Home,The  does not believe any new mineral deposits can be found by the further geological survey of New Home-A III"
(note the double space between "The" and "does", that is where the team's name is supposed to go).

I can not load this no-name team on a ship.  And I could find no way to disband this dysfunctional team.  Is there any way to disband a team?   I even looked on the F4 officers window and could find no way to see who was on this team or how to remove them from the team.

I then formed a 3rd team which formed O.K. and that I was able to load on a ship.  But I still have that no-name team sitting on the HW and I'm back to getting that message every turn cluttering up the event log.  And I still have the original geo team stuck on the PDC.

In the Ships screen (F6) you should be able to transfer the team using the cargo/ground units tab.