4.0b Bugs

[schroeam]

I'm not sure if this has been reported or not, but the auto-assign of commanders seems to assign the change of command for all commands on the same day.  I have 36 months selected as my tour length and haven't tried other lengths.   If a ship is not in the home port then it's commander is just signed on for another tour.  In the past I believe that if a ship was away when the commander's tour was up then he was relieved as soon as that ship arrived at a colony with available commanders. IIRC.

Adam.

[sloanjh]

Civilian fleets show up in the list of potential targets for construction in the shipyard tab.

John

[sloanjh]

I'm not sure if this has been reported or not, but the auto-assign of commanders seems to assign the change of command for all commands on the same day.  I have 36 months selected as my tour length and haven't tried other lengths.   If a ship is not in the home port then it's commander is just signed on for another tour.  In the past I believe that if a ship was away when the commander's tour was up then he was relieved as soon as that ship arrived at a colony with available commanders. IIRC.

Adam.

Yes, this was reported.  It's working as intended - Steve changed the behavior to better match good officers with good commands.

John

[sloanjh]

There's no way to turn off civie colonization to a planet.

Because of the previously noted bug in the colonization code, my colony on Venus is perpetually overpopulated - the civie colony ships can throw people in faster than anyone can throw infrastructure in.  What I'd like to do is to declare Venus "frozen" for colonists, so the civie colony ships ignore it.  Since that option wasn't available, I tried declaring it a "source" for colonists.  Unfortunately, whenever I switched away, the button would pop right back to "destination".  It appears that "source/destination" flag is just a logical in the DB that allows you to change the status of a population>25million to "destination", but doesn't allow changing a population<25million to "source" (or "none/frozen").

John

[schroeam]

Does anyone know what is causing the following:

Error 9 was reported by Aurora
Subscript out of range
Please report to stevewalmsley@btinternet.com

I get it about forty to fifty times during each timestep.

Adam.

Edit:  So, the error pops up over one hundred and thirty times now (80+ then a 2 second break followed by 50+)  and seems to increase by about 7 and 5 each time increment.  Weird.

[Sotak246]

This really isn't a bug but something seems to be off.  This is the set up:  I found 2 systems with Precursors in them, in the first 3 (later IDed as DDGs) ships destroyed 6 CAs and 3CLs before the 2 DDs left managed to flee.  The other system had 2 laser armed ships.  Went back to system one and searched for over 2 games months and could not find the enemy fleet.  The second system I over killed the 2 ships with guided missle cruisers.  I then occupied 1 of the pecurser bases in system 2.  After a few turns it turned from conqured to occupied, at that point the fleet in system 1 surrendured.  It said that due to lack of missles and occupation of a colony the fleet surrendured.  If the pecursers are supposed to be cut off from each other how did a fleet 6 systems away know one of its colonies were occupied?  On a side note, I am kicking myself for not letting the last 2 DDs of my destoyed fleet take on the DDGs,  the surviving senior officer must have paniced.

Mark

[schroeam]

Here's one for you...

1. The Plan:  I have four freighter task groups ferrying automines from Earth to Pluto.
2. Implementation:  For ease of typing I make TG 2,3,and 4 subordinate to TG 1 and copy orders from TG 1 to TG 2, 3, and 4.  Done and checked.
3.  Execution: Somewhere mice have taken over control of TG 2, 3, and 4 because the ships will travel from Earth to Pluto and back, supposedly moving automines and refueling in the process, but low and behold, they all three run out of fuel on a return trip from Pluto.  I checked the orders listed went something like this:

Load Automated Mine Earth
Unload Automated Mine Earth
Refuel from Colony Earth
Freighter Maintenance Check Earth

4.  Analysis:  I'm thinking there is a bug in the copy order's routine.  The last time I checked after refueling the freighters and letting them continue they were scheduled to unload the mines on Pluto, but weren't carrying any.  I checked the supply on Earth, >60 available for pickup.

Any thoughts?

Adam.

[schroeam]

Another Issue... If a Geology team member dies they remain part of the team and can't be swapped out with anyone else.  I guess we would just end up with a bunch of zombie teams.  That should improve their efficiency as they won't need time to sleep, eat, or smoke.  

Adam.

[sloanjh]

Probably more of a feature than a bug, but....

I have a colony on Venus (colony cost 40).  I originally put it there because I wanted the civies to colonize it - the Quixotic plan was to transfer a few terraforming installations onto it and slowly (over the course of 1000 years or so) bring the atmospheric pressure down to something livable.  The reason for going there is that Venus has the only significant stockpile of Sorium in the system, so I could also have the population work the mines, or put automines on if I wanted the population to concentrate on terraforming.

I've had 3 problems with this plan show up:

1)  The civies have gone wild with colonizing it, with no way for me to tell them not to.  I've mentioned this in other threads - the new realization is that this would have happened even if I'd only wanted to put automines only on Venus, or if Venus were populated with Venutians, and I needed a colony from which to launch a ground invasion.

2)  Since the colony cost is 40, there's (obviously) a HUGE ratio of infrastructure/pop.  Apparently, infrastructure takes workers to run/maintained (as opposed to sitting there passively).  On Venus, it takes so many workers that my "Agriculture and Environmental" category is 100%.  In other words, I don't have any workers available to do anything useful (e.g. terraforming) - they're all busy plugging leaks in the environmental system.  I understand how this makes sense in such an extreme environment, but from a game-play point of view it kind of removes any motivation for boots on the ground (plus why are all those colonists flocking to someplace where they can't make any money?).  That's why I'm calling this a "feature" and not a bug.

3)  I also have a 0-cost world, Olwa, a couple of transits away that I've been colonizing.  It has zero minerals, so I'm making it a research colony - so far I've transported one lab.  The it has roughly the same population (3.3 million) as Venus (3. million.  The major difference is that Olwa requires an R2 governor, while Venus requires an R6!!!!  I suspect that the infrastructure is to blame here - it's probably counting as "installations" and making Aurora think the colony is more important than it actually is.  This one is why I posted this in "bugs" and not suggestions - I think it's more a bug (or at least an unintended side-effect) than a feature.

I would propose that infrastructure not count at all for the governor's required rank, and (possibly) that its contribution to the environmental worker's load by cut by e.g. a factor of 10x.

John

[Father Tim]

2.  A world requires a minimum of 5% x ColCost of its population in Agricultural & Environment work, so any colony with cost 20.0 or more will be entirely devoted to survival.  Consider yourself lucky, as in the previous edition I discovered that A&E ws uncapped, and a 62.5 ColCost world required 325% of its pop in A&E, leaving minus 225% for Industry.

Any world with a ColCost of more than 8 or so should be (and with 20.0 or more must be) terraformed with terraforming ships.  Keep in mind the ColCost reduction technologies, but realize that not only are they expensive in terms of tech points, they're of greatest use to the most marginal of colonies.  ColCost 2.0 worlds tend to get terraformed down to 0.0 fairly quickly, whereas ColCost 40 or 60 worlds take centuries, and might only become 30/45 with tech.

I understand te desire to set up one or two terraformig Installations and leave them to do their thing, but Terraforming ships is almost always the best way to go.

[Hawkeye]

If you want the civies to stop colonizing (albeit alltogether) just set your HW and any colony with 25+ mio people to receive colonists. Over the next few updates, the civies will offer all their ships for sale. Buy the colony ships and after that, turn your HW to source for colonists again. All ships, you have not allready bought will be withdrawn from sell (which should be the freighters, continuing to provide free infra).

Yes, I know, a nasty exploit, but those stupid colonizers are realy irritating me, so I think it´s ok to rip them off.

[Starkiller]

I don't know how many times this has occurred, but every time I go through an unexplored JP, this error comes up, I'm not sure why. It's happened
with every one lately, and many past ones. This is the first time I actually thought of getting a screen cap. I can be dense sometimes.



Eric

[Hawkeye]

The problem of aurora seemingly hanging has been brought up allready. I thought it was not hanging but working hard on the computer controlled NPRs.

Therefore, I had the windows task manager running while playing.

In my game, aurora now seems to hang every 3 or 4 5-day-updates.

The funny thing is, task manager tells me, aurora is still using about 50% of processor power, so initially, I let it run. But after some 90 minutes I simply couldn´t wait any longer and shut the process down.

After restarting, nothing extrodinary came up in the events report

It is allways at the end of a 5-day-cycle (I have 6 houre sub-pulses on)
Other than that, I can´t spot any reoccuring factor (I had this happen some 30 times now)

The fact, that aurora keeps working and working leads me to belive, the program enters some kind of endless loop (not that I know anything about programming, mind you)

[sloanjh]

The problem of aurora seemingly hanging has been brought up allready. I thought it was not hanging but working hard on the computer controlled NPRs.

Therefore, I had the windows task manager running while playing.

In my game, aurora now seems to hang every 3 or 4 5-day-updates.

The funny thing is, task manager tells me, aurora is still using about 50% of processor power, so initially, I let it run. But after some 90 minutes I simply couldn´t wait any longer and shut the process down.

After restarting, nothing extrodinary came up in the events report

It is allways at the end of a 5-day-cycle (I have 6 houre sub-pulses on)
Other than that, I can´t spot any reoccuring factor (I had this happen some 30 times now)

The fact, that aurora keeps working and working leads me to belive, the program enters some kind of endless loop (not that I know anything about programming, mind you)

Hi Ralph,

  It looks like you've landed on the same hang I did.  I managed to make it through another few years of game time, (by ctrl-C'ing out and restarting, sometimes several times), but eventually it was totally hung.

  About the 50% thing - you've probably got a two-core CPU (like I do).  If so, only one of the cores is used by Aurora, which apparently isn't multi-threaded (multi-threading is hard , especially if not designed in from day 1).  In that case it will only show up as working 50%.  The way to be sure is to open the performance tab on the task manager - if you see two panels arranged horizontally under "CPU Usage History" (where there used to be only one on your old machine), then it's a 2-core machine.  At work we have 8-core boxes - there's 8 little panels there.

John

[Thorgarth]

I have had two non-jump capable ships transit JPs.  Both have completed 2 such jumps.