4.26 Bugs

[sloanjh]

Aurora is not interrupting properly when an NPR transits into a system whose WP is under observation by active sensors.

I've had a picket watching the WP into an NPR home system, about 1M km off with active sensors with a range of about 12M km.  The NPR had already sent through an gate construction ship (based on size and behavior).  I just did a 140,000 second update (which resolves to 40 hours), and got a interrupt enumerating 3 new thermal contacts at t+8 hours.  When I went to look, the NPR had sent 3 ships through the WP, but they had already moved out of range of my actives - about 15M km.  Fortunately, I had just saved, so I reloaded the DB and ran the same update with 30 second timestep (yeah for the rewrite - it didn't take long at all).  This time it worked ok - they were detected at 6 hours, 31 minutes (note that they were already off the WP, but I'm willing to chalk that up to "activation lag" by bored picket sensor operators).

I am stepping through the code to try and figure out what happened. The code is set to generate an interrupt if a transit is actively detected by a hostile race or if the transiting ship is only picked up on passive sensors and its identity is unknown. I am guessing this was a neutral ship, in which case I probably need to adjust the logic so that time also stops for neutral NPRs but perhaps not neutral player races. Or perhaps just for recently discovered neutral NPRs. Before I shoot off in this direction, could you confirm if the NPR was neutral or hostile?

Yes, it was a neutral NPR.

From my experience later in the game (where they had commercial ships in my home system, and were interrupting every few hours of game time), I'm not convince that throwing more interrupts in is a good thing.  I think this is a very difficult problem for you to solve, since what is needed is the ability for Aurora to read the mind of the player as to what's an "important" contact that needs an interrupt and what's noise.  This is especially difficult since exactly the same event (detecting a transit) can vary in importance according to the current situtation.  I've had the following thoughts about it:

1)  I think there has to be a way for a player to select (on a race-by-race and/or system-by-system) whether or not he wants an interrupt to be thrown by a "harmless" (non-hostile) event.  I suspect the easiest way to do this is to put a "trusted" flag into diplomatic relations, which can be toggled.  If a race is trusted, only hostile acts (e.g. missile launch) should cause an interrupt.  There might be levels of trust too, e.g. trust commercial ships but not military, although I'm not convinced there's much added benefit from this extra complexity.  One way to think of this is as rules-of-engagement - the rules for a trusted race would be "don't interfere, but report their actions", with the processing of the report happening at the end of the update.

2)  I think that NPRs have to be inclined towards trusting others  In particular, they should trust any race for whom they're carrying cargo - otherwise you run into the situation I had with my home system.  You might need to cheat a little here, and have the interrupt decision code "peek" at the detected fleet's orders to see if there's hostile intent - if there is then an interrupt happens and the NPR can change its behavior.

3)  One thing I'd like to see is a "contact acquired" to "contact lost" line on the screen (similar to the movement tails) for contacts which didn't cause an interrupt but made it out of sensor range before being lost.  This comes back to the RoE "observe and report" idea - you get the event notification at the end of the update (as it is now), but you also get a visual cue as to where the contact was headed so you can go look for it if it's going in an unexpected direction.  If I'd had this, it wouldn't have been a big deal that I didn't interrupt when the aliens transitted, since I'd know where they were going.

4)  Just remembered this one while typing the last bit - it would be nice to have a "Move in direction xxx" order, as opposed to "move to a waypoint".  Then you could send ships searching along a bearing towards a lost contact, rather than having to set up a waypoint.

John

[sloanjh]

The civie transport companies seem to think that a comet mining colony (automated mines only) out by the orbit of Pluto is a valid trade location - about 2/3 of the civie fleet just went on a wild goose chase out there....

That is weird. I assume the comet mining colony has no demand or supply for any trade goods? Any chance it is a huge comet that actually has a colony cost?

Steve

Just checked....

No and No.  0 for imports and exports on the trade tab, and N/A colony cost on the F9 screen.

I suspect that what's going on is that I've got an oversupply of trading ships compared to the demand for shipments, so most of my ships are sitting around idle because I don't have any trade centers that have anything to ship.

John

[sloanjh]

This may well be a feature, I was in the middle of a battle v Precursors, everything was going though not necessarily well. I have 21 FACs left but all enemy craft but one are damaged, when I issued an order to follow the target I got "Awaiting Acknowledgement" next to my FACs on the system display, at this point even FACs in the process of rescuing survivors also display this flag, and all my FACs just stay in place while the damaged precursor continues to move.

An explanation would be welcome

Regards

I'm pretty sure this is a feature - it's the order delay that happens for poorly trained task forces.  It can be turned off by unchecking the "Use Inexperienced Fleet Penalties" on the game info screen.

John

[Beersatron]

I managed to get the escort groups to form up on the battle group, but then after the next move order for the battle group came along it all went a bit Pete Tong again!

Anyways, I just threw everything into the one fleet, it means I am constricted as to the length of engagement on the ship killers currently bearing down on me though  

To the point: I am getting the following error when my escorting destroyers are setup as area defense and the ship killers are inside my envelope

Error in AutomatedAntiMissleFire
Object variable or With block variable not set

I have 12 ships with a triple turret each, the error fired 36 times.

The event window is telling me that:
'Targeting Problem - No attempt to fire as the Triple Katana Class Laser Turret is out of range'

The range for the turret is 300km and the FC can see them fine, the missiles are going to hit in the next tick they are that close to me!

**edit**
Tried different PD modes but none are working, the only way to get them to fire on the missiles is to assign each turret a salvo as a target then they will shoot and actually hit a few too!

[IanD]

I'm pretty sure this is a feature - it's the order delay that happens for poorly trained task forces. It can be turned off by unchecking the "Use Inexperienced Fleet Penalties" on the game info screen.

I wondered, about that, but the fact it occurred at the same instant for all FACs in different task groups and not just the ones trying to engage the precursor including one that was half way through rescuing life pods.

Did you know that you can get a couple of thousand survivors on a 1000 ton FAC?    I don’t know were they went to, as I could not select unload survivors when the FAC returned to Earth, think this part was in an earlier bug report.

Have you seen the bug where hostile contacts and wrecks disappear if you try to magnify the combat area? Have to advance time by 5 sec to redisplay.

Regards

[sloanjh]

I'm pretty sure this is a feature - it's the order delay that happens for poorly trained task forces. It can be turned off by unchecking the "Use Inexperienced Fleet Penalties" on the game info screen.

I wondered, about that, but the fact it occurred at the same instant for all FACs in different task groups and not just the ones trying to engage the precursor including one that was half way through rescuing life pods.

I think that part of the logic is whether or not there are enemy forces inside the same star system - if there aren't then Aurora doesn't check for delays.  Did you give an order to all the task groups, or did you just give an order to some, but the others popped into the "delayed" state?  If it's the latter, then I suspect that's a bug - (I think) the delay should only hit for new orders.

Did you know that you can get a couple of thousand survivors on a 1000 ton FAC?  :-)

Steve just talked about the unload bug - if you deselect the filter orders box you should be able to unload them.

Have you seen the bug where hostile contacts and wrecks disappear if you try to magnify the combat area? Have to advance time by 5 sec to redisplay.

I assume this is the bug where contacts disappear and civie contacts from your home system magically show up.  If so, you can get back to a good state simply by re-selecting the system you're in from the pull-down on the left.

John

[IanD]

I think that part of the logic is whether or not there are enemy forces inside the same star system - if there aren't then Aurora doesn't check for delays. Did you give an order to all the task groups, or did you just give an order to some, but the others popped into the "delayed" state? If it's the latter, then I suspect that's a bug - (I think) the delay should only hit for new orders.

I only gave orders to two of five task groups, the rescue was going on long before my FACs caught up with the remaining precursor threat.

I assume this is the bug where contacts disappear and civvie contacts from your home system magically show up. If so, you can get back to a good state simply by re-selecting the system you're in from the pull-down on the left.

Not that, the civ fleets appeared when I used way points, but the wrecks and hostile contacts just disappeared as I increased the magnification to help me decide when to open fire, to reappear when the time was advanced 5sec, I didn't try to refresh the screen.

Regards

[welchbloke]

A VERY minor bug.  When using the SM SY create facility to create shipyards, if you select the Mil Shipyard checkbox the shipyard type in the main shipyard screen comes up as an M.  As soon as you refresh the M changes to the correct entry of N.

[Beersatron]

Set the PD to be none on one ship and then Copy to TG, it doesn't set the other ships PD to none.

[Beersatron]

I am on the Fighter screen and launched one squadron at the start of the fight but held the other 5 on their carriers just in case. But now, I can not launch the rest of the squadrons - I also tried to Launch Parasites from the Task Groups screen.

Another Fighter issue, they do not show up on the Individual Unit Details list and when you double click them on the Task Group 'Ships in Task Group' list they have no details or stats in the Individual Units Details popup that comes up.

I am seriously getting owned by 3 Precursor ships that fire only 2 missiles at a time each (strength 13 doing 30k kms) with PD not working plus I can't launch my fighters as another anti-missile layer. I'm going to have to talk to my Chief of Staff about lopping some heads off the engineering team!!  

[Beersatron]

I am starting to think that my game has become corrupted or something, which would be a right pain in the bum because this has been my favorite by far.

Error in ShowFleetList
Error 35602 was generated by Nodes
Key is not unique in collection

Pretty sure this is what is causing it:

One of my ships, Danube, got hit by missiles and took engine damage so was automatically ejected into it's own fleet (can we have an option to stop this? i'd rather my whole fleet slowed to keep protecting it). I moved it back into the battle fleet and forgot to delete the now empty TG.

Next round of missiles came in and Danube was hit again, automatically ejected into it's own fleet which will have the same name as before - but it hasn't been deleted so is no longer unique. (are you using a string as a unique identifier?)

[Andrew]

There may be a problem with the execution of default orders. My survey squadrons seem to execute their Secondary orders first. My ships carry both geological and gravitational sensors so I gave the first group orders to survey the nearest 3 system locations as primary and the nearest 5 system bodies as secondary , they set off to survey moons . So I gave the second group the opposite orders and they set out to survey survey locations

[welchbloke]

There may be a problem with the execution of default orders. My survey squadrons seem to execute their Secondary orders first. My ships carry both geological and gravitational sensors so I gave the first group orders to survey the nearest 3 system locations as primary and the nearest 5 system bodies as secondary , they set off to survey moons . So I gave the second group the opposite orders and they set out to survey survey locations

Just curious, why do you have both sensors on the same vessel?  Seems an inefficent use to me, I assuming you have either limited shipyards or a 'role-playing' limitation?

[Paul M]

Andrew this is the same as what I reported a few messages upwards.  I didn't think it important to mention that I use mixed survey sensor ships.  The primary order is survey next 3 locations, the secondary order is survey nearest planet or moon and I've had to stop them charging insystem to survey a planet as their first action on entering a system.  They have also gone out of their way to survey some random moon rather than a nearby survey location.

As for why do it...it is more efficient in the long run.  Having a ship do job 1 then sit around doing nothing puts time on its clock for no good purpose.  I tried using seperate types of ships one time and the hassel was not worth it.  So building a deep space survey ship with 2 grav and 1 geo sensor is in terms of micromanagement hassels much more effective.  The same goes for giving all ships jump drives.  It isn't the optimum from a min-maxers point of view I'm sure but there are lots of other considerations that make far from silly.

I now convert over one of my older grav survey ships to function as a jump tender to make use of the special purpose ships but this is always a lot more micromanagement required.

[IanD]

As for why do it...it is more efficient in the long run. Having a ship do job 1 then sit around doing nothing puts time on its clock for no good purpose. I tried using seperate types of ships one time and the hassel was not worth it. So building a deep space survey ship with 2 grav and 1 geo sensor is in terms of micromanagement hassels much more effective. The same goes for giving all ships jump drives. It isn't the optimum from a min-maxers point of view I'm sure but there are lots of other considerations that make far from silly.

But do you lose a more valuable ship to precursors? The first I usually know about Precursors is that a search sensor has been detected, followed by an strength 12 thermal source followed by boom! . If you have your grav-survey vessels separate from your geo-survey ships you only lose half the capability. Since I have found the Precursors don't seem to mind me carrying out a warp point survey, but as soon as I go near the planets.........I have now lost four geo-survey ships to precursors, but no grav-survey ships in exploring the first eight systems.

Regards