V1.4x starbase and early alliance issue

Bugs or intended features?

I was playing my 2nd game of V1.4x and I thought since I haven't really been challenged recently I'd go for a completely new strategy, the "early rush". Playing as the Drengin I immediately grabbed 2 planets and began research and construction of military spacecraft. I decided to go after my closest enemy, the Thalens. I destroyed their research mining starbase and fully expected relations to drop from "neutral" to "at war" but I did not expect the Terrans to come to their aid especially not due to an alliance as the pop-up told me. This attack happened in the first 20 or so turns so I couldn't fathom how they could have researched the tree to alliances already. So I checked on it and confirmed that neither race had the alliance tech and after checking their relations they were not allies at all! Is there some random feature that could cause this or is this a bug?

During the course of the next couple months while fighting the war on two fronts. I constructed a military starbase to help me against the Thalen. I upgraded it to give additional attack power to nearby craft and parked a fleet on top to protect it from attack. Fortunately I also added the 2 modules that give the starbase some fighting capabilities because the Thalens were launching ship after ship and attacking the starbase. My fleet was not protecting it at all. Additionally the my fleet stats read "3" beam attack power but it should have been "4". (2 ships that started with 1 attack power each should total 4) This was corrected to "6" when I added the 2nd module to give attack power +2, but read "7" when I added the 3rd ship to the fleet. I cannot confirm if this was simply a display error or if in fact the ships were not getting the full value of the modules.

So my questions on these...
1. Were there changes that allows ships to target the starbase and ignore stacked fleets?
2. Are there known display errors with starbase assist on fleets? or bugs with the assist modules?

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I think the answer to your first question is the same as to how the game decides what to attack in stacked ships/fleets. It sounds like, since you added attack to your base, it had higher attack stats than your fleet. The game always seems to make you or the AI attack the most powerful fleet/ship/starbase in a stack. If your starbase was more powerful than your fleet, than it becomes the first target. I'm willing to bet that if you had no weapons on your base, the fleet would be attacked first every time.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Is there some random feature that could cause this or is this a bug?

Just a guess, but it may have just been a bug involving the wrong 'assist' text being used, and the Terrans just declared war to help but not due to an alliance. In any case, if you have a save from that point in the game (preferably just before, if the same thing happens each time) you can send it to gc2bugs@stardock.com for the devs to examine.

1. Were there changes that allows ships to target the starbase and ignore stacked fleets?

No. But starbases are targeted by the same formula as fleets are: Total Attack / (Total Defense+HP). Whichever ship/fleet/SB has the highest result from that calcuation gets shot at first. Assist module bonuses are not included in that calculation, so your ships with their 1 point of attack were most likely counted as lower priority targets.

2. Are there known display errors with starbase assist on fleets? or bugs with the assist modules?

None that I'd heard of myself, but if you can reproduce it you should report it on the 1.4X bug thread stickied in this forum.

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Thanks for the quick responses.
So the first is intended but perhaps the wrong text string was used. That's good. At least there isn't some galactic conspiracy against me.

2nd. My misunderstanding that fleets automatically protected starbases. Good, now I know and as we all have heard "knowing is half the battle".

3rd. I'll try check it again to see if I can duplicate the error. Although I'm not sure how many ships I have remaining. (The Terran declared war on me again and their ships are better than mine were)

One more thing while I have peoples attention. (And I'm too lazy to look through other posts right now) I noticed that the foreign relations screen sometimes says "string not found" (or something similar) instead of displaying the current status (at war, hostile, friendly, etc.) I'll check to see if this can be duplicated as well.

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"String Not Found"?! I had that error with the Terrans in V1.3. All their relations except mine started at "String Not Found". If the Terrans declared war on them, then the relations indicator would work normally afterward. However, if someone declared war them, then every race that still had "String Not Found" would declare war on the attacker. It created such chaos I stopped including the Terrans as competition until I was finally able to update to V1.31. I would hate for that particular bug to make a comeback.

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I dont remember for sure which race had the string not found error but I noticed it again in the game I played yesterday.

I started a new game and once again attacked my nearest rival. The Terrans in this case and I had 2 races join in the fight to save them. The Yor and that minor race the Akalians (sp). Both civs "honored their alliances" and once again none of the civs were allied or even had the alliance tech (it did not appear in the trade window). I'm pretty sure that I can duplicate this in a new game that I'll save immediately before the attack.

I checked on the starbase modules issue I reported above and it appears that the ships are getting the attack values individually (attack power 1 ships did 2 points of damage) but the fleet stats are being displayed incorrectly. It seems that sometimes takes the fleet stats then applies the starbase module stats to this total.

How do I e-mail a save game file?

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