I'm on the latest version. Just downloaded the game from Stardock yesterday on a fresh install of windows on a new Core 2 Duo machine and noticed the same bug. However, I've had the problem for about 6 months on another machine, and throughout many versions.

Searching these forums reveal that another poster also reported this, but then someone asked him to post a bug report - and, well, you know how threads tend to become unreadable and die once they contain a bug report

I'd really like to see some action on this bug, but at the same time, I realize that DA is probably taking up all of the developers bandwidth. Hopefully, as sam0t suggests it's been fixed on DA, but one of the things I've noticed about it is that it tends to happen only when there is a *lot* of autopilot movement going on. This problem may only be noticeable on gigantic size games and even then later in the game. Also this may be dependant on your cpu speed.

It takes me a long time to finish a game (this bug has a lot to do with that) so I'm still working on a v1.31 game. I'm sure the developers aren't interested in a bug report about v1.31. But AFAIK v1.4 is at the core of DA and should be of interest to the developers.

The best possibility of getting this addressed is if anyone has a save game that reliably demonstrates the problem. If so, they should zip it up and email it as an attachment to gc2bugs@stardock.com along with a short description of how to replicate the problem. Anyone that could do this would have my eternal gratitude.

I actually do have such a save game for v1.31 that I could send in, but as I said, the first response would probably be "Does this happen on v1.4".

I wouldn't think it mattered whether it's v1.40x.053 or v1.40x.061.

I've seen it as well, but central intelligence says that it's 'random and light'

Who's central intelligence?

As I mentioned, the behavior in v1.2 was definitely different than in v1.31, so I wouldn't be suprised (acutally almost expect) that it's behavior is different in v1.4.

Also, I have no reason to back this up, but I suspect that a slower cpu will see this more than a faster one. Since my cpu is at the bottom end of the recommended range (900 MHz), I see this a *lot* more than occasionally. In my current game, of 40 ships produced and auto launched to a rally point, easily half of them just sit there.

Since undependable functionality is barely better than no functionality at all, I usually just do all my movement by hand. When I'm in the middle of a war, moving literally hundreds of ships and fleets, it should be no surprise that a single turn usually takes an hour (or more). Also I don't leave my PC powered up when not in use, so I pretty much have to save after every turn.

Anyway, I'm glad you reported the problem with a save game that can duplicate the issue, regardless of the frequency. Thanks.

movie quote... effectively it means that it's not random and light...

Oh. Like the oxymoron "military intelligence". Er, sort of.

The only reason I bring up cpu performance is that I think I recall Kryo mentioning something about some kind of autopilot timeout. I couldn't find the thread though. Anyway it's the vaguest of guesses on my part.

It’s kind of funny to me, when I was designing PC’s a 386DX33 was a fine machine, now 2 GHz is “slow”. Plus, I seem to spend more time waiting for my PC now than I ever did then. It's just that damned Microsoft.

I've had this problem often also. I haven't noticed it recently, but it has definitely happened to me with the current update.

I play medium and large games and have 1.5 GB of ram and a fair amount processor power, so I don't suspect that memory has a whole lot to do with it, although I may be wrong.

I never mentioned this issue before, but I'd certainly love to see it fixed.

I've seen this occasionally, one ship here or there losing it's way. Never thought much about it. One time though, I loaded a save that had about 20 ships on autopilot and about 16 of them had lost there destination. That's the absolute worst case I've seen though and it's so infrequent that I never thought it important enough to mention.
I am kinda bottom barrel on ram 512MB PC-2100 with an XP3000 CPU, but I don't play a lot of large games either.
I will have a chance at seeing if it's in DA when I next load it up. I have quite a few ships on auto in the game, so I'll report back if I see it.  

It's not fixed in Dark Avatar

From the point of view of those that would like this to be fixed, this is actually good news. Do you have any documentation of the problem?

If you have a ship lose its autopilot path, immediately exit the game and post your debug here.

I believe it is related to other ships entering and leaving an auto-fleet rally point.

I could be wrong but stardock should know about this bug if anyone there has ever used the feature late-game for more than a few turns.

It is clearly not a hardware issue

memory? I have 2 gigs of fast corsairs
processor? dual core AMD64 3800 overclocked (yes it happens when not overclocked as well)
video card? PCIEx16 NVidia 7600 with 512 megs
drivers? all the latest

I never assume a hardware/driver issue because it almost never is (Some game companies like electronic arts like to blame anyone but themselves, but thankfully Stardock isnt one of them .. there seems to be an attempt to get at the root of problems here)