Ships not flying to rally points.

AFAIK this has been an issue for a while. In v1.2 this appeared to happen randomly. In v1.31 it seems to be fixed except for the turn immediately following the load of a saved game. I don't have any experience with v1.4 or the Beta as of yet.

This does become a major pain in the late stages of a gigantic map game, because the turns become quite long and pretty much every turn follows the load of a save game.

BTW what rev are you playing?

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 have been a victim of this rather nasty bug for a long time. Iam not sure when it began but its been bugging me atleast from 1.2 to 1.4. I have not experienced this bug with DA beta, not atleast yet.

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'

on the same note, I've also seen this bug happen on the turn after a ship leaves the production planet. Ie, ship made, autopilot for first turn happens, then on second turn, the ship doesn't know where it's going. this seems to be planet specific though, since I've only really seen this on 1 planet (on a gigantic map)

case id: 16241 (1.4X save) is the save that it can be found on.

#edit: oh, and this doesn't require being the turn after a load. I tend not to reload on gigantic maps.

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.

Who's central intelligence?

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

basically, the more auto-pilot ships in a round that get built, the more likely it is that one or two, or more, may not get scheduled.

it could be possible that it's related to hardware, as I've only a 2 GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 laptop with ATI on board graphics. On very big maps with lots of ships moving (mine + AI), I get alot of slowdown.

but it could also just be a volume of Auto-pilot ships issue. would have to see the actual code to determine that.

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 have also heard the misdirected autopilot and “lost” autopilot (I.E. lost its destination on game load and is now sitting in the middle of space) can be affected by low real memory. I used to have problems with both in every game in 1.2. I didn’t see it in 1.31 (but only played one game on that version) and haven’t seen it yet in the 1.4 version game I started yesterday…But I also went from 1Gb of RAM to 2Gb of RAM when I upgraded from 1.2 to 1.31. So either one of these fixed it, or I have just been lucky recently. These are huge, abundant all games.

BTW I think this would fit nicely with an autopilot timeout theory, after all I'm still swapping for some things with 2Gb of real, but a lot less than I used to.

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.

Can't tell you how much of a bummer it is to hear that. Hopefully my current luck will hold. It's a huge pain when it happens late game on a big map.

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.

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?

I just was playing the threeway scenario, which is small and only has three civs. I had all of two rally points. One for constructors, one for war ships. The one for constructors worked fine. I pumped about thirty constructors out to it without issue.
The warship rally on the other hand, absolutely would not work after two ships. The planet they were set from would still auto launch them, but they just sat there. I cleared it from the planet and reset it, and it still wouldn't work. 1.4 game and with it being such a small setup, I doubt my RAM or Processing power had anything to do with it. Sure hope they track this one down before the DA release.

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

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

It's not that the ships are losing their autopilot paths, it's that the autopilot is not being set to begin with. The ship autolaunches from the starport and just sits there. The bug should be easy to duplicate. Simply create a rally point, set your planets to use it, and hit the turn button for 20-30 turns.

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)