Auto Pilot Problems.

Do you play with or without auto turn, so that I can play the same way when I go to try and reproduce it?

Without.

The problem seems to affect both me and the computer players. There's a sector with four or five AI ships that haven't moved in a long time.

Usualy I see this, when my ship meets a ship of another race while on autopilot and has to stop.

I have been trying to find some kind of pattern of behavior with this failure and keep coming up with even stranger things happening.

First, I think the autopilot failure has become much worse in this build. In the previous builds it was taking something over 30 ships on autopilot on a gigantic galaxy to cause ships on autopilot to stop moving.

Second, on this build, the failure is not just the ships on autopilot. It also includes failure of the "next ship" routine to select all of the ships on manual control. With only 5 ships, three on manual and two on autopilot, for example, the game selected one of the ships on manual, which I moved, then went and moved the two that were on autopilot. It did not select any other ships on manual control until I learned that the "next" button would force it to do so. I have since learned that even the "next" button is not competely reliable. The more ships I have the worse it gets and the more difficult it is to determine what is failing. At one point I had taken all of the ships off of autopilot and was moving them all manually (4 scouts, one "hero", a few battle cruisers and defenders I had discovered in anomalies, and maybe more than 10 colony ships). Then I started gradually putting them back onto autopilot again. I am now back to using the ship list to make sure that all of them have moved.

As should be apparent, as it is the only way to exercise this level of control, I have autoturn OFF.

I have been trying to identify the specific difficulty a ship has that causes it to fail to move while on autopilot. So far it looks like it involves "path finder" problems, that is, something changes - either along the path that was planed for the ship or near the ship, or during the last turn the ship approached or passed an obstacle. As I said, this is only as far as I can observe. I may be way off as to the cause.

I have as yet absolutely no clue as to why the next ship routine fails to select all of the ships on manual before selecting those on autopilot.

One last comment - I have tried to assure that the download I have is not corrupted, but with an uninstall and re-install taking all day if the DGM encounters NO problems or excess server loads it is very hard to tell whether I have a good copy or not.

Cheers,
Jack

Putting something in the way works with the AI too sometimes. I have repetedly put a scout in front of an aproaching AI Colony ship on rout to a good system. The Colony ship wouldn´t move the next turn, and often didn´t move even after the scout moved away, so I got my own Colony ship in.

Yes, I know, real cheap.

Way back when the "path finding" code was introduced (one of the Alphas) I tried to block another race's colony ship with one of my ships. It did not work. With all that has been reported on ships getting hung, the conditions I have seen that seem to make them get hung, being able to block ships, and some of the wierd movement when watching ships on autopilot, I think the first place to look for this problem would be the "path finding" code. Perhaps even the second and third places to look.

Cheers,
Jack