Some more bugs for the pile

The first and biggest one is the game seems to crash every 50 saves or so.
It's very annoying because it not only crashes but screws up the save file in doing so if you load that saved game it will promptly crash before even getting back into the game.
And it doesn't seem to happen for any noticeable reason. I can load a game saved the turn before, do the same things, and it won't happen again.

Another big and annoying one is that clicking the turn button doesn't seem to be properly ending the turn.
When I end the turn it clearly ends auto pilot ships move, enemy ships zoom around, and what not.
But then when I get priority again it seems that half of my ships didn't actually update and are still sitting around with out any movement. And it's not limited to my ships either, several of the AI's ships don't seem to be updating either.
I mean it's pretty clear something is wrong.
In the most recent example I had fleet set to attack an AI fleet. Both of our fleets are out of movement. I click end turn. I check both fleets, neither one has moved and neither has any movement points, I click end turn again. Same thing no movement. I click it a third time and finally they get some movement points.
It's very annoying.

Another bug that's been bothering me is the ships seem to switch priority too fast. If I order a ship to fly a short distance it does it so quickly that when the game jumps to your next ship that it will respond to the same click and fly to the same spot, wasting it's movement.
Again very annoying.


And those are just the ones I encountered since patching. I had a list like 3 times as long when playing the base version. =/
17,770 views 13 replies
Reply #2 Top
None of these happen to me and I havent seen people report any of these, can I respectfully suggest that its something entirely your end and not a bug at all? Bugs tend to be commonly experienced if not universally.

Can we just get the whole, "what's your pc specs", "have you got up to date drivers" and "which patch are you playing" out of the way first so that people can start to localise what's going on here. If you post up the first part of your debug.err that should give all the necessary info.
Reply #3 Top
I doubt the second 2 are releated to anything about my computer.
The first one could be.... but should be simple enough to test. I can email someone a copy of one of the saved game files thats screwing it up (when I get home) and see if it causes the same problem.
But anyway. 2.4ghz p4, 2.5 gigs of ram, 256MB x800 radeon, don't recall the motherboard some Gigabyte one... 1TB of hardrive space (serriously ), no sound card.

I'll check out that glitch report sticky. But It's quite long =/ (which shows how buggy this game is...)
Reply #4 Top
Are you sure 3 is not related to the fact that ship selection is maintained when you click on another ship, i.e. click ship 1 then click ship 2 and you'll have both selected? This might be causing multiple ships to go to the same location.

I do vaguely remember some posts on problems with save games cropping up but I think it was something that only a few people seemed to encounter so difficult to track down - see if you can find some of the older posts to see if they have any extra info. or work-arounds.

From what I can see, the sticky has a lot of old bugs that should be fixed - plus people have a tendency to repeat them (either due to forum issues or whatever)!
Reply #5 Top
That seems odd....
How would two ships in diffrent sectors get grouped together. Why would they ever need to be grouped together? And how do I stop it from grouping them together.

My work around is I set it to autosave every other turn and use quick save a lot. That way when some does go wrong (and it goes wrong far to offten) I can load the last saved game.
Reply #6 Top
which shows how buggy this game is


But how many of them are actually bugs? If they really were all bugs, none of us would be able to play the game!!

You will, I can pretty much guarantee you, get a faster answer here if you post up the first chunk of your debug.err when you get home. If people here can't help you, posting on the glitch report is effectively just notifying the devs of the problem and doesn't mean you will get an answer there. It's more things for them to take into consideration for future patches as far as I can see. But it's up to you!

The only thing that springs to mind without seeing your debug.err is that you aren't running the current patch? I can't remember the specific problems in some previous patches but none of your problems above seem to tally with anything I've seen people post about recently!
Reply #7 Top
I have been nothing but a huge proponent of this game since the get go, and when people complained about all of the "issues" with the game, I just took them all with a grain of salt and kept playing -- even ignoring these issues when they popped up on me (which they nearly never did).

BUT... (and you had to know it was coming). I have definitely seen the "Turn Button Issue" Reyals is pointing out, and a lot more in the recent past. I'll click on the button to end the turn and seemingly nothing happens. I'll even click on it a second time, and nothing will happen, again. Last night, this happened after a turn in which a fleet of my ships enroute to intercept a fleet of Drengin ships that were targeting a starbase of mine. My ships were faster AND had all of their movement points, not to mention they had a shorter distance to travel to intercept. After clicking on the Turn button, my ships didn't move at all, and the Drengin Fleet did... and, in turn they beat me to my starbase and wiped it out. Sure... just re-load you say. Well, I hadn't saved in about 8 turns, and I had to go back and do all of the same crap again. Not a deal-breaker in the game, but definitely annoying. Sometimes after clicking on the Turn button, ships will move, but the time for completion for a research project/ship being built won't change (and I haven't changed ANYTHING in regards to production and economy in the previous turn).

The crashes have become a little bit more frequent for me, too. Not specifically in the scenario Reyals is pointing out, but in some pretty weird circumstances. Strangely enough, they've only been happening lately. Mostly when the Combat Viewer is about to load -- and this is probably because my ship designs are pretty complex (video issues, I'm sure -- so I let these go). However, last night was a weird instance of repetitive crashes. In trying to place a Xeno lab on the surface of a specific planet, the game would crash. Regardless of the tile I chose, the game would CTD. So, I just gave up on placing a lab on that planet, and kept playing. Has anyone else ever seen anything like this?

To close...

Drivers updated, all
Intel P4 3200
1 Gb of RAM
ATI x800
250 Mb HDD

Oh and Reyals, not trying to hijack your post!

Thanks all,

- Vern
Reply #8 Top
For the record I have his 3rd bug happen to me often.

I click a ship tell it to move and whatever the next ship to be autoselected is ends up flying towards the same spot.

They could be clear across the map from each other or a few tiles away, still happens from time to time.

-Chris-
Reply #9 Top
which shows how buggy this game is


Actually it shows how buggy the users are. If you read that thread carefully you will see that most things mentioned are either repitition of a known problem or misunderstanding or dislike of some feature or lack of feature.

The term buggy is often misused on this forum.
Reply #10 Top
Citizen Reyals

3/23/2006 9:08:22 AM


The first and biggest one is the game seems to crash every 50 saves or so.
It's very annoying because it not only crashes but screws up the save file in doing so if you load that saved game it will promptly crash before even getting back into the game.

I've haven't had a crash since the first patch, personally.

Another big and annoying one is that clicking the turn button doesn't seem to be properly ending the turn.
This happens to me all the time. The turn button takes two or three clicks to end the turn. No idea why this happens.

When I end the turn it clearly ends auto pilot ships move, enemy ships zoom around, and what not.
But then when I get priority again it seems that half of my ships didn't actually update and are still sitting around with out any movement. And it's not limited to my ships either, several of the AI's ships don't seem to be updating either.
I mean it's pretty clear something is wrong.
I don't pay enough attention to notice if this happens in my game. I usually move all my ships manually during my turn, rather than let the autopilot do it.

Another bug that's been bothering me is the ships seem to switch priority too fast. If I order a ship to fly a short distance it does it so quickly that when the game jumps to your next ship that it will respond to the same click and fly to the same spot, wasting it's movement.
Again very annoying.


And those are just the ones I encountered since patching. I had a list like 3 times as long when playing the base version. =/


That is very annoying, and it happens to me frequently. A related issue is when you select a ship that's in a stack, and then select a different ship, not in the stack. When you move that second ship, half of the time the last ship you had selected in the stack will move, too. That's been the one that's irked me the most. I think the issue has been identified, and is being worked on, thankfully. In the meantime, I make sure to manually unselect ships in a stack before moving my next ship.
Reply #11 Top
I have also experience the turn issue and the issue where two different units respond to the same click.

Sometimes I wish that the turns were more distinguishable. And I wish that cycling through units didn't seem so random. Another thing, and maybe this exists but I don't know for sure. I wish there was a button that skiped a units turn without selecting guard. That way, I am sure that I looked at all units befor I hit end turn. Also, maybe it could show a little insignia for the race that is currently moving while it isn't my turn. Kinda like RTW, or at least show different color squares in the corner like Civ III. Something. The turns just seem to run together in this game and sometimes I wonder if the turn even happened or not. Which I guess is half the point of this thread.
Reply #12 Top
The OP mentions failed turns and crashes after lots of saves - there's definitely a failed turn after a reload. Connection? I workaround by not going to bed in the middle of a war. It's not great, and my boss is getting tetchy about my punctuality, but it means tomorrow's reload won't be just before a critical engagement.

As for multi-select, these days I make a point of selecting a nearby star or planet between ship or fleet selections. Disbanding fleets and then selecting other ships or fleets practically guarantees the bug, so do your fleet management near a stationary body.
Reply #13 Top
The first and biggest one is the game seems to crash every 50 saves or so.
It's very annoying because it not only crashes but screws up the save file in doing so if you load that saved game it will promptly crash before even getting back into the game.
And it doesn't seem to happen for any noticeable reason. I can load a game saved the turn before, do the same things, and it won't happen again.


I had this happen often before the first patch. If you haven't updated yet, you should do that. Also, make sure that you update your video drivers.

I have noticed that auto-pilot "bug" too. It is nice having an extra turn to get away from the Dreadlords when they are chasing you though.