For those who don't want to read much, my vote is FIX THIS HORRIFIC BUG!!!

Detailed analysis below:

Frogboy:




As has been pointed out, reloading isn't used solely as a mechanism to "cheat", and I personally find this assumption rather ignorant. Some of us have busy lives and when turns get to the point of 5-10 minutes a piece, a 30-minute playing session means the AI is getting a free turn every 3-6 human turns (18% to 33% advantage). To me, that is indeed a big issue. I try to play for a few hours in a row, but a bug like this certainly explains why I get crushed in the games where my kids interrupt me every turn or two.

I'd vote for fixing this over most other things. As it was, I was constantly frustrated with the game and rather surprised tonight when I actually won on a hard setting (big surprise, I played through without any reloads). Now that I know why I have had some trouble, I'm not as likely to play except when I know I can get 2+ hours in a single play session. As I have a wife, kids, full time job, etc., I don't know if that will be common enough to justify playing many full games all the way through....

Mumblefratz:


Where the game's challenge seemed erratic before, and tended to confuse me, now I am wondering if it's all due to this free AI thing during the games I was playing in "spurts". So yeah, now that I know it goes from "playable" to "impossible" depending on my free time, I have a whole lot less desire to play if I can't guarantee a good deal of free time. If you can't understand our position, maybe you shouldn't try to explain it.

Yeah, I remember that. That might make a fun addition to GC2.

Just so we have some sort of a tally:

I purchased the game (and add-on) for the advanced AI and no cheating. I have a two-year old and a fairly busy life-style and enjoy playing 5-10 turns at a time on gigantic maps.

While this bug did not really effect me before (as I did not know about it), I'm having a hard time getting myself to load up the game and play my standard 5-10 turn session. Call it a "gamer's block" or something, but even though it is psychological it makes me shy away from playing the game.

I guess I can understand that. Someone who plays for long periods gets an easier game. It must be a bit disheartening to know you get the same result as them, even though you did more work. Its not a level playing field.

I want to point out that I agree that this should be fixed but just that it's priority is not necessarily the highest. Secondly, at least from my reading of the description of the problem, the AI doesn't get anything like a "free turn". A free turn implies that they get two turns of production (i.e two turns of actual production, extra MP's and SP's, not just extra rush builds) per turn. This implies that the AI receives what is in effect an extra 100% social and military production bonus over and above any bonus associated with difficulty level. Also a true free turn would imply collecting taxes twice while I collect them once. None of what I've read here seems to suggest that any of this is the case. AFAIK the AI merely gets two opportunities to rush buy per turn. Again AFAIK the AI still has to earn the money required pay for these two rush buys the same way that I do.

I doubt that there's anyone out there that plays any slower than I do. I've spent many two hour sessions pressing end turn only once. With this kind of time spent per turn, saving and restoring once every turn is pretty much inevitable. I've not noticed any significant improvement in AI performance in these cases versus other times when I go through 10 or more turns in a row.

I can understand that there could be a subjective effect that this would have on folks. But I wasn't trying to explain your position I was trying to explain my postion. It's still my position that the game hasn't changed in the least and that if you continue to play the game as you always have then you have every reason to expect similar results.

I haven't seen anyone come out and say it's NOT a true full turn. And explain how the AI can have a production ONLY bonus turn. Since the AI uses the same spending sliders...
Actually I haven't seen a detailed description of what the full consequences of the bug are. That would help determine its priority.

I agree that it would be good for this to be explicitly stated. The best description I've seen is from Kryo's reply #9 in this thread. This seems to be saying that's it's neither a true full turn nor even a production only bonus turn but merely a second opportunity to rush buy. But again I agree that explicit clarification would be nice.

But then in reply #19, Kryo says the following.

I don't know if by round of production he means a real total extra production round or as had been discussed up to that point just another rush buy. In any case I find it very hard to believe that every time you reload the AI gets a totally "free" turn. Due to the autopilot bug I've had some very long single turns that have occurred over multiple sessions. I wouldn't doubt that I've had close to ten save/restores before pressing end turn. Although this many save/restores before end turn is fairly rare, I can't see how I would fail to notice the AI getting ten turns of production for my one even if it only happened once in a blue moon. I can't imagine how I could ever win the game at suicidal if this were the case.

It's not.  I checked in the debugger.  The AI is not getting extra ship moves or an extra turn's worth of production. 

What you are seeing is that the AI Planning thread starts as soon as the player turn starts.  All the AI is doing at this point is choosing social projects, choosing ships to build, etc.    It can, at this time, decide to purchase social projects, which isn't any different than if you were doing it while the AI was moving their ships.  

I have not yet verified if the AI can rush buy two projects per colony in that first turn; I still need to look into that.    

What do you do in two hours for one turn? Can't see why this would be fun. Ever heard of time management ?

The autopilot has multiple weaknesses; precisely what are you referring to when you say the "autopilot bug" here?

I asked Cari last Friday about fully rewriting the autopilot code to be truly awesome and exploit planets, etc., and it looks like nothing like that is going to happen until maybe GC3. But I assume you are talking about a more restricted bug, which may be fixable with a tiny code change.



If you are playing a gigantic map, it really can take that long to play your turn properly. (This is why I have no plans of ever playing a gigantic map, heh.) And as for time management, some people (me included) may prefer to play one game nearly perfectly over playing 10 games in a more "time-efficient" manner. It's not like we earn money for every game we complete.

Thanks Cari
This problem is really bugging those of us who play larger, slower games. I have also noted and sent in bug reports that show that influence levels and boundries are wrong on first and reload turns, and on larger, slower games this really effects the defection rates.
Scincerely,
Scintor

Great. Thanks Cari for this info.

I certainly admit that the way I play is not for everyone.    It depends on what's going on. For example in my current game I conquered 171 planets in one turn and the next turn I conquered 126 planets. I'll leave the details of how I did this up to your imagination (your first three guesses will probably be wrong   ), but the first of these two turns actually went very quickly. However the 20 or so turns following these turned out to be very long, easily more than two hours each. It takes quite some time to rush buy a new social project on every single planet for over 350 planets every turn until each planet is completely rebuilt to my exacting standards. But then it's good to have something to do with my 1 million plus bc per turn income other than rush buy ships.   

Yes it does. I noticed your post about the autopilot pseudocode, but the issue where it merely does not always take the shortest distance path is not of much concern to me. The issue of concern to me is when you are building 300 ships per turn and they're autolaunched to a rally point but a certain percentage of them just sit there by the planet that produced them.

However, you don't notice them sitting there because next turn each of the 300 planets has produced another ship. The only way you notice is when you check and find 2 or 10 or 20 ships all sitting by the same planet having apparently lost their autopilot destination. In that game I started each turn by using the governor to set all ships rally points to none. I still needed to leave the colony rally points set so that I would get all 300 of the ships autolaunched. I then went for four turns accumulating ships at each of my ship producing colonies. Every fourth turn I would cycle through all 1200 ships, fleet them up and send them off to my rally point by hand. Three of the four turns didn't take all that long but that fourth turn took at least an hour. If autopilot worked each and every time then it would save me a very large portion of my micro-management pain.

Well I did some checking and had stated in the "And the survey says" thread that the reload problem seems to be a DA only problem. I tested it in DL on multiple reloads and multiple AI planets and have not seen them getting an extra turn of production upon reload. If this is the case it changes my earlier sentiments in this thread.
I haven't played a lot of DA yet, so I haven't seen the full impact of this.


I know mumble's style and I have a similar micromanagement style and have had a turn last 7 hours before in DL over the course of three sessions( the reason I play few gigantics anymore). Of course in that turn I coordinated 100 fleets, destroyed 1200 AI ships, invaded/started rebuilding 165 planets and rush bought improvements on a couple hundred more planets.
In this scenario, the reload bug could become a quite a factor, which tells me I won't be playing anything over a large map in DA till that's fixed. It still doesn't effect me a lot because I prefer large or meduim maps, but occassionally I get a hankering for destruction on a truly galactic scale.   

If this is the case, I apologize for my response. Apparently the AI is getting a very minor boost. If the AI gets no extra movements, income, and production (other than rush-buying stuff), then I recant my vote and am keen to see a disclaimer and new features instead.

Now this doesn't explain why I sometimes totally suck and sometimes do really well....

That is good news however the AI will potentially gain extra production from the extra rush buy structure... for example, if the AI rush buys a stock market, then it will gain extra money from that. If the AI rush buys things across 30 planets then the benifits from all those new buildings will be significant. And that can happen every time you reload unless the AI's are all broke!

I do not know how this could be fixed tho, it would be difficult,,, i mean you could probably save the AI logic path instead of dumping it with every save, but i can imagine alot of potential problems doing that as well as more unstable saved games. I do not think anyone would want that?

Ugh. Yeah, a ship that arrives 5 turns late is not nearly as bad as a ship that never arrives at all.

Has this bug has been fully reported before, with a save file it could be reproduced from, etc.? It sounds like it shouldn't be too hard to use the debugger to determine what is happening when some ships are losing their autopilot destinations.

Actually 5 turns late is pretty bad as well, the problem that I considered to be no real issue was the fact that the calculated path may be 5 parsecs longer than it really needed to be because of obstructions.

Most of the problems seem exacerbated by the number of ships in flight. If one bug causes ships to be in flight longer then they're more likely (in my opinion anyway) to show one or more of these other errors.


I do owe Cari a save file with this in it although I'm not totally sure she's that interested in seeing it in a DL v1.4x savegame. Anyway Purge has reported this and is supplying or has already supplied a v1.6 DA save game (not sure which Beta level). Mascrinthus also has two quasi related issues with ships not showing up in the ship list once you have greater than a few hundred ships and the ship build notifications not showing up. I think the savegames that Purge and I have promised to provide demonstrate all of these issues (I know mine can if I can get it in the right timeframe, this is actually my current holdup).

Actually just the autopilot issue alone (as you said there are many) is probably at least three separate issues (at least in my opinion based on extremely limited software knowledge). I think there's an explicit timeout that happens based on a combination of system speed and number of ships in motion at the same time. There's also a path too long to calculate error and then there's the case where everything is just fine except if you have to save and then when you reload the game some ships just seem to "forget" where they were going. That's three that I know of, I've actually seen a fourth where all ships from some random planet just never seem to go to their autopilot destination even though everything else seems OK. I don't have an example of this but in one game it happened to be my home planet. This was actually easy to work around because the failure was always the same.

AFAIK this has been in every single version of the game to a greater or lesser degree since at least v1.2. With my new system (E6600 2.4GHz/2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM) this doesn't really start to hurt until there are at least in the high hundreds of ships in play (except for the save/restore) but with my old POS (Celeron 900MHz/512MB 266MHz DDR RAM) this happened virtually every turn. In the end it really doesn't matter if this happens 99% of the time or only 1% of the time, if you can't depend on the functionality then it's really not much better than no functionality.

So what's so difficult about fixing it? If the AI is only getting 2 Planning phases.



Why does it get to buy twice, if it's only the planning phase?
Deciding what to purchase while moving fleets or after moving fleets may be a completely different thing. Some moves might change your priorities as to what to buy, particularly in terms of defensive strategy.

I don't think that the AI is getting 2 planning phases; the AI has to wait for an event to be set before it can start doing its planning, and the event is set at the beginning of the player's turn. 

I have not estimated how long it might take to fix this bug as I am not done investigating it yet.  There are other bugs that I need to fix first.

 

Thanks for looking at it anyway.

Hi!

There may be another way to go around that by giving a player one "free" building before he starts - game just needs to ask him what he wants on his HW and puts one factory, lab, morale or financial building (or nothing) on (proper) tile, and OFC subtracts a proper amount of money from his treasury.

BR, Iztok

But that doesn't fix it for loading a save game, and it's not truly addressing the problem.  The AI is not getting a free building, he's rush buying it with his money.  I believe that this is a fixable problem, I just need to finish a few other things before I can look into it.

Hi!

I see. And giving the player the possibility to finish buying/production at each load could lead to even greater abuse. Sorry, I rarely reload, so I forgot that part of the "bug".

BR, Iztok

Thats good enough for me!   

that's fine, you have any other problems then lets solve them right here right now.