No autopilot for fleets in DA 1.80g


I just came back to playing DA after leaving it for a while, and upgraded to the 1.80g release this week. I'm finding that while I can set autopilot or rally point destinations for single ships, I can't do so for fleets of any size or composition. I can only move fleets to destinations that are within their one-turn move capability.

If I click on a fleet and right-click a destination to autopilot to, nothing happens. The fleet's available/total move immediately drops to X/0 (where X is maximum move). The autopilot flag below the fleet icon never comes on. The fleet never moves. I can right-click to any destination that is within X squares and the fleet will move there, but I have to do it again next turn.

For rally points, I can click on the rally point destination icon in the fleet details and set one, and the autopilot flag comes on - but the fleet never moves, and the next turn the autopilot flag is switched off.

Did I miss something in prior releases? Is this a rules change, or a bug?

Any advice appreciated.
4,654 views 3 replies
Reply #1 Top
You're actually running 1.80e. SDC had a bit of a fluke where it treated 1.80e as 1.80g (and thus set the registry key as 1.80g). I'm not sure that's exactly how it happened, but as far as I can tell it's functionally identical to the current situation, so we should just be able to proceed from there.

If you change the registry key Version in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Stardock\Drengin.net\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar to pretty much anything other than 1.80g, it will properly recognize that it is outdated and running SDC will update you to the -real- 1.80g. I've found typing in 1.7 works fine, and is nice and simple as well-no need to mess with letters, even.

You can access the registry by clicking on your start menu, going to run (alternatively you can get here from task manager, via the file menu-some systems are configured not to have a run box in the start menu) and typing in "regedit", without quotes. This launches Microsoft's registry editor, and you should be able to navigate yourself via the folder tree from there.

Someone wrote up a very concise, straightforward how-to for this here-my wording is a bit clumsier, I think. This thread might also be useful.

Alternatively, if you don't personally feel like mucking around in the registry, you can simply use this. It's a .reg file that will change the Version string to 1.7 for you, and will work on all versions of Windows from 98 up until XP, and it should work on Vista but I haven't had the opportunity to test that. You can open it with Notepad/Wordpad/etc to verify the contents, and feel free to run it through whatever virus scanners you may feel is necessary. It's clean, and it does exactly what it's supposed to-no less, no more.

Your last option, other than the above, would be to uninstall DA and then reinstall via SDC, although apparently this has not worked for at least one person, for some reason.

As an addendum, do be sure to switch over to the US-1 server if you haven't already-the US-2 server is apparently trapped in a bit of a temporal vortex. (Not literally.)

Hope that helps.
Reply #2 Top
Ack, I downloaded an update for DA last night (when I was downloading my new copy of SINS) but didn't actually play the game.

When was this fixed?

Reply #3 Top



If you change the registry key Version in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Stardock\Drengin.net\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar to pretty much anything other than 1.80g, it will properly recognize that it is outdated and running SDC will update you to the -real- 1.80g. I've found typing in 1.7 works fine, and is nice and simple as well-no need to mess with letters, even.


Thanks - this worked nicely. Changed the version to 1.7 and re-ran the download. All went well and my fleets are back to normal.