Bug in movement/selection system (all GC2 versions)

I always found that very annoying too, but I resigned to live with it after a while. It would be great if it could be fixed.

Sentient species taste better...

What dazzles me is that the legendary (no sarcasm, they're my heroes) Stardock developers have let this go on for so long. Surely they play their own game, and there's no way they didn't run into this. It happens on a regular basis sometimes within 5 minutes of the game's start. Constantly, again and again.

You start to dread going to war, not because of the fear you'll lose, but because you know you'll have to go through micromanagement hell, moving a single bloody ship at a time.

For me, it has COMPLETELY eliminated the possibility of using smaller ships - I always just tech up for the largest hull size as soon as possible and have a half dozen "guardian" vessels that can easily dispatch 20 AI fleets at a time. They kill me in maintenance costs and if I get attacked from the wrong direction I'll suffer severe losses, but compared with the alternative it's not a big deal.

The only conclusion I can come to is that it's done this way by design, but I can't for the life of me figure out why delayed movement - invariably leading to unnecessary combat losses - could possibly be good for the game in any way. I wrack my brain every time I play, "Why would they possibly do this? Why would they leave such a glaring flaw in a fundamental part of the game, when they seem to have time for all kinds of extras that they themselves admit are unnecessary, like shinier graphics?"

Why are they intentionally sabotaging their own game? I just don't get it.

I have to agree with that being one of my major remaining pet peeves. That and to a far lesser extent the fact that once you move a spending slider (social, military, research) the sliders position does not reflect the percentage that it has allocated. While the latter is really only a polish issue, the former, the one brought up here, is a more serious issue that can really frustrate gameplay.

My only theory is that those two issues are simply put at a very low priority to fix, though I believet he second one would be easy to fix, and that the first one is actually more important than may be realized. In my opinion at least.

If they fix this one bug, GC2 will go from "Very good" to "legendary" in my book. It would make SUCH a difference. Not having to reload when ships don't move and I get my ass kicked as a result, not having to move armadas of 20-30 fleets each, one at a time in the late game, not being constantly paranoid about whether or not my transports will be safe if I turn my back for a few seconds...

I can safely say if this was fixed, I would play GC2 400% more often, at least. I'd probably not play Civ again, period.

Will anyone else respond with your opinion on the matter? If enough people like us three loyal customers are all saying that it's our #1 problem with the game, surely they won't leave this problem alone forever.

Devs, can you give any response?

yeah i find this annoying too, now i just use some rally points and the 'T' key to send ships there, its not perfect but it helps, but would be nice if this could be fixed.

I feel your pain. I've lost a terror star because I couldn't get my escort ship to stay with it.

People are using rally points as opposed to simply issuing a move order! There's a problem here! The ability to *move* is so fundamental to any strategy game, even the slightest flaw can be a major problem. But something of this scale, being unable to move anything reliably, is not something that should be ignored indefinitely like it has been.

I've had stacks of as many as 30 ships before, but I would always fleet those up into 4 to 8 fleets and then send them all in different directions, or send them in paired fleets in half as many directions. Either way I just can't imagine a situation in which I would have a stack of 20 fleets, let alone 20 fleets I would be moving in the exact same direction at the same time....

It amazes me how many different ways there are to play this game.

This problem annoyed me - for the absurdly short amount of time it took to figure out the mechanics behind it, and plan for them. Now, I dont' even think twice about it. It's hardly the game-breaking problem you seem to think it is.

A fix might be nice, but at this point a fix would cause me more problems than leaving it broken - at least in the short run.

If you've got it all figured out then please explain. Seriously, no sarcasm, I just want to know how it makes sense. You order a group of ships or fleets to move and a random choice of three options is made:

1) All ships move
2) One ship moves, the rest move on the next turn
3) One ship moves, the rest ignore the order

How would ships moving when ordered to cause you problems even in the short run?

It's not "game-breaking", it's just a massive annoyance that isn't expected from a game of this level of quality. Why strive for perfection on little things when one of the fundamentals is broken?

It's called 4X for a reason:
Expand - Requires movement... which is broken
Explore - Requires movement... which is broken... and so is the "auto explore" AI, but everyone already knows that
Exploit - Works nicely
Exterminate - Works nicely up until the point where you need to actually move

There's no counter-argument that I can think of... why would anyone not want a major persistent bug fixed?

There are exceptions to the following, but 95% of the time this is true.

The difference between option #1 and #2 is simply whether the first ship runs out of movement points or not. If you have a pile of ships with speed 5 and move them 5+ spaces, the entire pile will move. If you only move the pile 4 spaces, only the first one moves. If one fleet is faster, the pile will move one fleet at a time until that fleet is reached, then it will hang up.

As for option #3, I rarely see this happen, with two exceptions, both mostly-preventable. First, when loading huge saved games, a lot of autopilots fail. IMO, this needs a fix more than the pile-moving issue. Second, if option #2 happens, the the one fleet that moved gets destroyed and the following fleets are targetted on the leading fleet, not the space it was occupying.

In all honesty, the best way around this entire issue is to move your fleets yourself. If you selected one at a time instead of an entire pile, you would see it move, not just assume it will move at some point. Also, if stacking is causing such difficulties, why make the stacks? Space is big - spread out a bit.

And I just reread the OP - seems I missed part of it the first time around.



No offense intended, but are you new to TBS? Learning how to game the turn mechanics should be second nature. Basically, this is related to the order that things happen when you push turn. Any ship/fleet you move manually during your turn won't move when you push turn, as you expended all its move points. Select the ship/fleet, and in the bottom window you can tell how many points it has left.

When you push turn, all the ships you did not manually move start using those points to follow the paths you gave them. Any ship/fleet with the "autopilot" notation under it has preexisting orders, and by selecting that ship/fleet, you can tell what that order is. After all your ships use their move points, it's the AI civ's turn(s). Technically, they do their turns "before" your turn - which is why you generally find AI ships/fleets with zero movement points when you do your turn.

As to your complaint about making a fleet on arrival - again, moving manually (instead of using autopilot) would give you this option, as you don't need to be able to move to make a fleet. Alternatively, making a waypoint and setting it to "fleet" will do this automatically when ships arrive.

Odd that you bring up everyone working around the auto-explore AI, but don't consider that everyone has worked around this for just as long. For me, they're about the same level of annoyance, which is minimal.

Oh for god's sake I know it's not an RTS, I don't expect things to actually move instantly, I realize things have movement points, don't talk down to me. On a game of this scale I shouldn't have to order every single ship in my armada to attack something, I should be able to say "Hey you lot over there, go here and kill stuff". Not, "You, you, you, you, you.... *3 weeks later* and you, go here and kill stuff".

This bug is indefensible, I can't believe you think it's normal that someone should have to manually move every ship if they want them all to move reliably and at the same time. You suggest that I'm new to the concept of TBS games and at the same time you say that the something which has worked one way in every TBS ever made should work *sometimes* in this TBS and that's ok, just because it's only mildly annoying to you in particular? Give me a break. Play any Civilization game, play Alpha Centauri, play the original GalCiv, play any TBS you want, it doesn't change: if you select a bunch of units and say "move here" or "attack here" it doesn't result in just one single unit moving, they all move. If they're out of movement points it waits until the next turn, that's only obvious, but not when you have a dozen identical ships that have been sitting on a square doing nothing for the last 10 turns.

Let me give you an example. Actually I've already given this one but you don't seem to have read it. You have a bunch of ships or fleets on a square. You select them all. You give them a move order. One of the ships, of all thips having full movement points, one of them moves. Then I hit turn and the AI takes it's turn. The ship I moved gets attacked and destroyed. The rest of my ships finally move when it's my turn again automatically - Some of the time. Do I seriously have to FRAPS this and show you what a bother it is to get people to stop denying reality?

It's not a matter of stack-movement being broken, it's that a fundamental part of the game is broken. There's apparently no way to move more than one unit at a time and expect it to work every time you do it and you just said so yourself. Putting ships on more than one square does not mean that I no longer need to move every single ship one at a time. That can be upwards of fifty or a hundred clicks for a major fleet movement where it should be two or three.

You select things that have movement points, you give a move order, they move. That's how it works. Not "Maybe it'll move, on my next turn".

To suggest that as a "workaround" I should move every ship one at a time manually every time I get attacked or decide to attack someone or maybe just want to move somewhere, is the most ludicrous thing I've heard all week.

Sorry I'm getting all worked up about this, I know I must sound spoiled and that's because I am - I play Galciv 2, it's an incredible game, and I am in amazement that this one thing has slipped through the cracks for so long, and that people can actually excuse it and say, "Just move one ship at a time, it's not a big deal!"

Consider our simplified positions:
I think that ships should move when given an order to do so and are able to do so.
You think they should not.
Which is more reasonable? Which sounds like a more enjoyable game experience? Which is less frustrating?

My point is: if you do it correctly, ships follow the movement orders.



Oh really? Does this particular problem come up any time other than when you move a stack? No. It's only when you move a stack of fleets that this becomes a problem.

Would the game be better if this was fixed? Certainly. While it would cause adjustments for those of us who know how to play in spite of it, it would be a long term positive. How likely is this to happen, though? I can describe from watching fleet behaviour what happens, but I can't begin to look into the coding to say why, or how (or if) it could be fixed. Seeing as this has been around since the beginning, I don't see a fix any time soon.

For your own sanity and gaming pleasure, I recommend learning the various ways to deal with it. Seriously, in my current DA score-grinder with about 15k ships, dealing with this takes an extra few clicks each turn, unless I move everything all at once.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying your sense of proportion is distorted.

Actually, yes, it does. Fleets or individual ships - as I've said several times now, thank you for reading - it doesn't matter, in either case they only move sporadically if you ask to more more than one at a time.



So the whole purpose of your posts in this thread was to say, "Yes, you're right, but I think I'll argue about it anyway"?

My sense of proportion isn't distorted. This is like when you've got an itch - for the first few seconds it's just an annoyance, but if you have to ignore it because you're doing something, it starts to get more and more irritating until you absolutely have to do something about it.

Well, I and everyone else have dealt with this your "workaround" way, that is, moving every ship and fleet in our entire armada one unit at a time, for several years now, and that itch is really starting to irritate. It's not so much a matter of it being a huge deal, like the game crashing randomly, it's a matter of it being an obvious glaring flaw in one of the most fundamental parts of the game, and it being completely ignored by the developers even though they themselves must know about it.

This bug makes movement in general a pain in the ass. You try to form a fleet, so you say "you three go here" and either:

1) The three you selected
2) One of the three you selected
3) One of the three you selected and the other two on the following turn

is what moves, and you might do the same thing on the next turn and get a different result. It's nonsense. I spend more time and effort fighting with this game's movement and selection interface than I spend fighting actual enemy empires.

And what's the deal with ships set to Guard constantly coming off Guard? You move a ship somewhere, tell it to guard, hit "Turn" and now the game takes that ship off guard and expect you to give it an order... Maybe I just wanted it to sit there.

Then there's auto-explore...

Why do so many of these tiny things that cannot possibly have gone unnoticed get ignored, and yet so many things nobody has ever asked for and which have no effect on gameplay get done?

It's like, every time there's a patch... woo memory usage is down 30 percent, from 9 mb to 6 mb. Yay, I can play at grandma's house now! Ships have more colorful textures, unending bliss! Planets look... different... my life is complete! Things rotate, I can die happy now!

These things are all well and good but they've got to take a back seat to gameplay. Instead things like auto-explore become like an inside joke, newbies come and complain about it and you just laugh because everyone knows it's broken, it's a pain in the ass, and you know it's probably not going to get fixed... but is there any reason why, besides that it hasn't been done yet? Maybe all the assclowns who say "BIGAR LAZERS!!!111eleven CARIERS!!! WE NEEED CLOKING!!!" are just being louder than you are?

Ships or fleets doesn't matter, this only comes up when they start stacked onto one square. You said not to talk down to you, so I didn't explain the ****ing obvious.

For you sense of proportion, the memory issues were several hundred times more important than a very minor irritant in stack movement. Hell, your guard issue is probably more significant.

If this annoys you that much, you'd be better off looking into another game, as I don't see this getting "fixed" any time soon.

As it has been a month or two since I've played Galciv and I've played Civ 4 a couple times in the meantime, my memory may not serve me correctly, but doesn't having multiple units/fleets on the same square provide an additional degree of protection? If you attack a fleet and lose a ship, then that fleet is attacked again, it is at a greater disadvantage and you'll lose more than one ship, maybe 2, maybe 3, depending on the situation. However, if your fleets are stacked, the strongest one defends and you will always lose only one ship. Am I wrong? So in what way is fleet stacking something that's unimportant? It's not just a function for movement, it is a function for defense and offense as well.

It can and will mean the difference between winning and losing many conflicts, and for this clear reason it is the best way to move units, especially in the late game as enemies become faster and a transport fleet can easily be ambushed by something out of sensor range.

I suppose your next solution will be, "put one transport in each fleet!" or something equally crippling...

Crazy, just crazy... "Ships when selected and ordered to move, should move" "THIS IS MADNESS! THEY MUST IGNORE YOUR ORDER AND DO NOTHING, YOU SHOULD TELL EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY TO MOVE. PURGE YOUR MIND OF THE OBVIOUS BENEFITS OF GROUP MOVEMENT, THEY ARE THE TOOLS OF THE DEVIL! IF YOU WANT UNITS TO DO THINGS YOU TELL THEM TO, GO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE!"

I don't know if memory issues were more important than this, I have the luxury of a modern computer. I also have a garbage laptop that runs this game easily. It's got 512mb of RAM. To what degree is it necessary to cater to people's memory limitations when in fact a gigabyte of memory costs less than the game itself?

What I know is, if you, an individual playing a strategy game, tell a unit to move, and it does not, there is something wrong. I don't know why I'm bothering to argue with someone so blinded by fanboyism they actually think there's a counter-argument to this.

If the developers want to improve their engine, that's fine and it's a good goal, regardless of whether it's really necessary in most situations. But from my own experience, when you're developing software and fixing bugs, you prioritize things based on four criteria: frequency, severity, number of users affected, and how long the bug's been known. Everyone's affected by this. It's been known from the very first release. It happens almost every time you try to move more than one unit at a time - and "almost" is the key word here, meaning your ships' behaviour is not just broken, it's unpedictable. Severity, I'll admit, isn't major. There IS a simple workaround, but it's one from the stone age of PC gaming, moving one unit at a time. It would be tolerable if this wasn't the grand-scale game it is, but the developers have made it so that you need to have a lot of ships if you play the game at its full potential. If you have a lot of ships, sooner or later you have to move them.

Units when told to move, should move. Anyone who disagrees with this statement has something wrong in their head.

If nothing else I would hope that a developer or someone knowledgeable would be able to come forward and say, "this is why it is this way, this is why it hasn't been adjusted when it's been known for years." If what you've got to say is the closest I'm going to come to an explanation ("Dunno, ignore it") I can and will just live with it. But I sure would appreciate some kind of real answer, even if, in the end, they still just tell me it's not going to be fixed.

*dangerously old bump*

Has anyone at Stardock read this?  It's kept me (and apparently others) from really enjoying GC2.  I'm not going to make some "paying customer!!!" speech, but I would hope Stardock has enough pride in their most important game title to defend it.

I do not play GC2 for the sake of small maps and micromanagement.  I play it to enjoy the full rich scope for which it has the potential.  Large or Huge galaxies are my favourite, and as such I must have a large number of ships.  This glaring interface flaw prevents ships from being moved except one ship or fleet at a time.  I have dozens of ships and fleets, as does anyone else on a large map.  Moving an entire armada one ship at a time is ridiculous.  This has been a bug since day one and has been ignored.  It can't have possibly gone unnoticed, since it affects EVERY ship in EVERY game.

It's confusing as hell.  Stardock cares so much for their games and customers that they have an outstanding reputation.  They make high quality, inexpensive addons.  They make free patches which greatly improve the game.  But a single massive bug to do with one of the most fundamental aspects of the game, a bug which is reproducible 100% of the time, and which flies in the face of the game's ever-expanding scope, has been ignored for almost 3 years!  I can't wrap my head around this contradiction.  Even for the people defending it, the best they can come up with is "Yeah, it's a bug, and it annoys everyone, but it could be worse."

"It could be worse?"  What is this, China?  Iran?  No, we're dealing with Stardock, known as being one of the best developers and publishers in the industry.  For the sake of your own pride, why has something like this been ignored for 3 years?  A diplomacy bug would be tolerable, a research bug would be tolerable.  A bug with most any part of the game would be tolerable.  But this is the very core of the game - you cannot win even a diplomatic or research victory if you don't maintain an adequate fleet.  In other words, ships are basically the most important part of the game.  And we can't even move them more than one at a time.

 

RAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Short of having an indirect algorithm (possibly based on some AI functions) that would take over every last ships you own and move them around however it sees fit, there would be a way to sortof automate that kind of dispatching process for any given situations.

*RallyPoints* continuous and micro-manageable governing of some strategic & specific map locations where ships gather up and can be grouped to launch to any other locations at any time. These can loop together, be moved up entirely, reassign ship types from a pre-defined list, be linked at your own optimal amounts of self-operating layer levels, etc.

This IS already available in the game... all it takes is someone to use it in such a way that it becomes efficient enough to justify the whole activity.

 

You should thank SD coders for having provided us with that much control & power over our fleets & ships instead of you not having the patience or willingness to find RallyPointing patterns that do work as magic once mastered.

 

I guess you'll soon find out that the above statement is far from being true if you just start playing with the features built-in & available.

 

Rally points?  Give me a little credit, I use rally points all the time.  I do not, however, think it makes sense that I should have to make a rally point on a square full of enemy fleets just to get more than one ship/fleet at a time to attack them.

I don't know where your first two paragraphs come from, but it doesn't matter.  You're completely missing my point.  Suppose I have 20 fleets on a square.  Yes, it happens if you are... USING RALLY POINTS.  Now, these fleets need to move out to defend my borders.  I have to click each and every one and tell them all, one at a time, to move to a given destination.  Am I really that spoiled to think that when I give a group of ships an order, they should all move?

JUST for clarity, maybe in case you think I'm clicking on one individual fleet, I'm not.  I click on the square, then I select (in the lower GUI pane) which ships and/or fleets I want to move.  Once they are selected, I give them a move order.  Now, here's the bugger.  Seemingly at random, one of three outcomes will occur:

1) They all move flawlessly.
2) One moves, the rest ignore the order.
3) One moves, the rest follow on the next turn.

Explain how this is working "as magic", please.  More likely, realize you are completely mistaken and don't say another word, pretending you haven't noticed the topic getting bumped again.  Just like the guys above who are confident that I'm just retarded and don't understand the concept of clicking things.  And just ignore the people above who acknowledged that this IS in fact an issue, a major bug in the most fundamental part of the game, which has lasted 3 years with no end in sight.

Maybe you'll reply with something super-clever like, "well moving as a group isn't really important".  No, read the posts above - moving as a group is vital to the survival of the group as a whole.  A single fleet can be attacked once, lose a ship, get attacked again, and be overwhelmed this time.  A group of ships will simply lose one ship from each fleet.  It's the difference between losing an entire fleet for nothing, or completely routing the enemy.  Besides which, the "well it's not really important" argument might as well be "yes, it's a bug, work around it.  For 3 years past and for more years to come."

This is Stardock, not EA.  This is Stardock, not Atari/Infogrames.  I can't wrap my head around this.  They can be unconcerned about something like this, but spend lots of time optimizing memory management in a day and age where a gigabyte of memory costs a fifth of what the game itself costs?  Memory optimization just for the sake of being anal-retentive is a waste of time and effort.  A lot of the things I've read in changelogs - I mean no disrespect - seem to have gone from needed adjustments and good ideas, to tweaking for the sake of tweaking.  If you're going to care so much for a game like this, why not fix something really meaningful, that will benefit the entire customer base, not just the people on their mom's computer with 4 MB of ISA RAM and a Trident video card?

This seems rather odd; you're apparently reading what others post, but are completely failing to comprehend or use it. You have clearly not wrapped your head around the concept that this isn't a problem for anyone but you. Have you noticed the glaring lack of anyone agreeing with you that this is a legitimate problem?

As for your whining about this being more important than memory leaks, bullshit. Having to move stacks manually has never caused a CTD that I know of, or caused the game to fail while saving due to OOM. Memory issues have done both on better computers than you're likely to have.

That should teach me trying to help someone.

I'll just add this for your kind consideration;

- Using Governor driven "linkers" of any form (by design or decisions, btw) or quantity that deploys anything according to consequential Rally-Points different locations, upon arrival of fleets & ships. In a word - Dispatch.

But, it won't matter much after reading your "response".

The END, AFAIC.

Not sure if this is the same bug but I had some fleets of 1 terror star and some ships each.

Now I was going around blowing up suns and mining the asteroids and generally the ships would move off automatically out of range of the explosion and then the sun would blow up and after I would have to put the ships back with the terror star.

But sometimes the sun would blow up taking the ship with it leaving only the terror star.