autopilot » Forum Post by JeffZakharov

what kind of autopilot are you using ?

what do you mean by manually ?

you can use the "tab" key to find the next ship with moves left.

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i can confirm that autopilot doesn't work... but only "as one would expect" : ) ....

the ships in autopilot don't move at the BEGINNING of the turn... they move at the END of the turn after you hit the TURN BUTTON! ACK!

this seems very very unintuitive for us civ players where we're used to following our units movements at the beginning of the turn and then being left to decide what to do next.

in order for units to move except at the end of the turn, you have to manually go and re-iterate your movement command.

this seems odd. is this a deliberate design decision or is there an option or something that allows for more "traditiona" unit movement.

thanks. great game. went to sleep at 5am last night.... ack.

jin

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the current galciv2 autopilots work like this :

-turn 1 moment 1 you select a ship without orders

-turn 1 moment 2 you tell it to go to a place far, far away

-turn 1 moment 3 since you just told the ship to go somewhere, the ship moves immediately

-end of turn 1 you click the end of turn button, nothing special happens

-turn 2 nothing happens, you give no additional orders to that ship

-end of turn 2 the ship moves along its path

-turn 3 same as turn 2 but imagine you just saw an ennemy ship in your line of sight, since the ship still has all its moves you can move it elsewhere if needed

overall it seems pretty logical even if different from civilization series ...

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that makes sense and it's good that it gives you that opportunity to change your mind if something came up. but the other side of that coin is that if you would have made it to an artifact that could have affected how you would play that turn, you'd miss out because you had to hit the turn button to get the ship to go.

actually, a button that tells your ships to continue their journey on the laid out path, without ending the turn (a force move button basically) would be a good compromise imo. just a smaller button right above the turn button.

jin

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

Also what game version are you using?

Autopilot has had some difficulty in DL that "should" "mostly" be fixed in later versions.

In particular there is a "path too long to calculate" error that can occur and be logged in your debug.err file. This is simply as it says and can be gotten around by scheduling autopilot over shorter distances.

There is also the problem that occurs over a save and reload where ships can simply "forget" they were on autopilot. Often this occurs when using a rally point as the common destination for many ships. This also can be gotten around by moving all the ships that will reach the rally point during the first turn after a reload by hand. It seems that it's the arrival of a ship at the rally point that causes other ships to forget their destination, but only for that first turn after a reload.

Also when using rally points you need to be careful about precisely what a ship/fleets destination really is. If you use the T keyboard shortcut or the ship/fleet menu to explicitly assign a rally point destination that is usually pretty reliable. However if you set the rally point destination by selecting the ship/fleet and then right clicking on the rally point and there are already ships at the rally point it's not so certain that the rally point is set as the actual destination. Sometimes the destination is set as the parsec itself (i.e. the x,y coordinates of the rally point) and sometimes the destination is set to be a ship that is sitting at the rally point.

What can happen is that you have the rally point set to fleet up ships as they arrive. In the meantime you set the autopilot destination of a ship/fleet to the rally point by right clicking on the rally point but instead of the rally point being the destination, the "real" destination is set to a particular ship that happens to be sitting at the rally point. Then the next turn some more ships arrive at the rally point and combine with the ship that had been set as the destination of the other ship/fleet into a new fleet. Now suddenly the single ship destination of the ship/fleet no longer exists and the ship/fleet "forgets" where it was going. Another thing that can happen when a ship gets set as another ship/fleets destination is that you move the destination ship somewhere and the other ships/fleets that had it as a destination will continue to follow it. This is actually kind of funny when it happens.

There are other situations where you're using colony rally points to get the autolaunch feature where ships built at some planets will just sit there and never move. Given that you do have to wait for end turn to get autopilot movement and given that you may be producing a ship at that planet every turn (or every few turns) it may be difficult to notice that certain ships have not moved during the autopilot phase until you happen to stumble on a planet with a bunch of ships piled up next to it.

In conclusion there have been a lot of different problems associated with autopilot over the course of the different versions of the game and even different revisions of the same version so it's important to be as explicit as possible when describing your particular problem.

In general I play gigantic galaxy games and produce many thousands of ships (on the order of 17,000 actually) and often have many thousands of ships all operating on autopilot at the same time and usually there is some method for you to do what it is you're actually trying to accomplish, however it often requires some fair amount of "hand holding" to get around some of the inevitable problems.

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thanks a lot to all of you!

Whismerhill : i do not really know... i did not understand there were more than one kind of "autopilot feature" in the game. for "manually" i mean that i have to move ships turn by turn. Because apparently they do not care about my previous orders! also, the problem appears to be bound to the level of zoom and/or the the selected zone when pressig "end of turn".

Jinchoung: i will try what you say... but it seems that my problem is different. in fact, if i forget to check the movement of the ships, some of them remain where thay are, also for many turns (10+)...

Mumblefratz : i have the full version of the game (DL+DA+TA) [I bought the game by digital download 2 months ago], but for the moment i am playing the basic "dread lords". i have the game updated to the latest version. now that i think about it, one source of the problem "could" be that i have updated the game twice since i started playing the current session...

have fun, all of you!

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Quoting JeffZakharov,

reply 6

now that i think about it, one source of the problem "could" be that i have updated the game twice since i started playing the current session...

have fun, all of you!

ho yeah lol the game definetely doesn't like being updated in the course of a savegame

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well, I'll try starting a new one!

have a good day!

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

Actually if you're playing DL it probably doesn't matter that you've updated the game because DL hasn't really changed in about a year and a half. But DL definitely has autopilot problems so your issue's are not surprising and there's really not too much you can do about it. The biggest problem is usually the issue of save and reload. Where at all possible I try to save the game at a point where there is not much autopilot activity and then when I relaod the game I just resign myself to rescheduling everything. If you do this you avoid most but not all of the problems.

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