New Bug?
 

Something strange just happend in NGC4. Alneyan and Randallw declared war on me, but I did not get any message. Instead of war, our empires have now treaty status "none".
When fighting, their ships fired but my ships did not fire back, in all combats that happend. Has anyone an explanation for this?

Re: New Bug?
 

Hmmm, this sounds like a problem I had in Negoc. I declasred war on someone but next turn it was a 'none' treaty.

Re: New Bug?
 

I don't know about Alneyan, but I didn't declare war. Surely though if our treaty was broken you would at least get a message from me saying I was breaking the treaty, I know I didn't get one from you.

Re: New Bug?
 

Very odd. I didn't declare war either or break the treaty, of course, but as it was the same situation as with Alneyan I thought the same bug has happend. No message, no treaty suddenly, and my ships didn't fire back.

Re: New Bug?
 

Roanon, it would be Alarikf and not Alneyan; I haven't broken my treaty or declared war in any way with you yet. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif I don't have a clue about the why this happened, however.

Re: New Bug?
 

The bad thing is not that the treaty is 'none' instead, but that my ships didn't fire back in each combat, resulting in single light cruisers destroying warfleets of battleships. This is a severe bug that should be found and fixed, if it happens more often.

Re: New Bug?
 

No kidding. I looked at the turn and it said there was a battle with the Primeval, what I found particularly surprising was that one of my old lt cruisers with missiles had destroyed something like 4 battleships while 10 others did nothing. I couldn't believe it. I thought, he must be out of supplies and yet he has reactors, then I thought perhaps they have orders not to get hurt, but even then their PD should be destroying my missiles. AS I said to Alarkif I have been playing for about 2 years and have never seen this before.

Edit: oh, and another thing I said to Alarkif was that I predicted Roanon was going to shout blue murder when he saw it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

I don't know if its related but another battle the Primeval attacked a federation satellite over one of my worlds. They then seemed to purposefully move into orbit of my planet and sit there while the defences fired wave after wave of missiles at them. It is astounding that this seems to have never been seen before.

Re: New Bug?
 

I have looked at the combat replays and it appears to me the ships are behaving as if they are out of supply. The only move one square per combat turn, and they don't fire. Would explain why the PDC does not shoot down the missles as well.

Can't yet exaplin why the ships would be out of fuel since most of them have reactors, all of them were at full fuel storage the turn before, and they only moved five turns.

I did see a similer event to this before, but in that case the guy had solar generators and his fleet was very low on fuel. It turned out he used his Last bit of fuel moving into the square of the enemy but his survivng ships refueled after the combat. It was a head scratcher cause all we could see was they had fuel before and after the combat. This looks different though cause these ships are clearly full.

Is it possibly something with the strategies? I'll check that out.

Re: New Bug?
 

Here's something else I just noticed - can either Geo or Roanon look at the battle for Hurvinek VII? My planet there is listed as "taken" by Roanon's ground troops - this acurred in the same place where he was attacking an Earth colony (whom he was at war with) and would be the only instance where his ships took offensive action against me - so its another wrinkle. Color me confused.

Alarik

Re: New Bug?
 

I don't think there is a genereal problem with the ships or strategies. Too many ships, too many different battles, and I'm using the same strategies for all fleets as in the previous turns.
Furthermore, there have been battles where my ships fired on Federation vessels, destroying them, but then refrained from firing at Aether Lord ships. The only thing that happend was ground combat.
Moving only one space is not consistent too, this mostly happend when the ships were clustered near a board edge and could not move further away, resulting in a few 1-space jiggling moves there.

Re: New Bug?
 

Roanon said: Not in the battle I looked at. Your ships were well away from the edge. Had him outnumbered 12 to 1. Your ships all moved one space per combat turn, didn't fire and didn't move aggresivly towards or away from his ship. Basically just milled about one space at a time while they got shot up. I'm still looking at it, but there is definetly something odd going on.

There has to be an explanation. It's not a simple fluke. Same thing happens when I rerun the turn.

Could be a bug, or could be something logical that we are missing. We might need to send this one to Malfador. They have the ability to monitor turns while they are running and see exactly what's happening.

Re: New Bug?
 

Is the game using a mod that removes supplies from Engines, and the designs have no supply - only a reactor? Just a thought. Not something I've seen happen before.

PvK

Re: New Bug?
 

The game is stock 1.91.

Re: New Bug?
 

Did any one see if the ship orders were to attack?...has happened to me.... [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

Re: New Bug?
 

I really think the key to problem lies with the treaty issue.

Here's a recap:

Roanon and I are at peace with a military alliance at the beginning of the turn.

I declare war on him. From his end, he did not change our treaty status (Roanon chime in if I'm misrepresenting here)

I send my guys to attack him.

Battles ensue - in some cases, battles wherein his forces are coming through a warp point and my fighters are guarding it.

In the replays of these battles, his guys just sort of mill around, acting, for all the world, as if they are not at war with my guys.

My guys, on the other hand, have a field day bLasting as many of the hapless roanonians into bits. For example, 54 low tech fighters took out 10 battleships.

There were at least five battles in which this happened, including a few where my fighters took out defended planets and other battleships. So it's both ships and planetary weapons that did not fire on my guys. Talk about being asleep at the wheel!

Also in our turn results, and this I feel is key, our relationship is NOT listed as "At War" but is instead "no relationship"

Furthermore, I think I have heard tales of problems with the diplomacy model in which Messages are not received or treaties not enacted if diplomacy is done at the end of one's turn. In this case, I declared war on roanon in the middle of writing my turn, but did other diplomacy as the Last thing I did.

All his ships had quantum reactors I think.

The only case wherein his guys DID attack me was when they were given attack orders against an *Earth* colony (with whom they were at war) and I had a colony on the moon above that earth colony. In that battle, an unarmed troop transport of Roanons succesfully landed troops on my undefended planet, and they took it.

All in all, I think his guys acted *as if* they were at peace with me, except in that single battle I just mentioned above, while my guys acted *as if* they were at war with him. The not entirely illuminating but interesting factor is the fact that our treaty status is currently "none" rather than "at war"

I say send it to Malfador. In fact, ideally, they could be the ones to take all the PLR files, run the turn correctly and let us continue the game as it should have been processed in the first place.

I mean, I ain't complaining that we did pretty well, but, still it is clearly wacky and should be examined.

Just my two cents.

Alarik

Re: New Bug?
 

The game is on hold until further notice.
Let me know when something happens Geo.

Re: New Bug?
 

No, one thing I am certain of is that the treaty issue is totally separate from the problem of Roanans ships not performing correctly in combat. Roanans ships should have fought back. You can test this yourself. If you break treaty with another empire and attack them their ships will fight back, regardless of whether you openly declare war or not.

There are two separate issues here. What caused your treaty to break is a question. But the more important question is why didn't Roanans ships fight back in combat.

Re: New Bug?
 

The treaty status could be a key symptom.

Perhaps the declaration of war was hit by a comm interception intel op or something, so they were only half at war...

Re: New Bug?
 

Ok, there's an interesting idea. You're postulating that my declaration of war was intercepted, so it never reached them, but I was at war as far as my guys were concerned but they were not? That seems like a plausible funky result of the interplay between comms intercepts and treaty declarations...but, still, as Geo says, once combat begins, shouldn't they at least defend themselves?

EDIT: spelling/grammar

Re: New Bug?
 

I'm not convinced of that. I think the game has registered that the Aether Lords are at war with me, but not registered that I was at war with them. Two proofs, my ships did behave normally in all combats against a already declared enemy, the Federation, and also in the combat involving both the Federation and the Aether Lords only fought agains the Federation, not fighting against the Aether Lords. This is possible, because there is a flag per player at which player they will fire, otherwise multiple player battles involving neutral parties would not be possible.
Second, most important, the Aether Lords were NOT affected by my minefields, while their minefields damaged my ships.
I think Malfador should take a look at this if even a rerun (on a machine with larger memory?) causes the same problem.

Re: New Bug?
 

I think it happend like that:

Alarikf declared war on me. This was instantly flagged on the client side, and this flag has been taken over by the host. (OT: this should NEVER be done with Online games, client has to be allowed to send commands only and not to change ANY data directly, host data MUST BE modified the host programm validating and evaluating client-issued commands only. I hope this is done more striktly in SEV).

The host program run the turn, somehow loosing the Messages before evaluating them. There are known problems with Messages in large games, we all know that trades tend to get lost when not done as the very Last thing during the turn. The result was that Alneyans already flagged empire shot at me, while the lost message never resulted in a like change of the flag on my empire's side.

Re: New Bug?
 

Therefore, if you re-send your declarations of war, your ships should behave as they should have in combat.

Re: New Bug?
 

Maybe, if the same bug doesn't strike again - and only from next turn on. Would be nice if the damage done this turn could be undone. If not, I'll have to live with it, but not another turn.

Re: New Bug?
 

This is a know bug that you can capture the planet of an ally when attacking the planet of an enemy. It has happened to me at least twice in PBW, one where I captured an ally's planet, and once when one of mine was captured. I declared war when my planet was taken before learning of the bug...

Re: New Bug?
 

I haven't read all the Posts in the thead yet, but this sounds like an intel attack to me.

Re: New Bug?
 

I obviously can't say that this is definetly not the case, but I have never seen or even heard of anything remotely like this happening. Like everyone else I have heard of problems with Messages getting lost, but I have never seen a situation where two empires were "halfway" at war like this. What are the odds that a bug this serious has never occured before now in all the games of SE4 that have been played?

I will send an email to Malfador tonight when I get home. Maybe they can figure it out.

Geoschmo

Re: New Bug?
 

Ok, well I'm leaning back the other way towards thinking you guys are right and it's some sort of "halfway" treaty thing. I ran the next turn offline and the ships act very similer, dancing around and whatnot. In several places where your ships are sharing sectors there are a couple of combat rounds played in each place. They do the dance for a couple rounds worth of combat and then finally wake up and start shooting on the Last round of combat.

I thought that was interesting, so I replayed the turn again this time taking control of Roanons empire and declaring war on the other guy. This time all Roanons ships go right to shooting like they should and all the combats only happen once.

This is quite bizarre to me. I know I've seen many games where one player has broken treaty and not declared war and both ships fight on the same turn. Not sure why it's not working right here. Malfador will have to try and track that down cause I've reached the limit of what I can figure out by rerunning turns.

We could roll the turn back and let you all do the Last turn over. For whatever reason Alarik's war declaration did not get to Roanon. There is no intel project that would stop a comm like that. You can tap comms or fake a declaration, but not stop one from going through normally. It must have something to do with that known communication bug that affects trades from time to time. If both of you declare war it should avoid the problem.

Geoschmo

Re: New Bug?
 

So...he gets to know that I'm attacking him, huh? sigh. Oh well.

Re: New Bug?
 

I don't like this option - I don't think that's fair.

Better thing would be it could be fixed by MM, running the turn with the same .plr files. Maybe MM can just decode my .plr file, add the two declarations of war to it(on Aether Lords and True Republic) enabling me to shoot back, make a new .plr and redo the turn with this?

Another option might be, I usually save the game before sending Messages, which I do Last every turn, as they cannot be undone. I could use this savegame, add the sent Messages as far as I can remember, add the 2 declarations of war enabling me to shoot back, and subit the turn otherwise unchanged. That requires some trust though, and is therefor not a good option; I would prefer MM fixing it one way or the other.

Re: New Bug?
 

Dude, I trust ya. That's fine with me. I presume all the other players would also abide by this idea?

Re: New Bug?
 

I can't promise you any sort of action on Malfadors part. I am simply going to send the files to them to see if they can figure out what's going on. They may in fact be too deep into SE5 to even think about looking at it. I'd suggest as far as this game specifically goes going ahead with one of your alternative options. Whatever you decide if you need me to rerun the turn let me know.

Geoschmo

Re: New Bug?
 

I opt for roanon rerunning his turn and adding the declaration of war, sending in the turn to Geo and run it again.

That's the best solution in my opinion.
If anyone disagrees voice it now or be forever silent!!

So Roanon, go ahead and finish the old turn and we'll wait a day before we rerun the game.
Mail me when you have sent the turn to Geo Roanon.

Ruatha (Host)

Re: New Bug?
 

Ok, I have reloaded my old saved turn, i.e. the submitted turn minus all Messages. I have added the two declarations of war to be able to shoot back against the True Republic and the Aether Lords, and my cloakers to engage (which they also didn't as I noticed), and to enable my mines, and to correct whatever also might have happend (it might even be possible that they still got my minerals from the trade while I did not get theirs).
I tried to rewrite the Messages, but might have missed something - in that case, anyone who wants please feel free to answer to the message that came in with the old turn http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif