Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

I'm in the middle of a long TDM game against the AI and have noticed two strange things.

1. All the colonies in two systems have "disappeared." (In the case of the second one, I had happened to save just before it happened and so went back to that save game and all was well.) That's right--disappeared. That is, the system is there and the planets are there but all sign of life--population and ships--have disappeared. The mines I laid are still there, however. There was no message of any system destroying devices given either. (But the planets are still there so it couldn't have been that anyway.) What's going on here?

2. In this game and previous long games, I've noticed that after a very long time many of my ships mysteriously gain the ability to cloak and decloak--despite not carrying the cloak device and not being fleeted with any cloak-capable ships. (In fact, in the current game I haven't built a single unit of any kind with the cloak device.) A pleasant surprise somewhat, but also strange and worrying. Is this some kind of bug?

[ January 22, 2003, 20:37: Message edited by: Silent Sorrow ]

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

Possible answers to

1)Mines do not give you the ability to see anything in the system other than your mines. If you move a ship into the system the colonies will magically "reappear"

2)Perhaps you have stealth armor on your ships which allows cloak level 1 or your ships moved in and out of a cloaking nebula or storm.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

I have seen wierd things happen when you are running a game with one mod but accidentally load it under another mod. Does that make sense? Like if you are using the mod launcher and select None under the mod but load a saved game which was saved under TDM Modpack.

Slick.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

if it's not due to the mod, it sounds like a really strange glitch.

Gandalph, it sounds as if he actually went to check on the system and everything was gone.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

1. Nope. The colonies in the system disappeared. As I say, it's happened a few times before but I went back to a savegame from right before the instance, played through the turn and the colonies were still there. I definitely think it's some kind of bug.

2. I didn't know stealth armour gives you cloaking ability. The other reason it doesn't make sense to me is that these ships of mine had their armour from the beginning yet had no cloak ability. It's only when far into the game that my ships mysteriously gain this cloak ability.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Stealth armor of any level does give you the cloak ability. You may not have noticed it previously.

Slick.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Stealth armor of any level does give you the cloak ability. You may not have noticed it previously.

Slick.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">You still have to turn it on.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Stealth armor of any level does give you the cloak ability. You may not have noticed it previously.

Slick.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">You still have to turn it on.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Thank you.

Re: Disappearing star systems and other weirdness
 

I had a similar event in one of my games: a planet with a colony of mine disappeared completely (no asteroid field left, no log message). It was a random event because when I replayed the turn it didn't occur again.
Try to replay your savegame again to see if it happens always or just randomly.
When I reported this here on the forum some beta-testers confirmed they had seen something similar as a rare event.
Just see it as an undocumented event of the game: there are strange things happening in the universe! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif