Phantom Convoy Delivery

[Omnius]

I've found a major error in the way resources are delivered to Britain. I have plenty of resources being delivered to Britain running through the Bay of Biscay, and I haven't had any CW convoy points in the Bay of Biscay for at least three turns. I have been trying to change my CW convoy routing, had been moving CW convoy points to the North Atlantic to stop using the Bay of Biscay when Germany conquered France.

I was baffled that turn after turn I'd move convoy points out of the Bay of Biscay and into the North Atlantic and Faeroes Gap yet would see more and more unused convoy points in the new sea areas.

After finally checking the route of one non-oil resource I noticed that it was still running through the Bay of Biscay while there were no CW convoy points there.

In 1.07 I was able to change the convoy route of one resource illegally going through the Bay of Biscay, I also figured out that I had to click a second time on the final sea area to properly "recompute" the port and rail pathing. However this really messed me up as I started moving convoy points out of the North Atlantic and Faeroes Gap to set up in the two sea areas adjacent to Greenland and Iceland, for future convoy routing. Now I'm trying to get my convoy points straight so I can reroute all resources running illegally through the Bay of Biscay.

It seems that for resources calculated while there were convoy points in the Bay of Biscay before they're moved out then those resources will keep on running through the Bay of Biscay long after there are no CW convoy points. Now I didn't see this problem in the Western Mediterranean when I had to pull out the CW convoy point that was running the resource from Cyprus. The Cyprus resource went idle when it was supposed to. I'm not sure if there are other sea areas that exhibit this problem, will eventually find out if the North Atlantic has it as I'll be transitioning from there towards Greenland and Iceland.

One person said that this wasn't so bad and I have to disagree completely with that assessment. While it is convenient in one sense for the CW player to be able to bail out of the Bay of Biscay while still having resources being delivered by these Phantom Convoys it also is inconvenient in that it covers up what needs to be done to reroute convoy routes through a different sea area. Now that I'm aware of this "cheat" problem by the program I can be more hands on making sure I manually change my convoy routing each turn as I'm pulling convoy points out of one sea area and setting up new ones in other sea areas.

What's really bad is that it makes a mockery of the submarine war for Germany. How does Germany stop CW resources getting to Britain if they can be run through the Bay of Biscay with no convoy points at all?

We have to rely on the program to play Convoy Traffic Cop or the game isn't fair. As the CW player I want the Convoy Traffic Cop alerting me to when I have a shortage of convoy points somewhere so I know to fix the problem. I don't want the program "protecting" me by falsely running resources to CW factories with Phantom Convoy Points. On the other hand I don't want to be Germany fighting a futile submarine warfare battle that does nothing to diminish resource delivery to Britain.

I sure hope this Phantom Convoy Resource Delivery problem gets fixed soon so we have a fair game for both CW and German players.

Omnius

[paulderynck]

Hi Omnius,

If this is the file of yours that I tested with, then how can you be sure? I ask because the total number of resources getting through was in accordance with how many CPs were in zones adjacent to the UK. It seems to me, the only way to be sure would have been to return CPs that were in the North Atlantic.

Or did you use the "show unused convoys" facility or the facility to return unused ones to port?

Of course, I did see the issue with the program claiming that a route existed through the Bay of Biscay for some of the resources (but oddly, not others), that all were coming up to the UK from the south.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

For version 1.2.0.2:

June 13, 2014 - Fixed a production planning problem where overseas routes that had previously been valid, were not being checked for sufficient convoy capacity in the last sea area in the old overseas route. For instance, a resource successfully sent from the US to the United Kingdom in an earlier turn might go through three sea areas. The program tries to reuse old routes (to save the player time and effort), but it was only checking the current convoy capacity in the first two of the three sea areas (it was checking the first sea area twice[:(]). The result was that there might be no convoys at all in, say, the Bay of Biscay, but the program would behave as if there were an infinite number.

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I'm expect we will make this available as a Public Beta early next week.