[1.2.1] Auto colonization not maintaining racial preference

[Velk]

In my current game I have a large empire with many races on established planets.

When on the create new colony list the tooltip shows a reasonable race for sending there, for example sending ackdarians to a water world. When you click the button and the automated colony ship is built though, it seems to load up on colonists at random, often with drastically different races than it suggested it was going to use.

For example, the same water planet it claimed it would send ackdarians to currently has a ship full of Mortalens inbound.

I first noticed this when a bunch of new colonies immediately rebelled and when I checked, I found the ai had settled a bunch of desert planets with frog people even though there are 10 billion Mortalens in the empire.

[Llamageddon]

Was going to report the same issue. It's not that it is just picking up a mix from a mixed population planet with the correct race, it is going halfway across my empire just to pick up the worst possible candidates for the new colony.

[Erik Rutins]

When on the create new colony list the tooltip shows a reasonable race for sending there, for example sending ackdarians to a water world. When you click the button and the automated colony ship is built though, it seems to load up on colonists at random, often with drastically different races than it suggested it was going to use.

Apologies, this was working at some point and it's supposed to load up the best match for the colony. Do you have a save file you could zip up from your /data/savedgames sub-folder and post here to share with us that shows this happening?

[Erik Rutins]

Was going to report the same issue. It's not that it is just picking up a mix from a mixed population planet with the correct race, it is going halfway across my empire just to pick up the worst possible candidates for the new colony.

Would love to see a save file for that if you could please share it with us. It would greatly speed up the process of fixing this and increase our chances of making a comprehensive fix.

[Llamageddon]

So my first attempts as replicating it, it has of course worked perfectly instead. Unfortunately, I don't think I have a save from before I stopped using automated colonization, but as it worked this time, I'll keep using it and be sure to make a note and post you a save if it happens again. At the time, it went wrong about three times in a row, so I would love to be able to replicate that for you to have a look at.

[Badbonez]

There is definitely a bug, or more than one. I have attached saves at the end.

ATTACHMENT 1 (and 1a)
I have a planet, Wurtal 1, which is a desert planet, best suited to Securan. When I go to the colony screen and click the Colonize button, a colony ship begins being built at Gurqi 1, which has a population of 32m Securans and 103m Humans. I don't know what the ship will do, but my experience is that it will try to start filling the ship at that location. That's a bad choice. But maybe it chose that because it was closest and had available materials.

Also, that planetary port is already building something, so I think it would be better to prioritize build locations to a port that is available AND has the correct race.
(I reloaded this save 3 times and clicked the colony button, the AI always selected Gurqi 1 as the build planet.

ATTACHMENT 2
So instead of waiting for that ship to build, after the space port. I built a colony ship at my home world, set to automatic. I then went to the Colony screen, selected Wurt 1 to colonize. When the colonizer was built, it immediately began filling colonists from the Homeworld,

100% human.

Again, bad choice. This is a desert planet.

I have couple Securan planets with several billion inhabitants. The expected behavior is for the colony ship to travel to one of those planets to fill with appropriate colonists. Or, if on Manual, allow me to select that colony ship, right click on the planet I want it to fill from, and select the appropriate population. But it's clear the auto process is not working.

ATTACHMENT 3
I took that manual colony ship from above and sent it to refuel at a Securan desert planet (100% Securan population). Hoping that when I set up a world to colonize it would take the population from the closest planet. I then put the colony ship on auto, went to Wurtal 1 and clicked Colonize. After a few seconds, the colony ship indicated it was going to the planet Aretusk to fill with colonists. Aretusk is populated overwhelmingly with humans.


So I have no viable way to colonize any of my desert worlds with an appropriate population until my current desert worlds get enough resources to build colony ships. That is a whole lot of bother for an emperor to deal with.


Unfortunately, each of these saves are 11mb, so I cannot upload them here. You can find the saves here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Hope these saves help.

[Llamageddon]

Was going to report the same issue. It's not that it is just picking up a mix from a mixed population planet with the correct race, it is going halfway across my empire just to pick up the worst possible candidates for the new colony.

Would love to see a save file for that if you could please share it with us. It would greatly speed up the process of fixing this and increase our chances of making a comprehensive fix.

I've found one for you. Should be able to replicate a bunch of weirdness to do with colonizing, and it might be a good example/starting point for testing this sort of thing. I'm not sure what sequence of actions will replicate it for sure, but If you want to follow the steps I took to recreate a couple of things that might be of interest to tech support:

Sort new colonies by suitability +10 and Distance from Spaceport. Scroll down and click build ship for Sputu and then Buvu Yagin 5. When advisor announces those ships are built, build another one for Zafulos 3.

At this point for me, which may also be a bug, it took a very long time for the advisor to suggest building a new colony ship for Zafulos.

This bit might have happened before the Zafulos stage, can't remember; When advisor says Vilmuueni independents want to join us, select the option to build a colony ship for them.

Wait for the game to do its stuff. For me, what I assume was the ship intended for Buvu Yagin 5 finishes and colonizes Sputu, with Haakonish who only have +5 suitability. The one I assume was for Sputu sits around saying "no mission" while full of human colonists. The one for Zafulos looks like it is going to do its stuff correctly. The one for Vilmuueni builds, but by that point it has been claimed by the empire it is in the territory of.

There is also an interesting case with the independent world of Vilmuueni. At the start of this save, I had just cancelled the colonization, as nothing was building. You will notice that it is not listed in the New Colonies screen and if you check it manually, it says it is out of colonization range. I seem to remember it definitely said before that it was in range, but if not, then it is the only case I've seen of the advisor suggesting a colony ship for an out of range independent and actually marking it for colonization and building a ship when this is the case. (I assume the advisor recommending colonizing out of range independents is already a well known bug, but if not, this happens to me constantly. It usually just means nothing happens.)

Just before this save point, I had made peace with that neighbouring empire and turns out I have a save for that too, so I've included that too as it also has Vilmuueni still selected for colonization and what I seem to remember is halfway through one of the prime examples of this sort of thing in the first place; With an automated ship filling up with completely the wrong race for that and a manually controlled ship I purposefully built and filled myself with a race that would be perfect for Vilmuueni but that I was already sending to a completely different colony.

I think I even have another save a few years before all this when I am still at war, I am building that manually controlled ship, and haven't even selected Vilmuueni yet. If you think that would be of interest or might shed more light on all of this, then I can check for that and post it as well.

The later save for reproducing exactly what I did is numbered 02 and the earlier one before I cancelled Vilmuueni is 01.

I think I have a good idea why some of this happened, in this particular scenario, but I will leave it to the experts to work out rather than muddy the waters with hypotheses and possibly misremembered details of when all this happened. Hopefully you'll excuse me not doing a more thorough test or search at this point, this was quite time-consuming (I kept editing the post after remembering other details and checking other saves). I'm hoping to actually play a bit now.

Good luck and I hope all this helps. Loving the game, despite some of these interesting "features"

[Velk]

I can't attach the save, because it's 12MB zipped and max file size here is 10MB.

bad_races.png (256.07 KiB) Viewed 731 times

I've attached a picture of all the recent colonies though, and you can see that it appears to be engaging in deliberate sabotage, dropping the Mortalens and Teekans to the bottom of the ocean and filling the desert planets with Shandar.

It's also currently in the process of shipping some Teekans to an ice moon that is literally on the opposite side of the galaxy, so it's not like it's just picking the closet planet to get colonists or something.

The problem *seems* to have started since I picked up a few independents of non-playable races - is the colonization race choice perhaps getting confused between the playable and non-playable races ?

[gravyten]

Republic of Markland - Human - 2836-04-14.7z

(5.67 MiB) Downloaded 9 times

Same problem with passengers. In this file you see that they are taking passengers from Kurolog to the slave colony even though all my other colonies are closer. Kurolog also doesn't have a population as suited to live on slave colony. I should note I took the slave colony by using the editor because it said colony ship out of range

As you see here it takes passengers from far away and to the wrong planet type

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... p?t=381254

[gravyten]

Bunch of people on Reddit having same complaint

https://www.reddit.com/r/DistantWorlds/ ... ame=iossmf

[Llamageddon]

Just had another example of colony ships being weird in a slightly different way than my previous save, and it happens intermittently. It is building two ships at once, when the advisor clearly states only one. It also only seems to deduct the funds for one ship. It happens intermittently, but is regularly reproducible from the earlier save I am attaching.

I have tried about 10 times with small differences in my procedure leading up to it, and I suspect it is somehow related to other events and/or advisor suggestions triggering. This in turn seems to be partly related to game speed via "queues" of events getting backlogged and lagging a bit behind the time displayed in the game and when you chose to agree to the advisor suggestion to build a colony ship. This is just a hunch though.

I suspect this issue might be the cause of quite a few oddities with colonization that have been reported; I certainly don't check what colony ships are being built every time I agree to the advisor, and if I saw an extra one in the list I'd probably just assume I'd forgotten I was building one or had accepted another advisor suggestion earlier and forgotten about that.

I would need to test it far more times to be in any way certain about any of the potential causes, and I don't want to send tech support on a wild goose chase, but from my limited testing in this scenario some other possible factors for auto-colonization problems could be:

• If the advisor just happens to want to build a colony ship just 'cause, whether or not you have queued a planet/moon for colonization

• If you have a ship building before you flag the location for colonization or; after it has been flagged but before the advisor suggests building another ship - (This one might account for a lot of cases leading to similar reports as the one's posted previously here).

Possible factors involving ship designs, which I am less certain about but can't discount:

• If the Auto Designer has recently updated the colony ship design.

• If you have recently saved a new colony ship design or obsoleted one

• If you have multiple active and buildable colony ship designs

If you want to see the double ship issue in action, then the save ending in "05" has the advisor suggestion already there and seems to happen every time you accept. If you want to investigate what different circumstances can lead up to this, then save "04" seems to have it happen approximately half the time if you alter the parameters mentioned in my second paragraph.

On a final note; before reporting here I let this specific save and scenario run to the stage the ships had actually loaded with colonists, and it directly leads to another issue that could account for a lot of reports as well as being a good starting point to regularly reproduce a few other problems. For brevity and to separate the two slightly different test cases, I will double post about that below, along with the relevant save.

[Llamageddon]

So I sent that other save via form in the end because it had a reproducible CTD.

I just wanted to update here with an oversight I noticed that could contribute to seemingly wrong colonists ending up at the wrong planet: The new colonies tab will not only send an idle colony ship with a good population to a selected colony, it will sometimes send any already automated ship with a relevant primary population, even if it has loaded just one colonist.

This is one of many things the auto-colonization can do that then leads to a cascade of mistakes down the line. In the example I am seeing, it has rerouted a ship that was on auto and already loading for another flagged colony. From what I can tell, this can lead to the next ship that finishes loading going to the previous colony that this one was rerouted from, whether or not it has the same ideal population loaded. This is of course even more likely if one of these sorts of mistakes has been made already and there is already one extra ship or colony added or missing from the original equation.

I wanted to update here as I suspect a lot of confusion and bug reports about auto-colonisation are getting reported as bugs when they are a result of the automation AI technically doing what it is supposed to do but adapting poorly to something else that has gone wrong previously in the course of events; often something that is more clearly an actual mistake in the code rather than something like this that is an oversight or lack of refinement on the AI decision-making process.

You are probably already aware of this as a potential issue, but if not, I thought this observation could save you a lot of time tracking down some more severe root causes to reports that might actually just be the end of a chain of cause and effect from something more critical that would be easy to have originally gone unnoticed by the person reporting.

Edit: Screenshots of a short while later... With no indication this had happened, the game has cancelled half of the new colonies I flagged. The only thing I did was tell that ship I was talking about above (Handsome Guide) to continue loading colonists where is had been already, and then re-automate it. The game was never unpaused between it stopping and continuing to load.

LostColonies.jpg (106.48 KiB) Viewed 649 times

ExcessColonyShips.jpg (150.77 KiB) Viewed 649 times

One of the colonies it did keep flagged was the one that Handsome Guide was originally built and loading pops for. Despite it still being flagged, it is now going to a colony that the pop has only +4 suitability for. Quiet Ruse is going to an ice planet with Shandar. Pretty sure a new colony ship has somehow been built along the way too. Anyone's guess where the other ships are going to take their passengers, or if they are picking up populations for the colonies that were inexplicably cancelled or not.

P.S. Particularly considering this can happen, it is far too easy to click the colonize flag without noticing, or thinking to check the blurb, that it is going to reroute a ship already loading for another colony instead of build a new one.