Tourists not being transported and empire spawn location bug

[Astornautti]

Hi.
I'm currently experiencing two different bugs(?) on the 1.2.0.8 Beta build.

The first one affects all my games, the other one seems to only affect some of them.

The first one is the game spawning almost all the empires right next to my empire, even though I'm playing on the largest galaxy size and 2000 stars. They spawn so close that I cannot colonize any planets and I'm immediately boxed in from the start of the game. The rest of the galaxy is almost always empty of empires, sometimes one or two spawn elsewhere. This happens regardless of the amount of AI empires I select, and game settings like "hostile empires near the player" make no difference. It seems like there is too high of a preference for empire spawn location to be right next to the player even if the setting is set to "normal". It doesn't seem to factor in the galaxy size, as on a small galaxy the distance those empires spawn would not be a problem. I have so far tried maybe a dozen games, changing the number of empires by a few each time, and unless I only spawn 1 or 2 AI empires, the problem persists. Something to note would be that I always start games with the "pre-warp" tech setting and the smallest amount of preset expansion.

The other problem is related to passenger ships not transporting tourists at all. If I reload a save, they transport one batch of tourists, and then immediately return to "no mission" status. If I however make a save then and reload that save they once again transport one batch of tourists and then stop. This happens no matter which save I load, and refitting passenger ships/resort bases does not affect the problem. I've tried going through every possible scenario that could cause the passenger ships to stand idle, but no reasonable explanation is apparent. This combined with the reloading save oddities leads me to believe this is most likely a bug. This problem is also not affected by restarting the game, verifying the game files, or any other method I could think of. The only fix I've found is starting a new game, which works maybe 50% of the time.

[MaximKI]

Those definitely sounds strange and seems like something's up with the game. Could you please upload your saves that demonstrate what you're seeing?

Saves you can find in this location: \Distant Worlds 2\data\SavedGames

[Astornautti]

Hi.
It seems like the save files are too large to send through the forum even after I compress them into ZIP files (both are around 16MB compressed and almost 50MB uncompressed). Is there an alternative way I can send the save files to you?

[fruitgnome]

https://www.file-upload.net/

[MaximKI]

You can also try using a service such as WeTransfer (https://wetransfer.com/), Dropbox, or Google Drive to post a link in this thread or alternatively send them to me at maxim.k@slitherine.co.uk.

[Astornautti]

Hi.
Here is a link to 2 save files that both suffer from these problems. I also have an additional save where the tourist bug seemed to solve itself after I built a certain amount of resort stations.

I've also noticed some additional things that may prove helpful in figuring this out.

The first thing I've noticed is that just like every time I reload a save, every time I build a new resort base tourists start being transported again, but each transport ship once again only transports one batch of tourists before returning to idle.

The second thing is that transport ships transport migrants without any issues if that mission type is available to them. Otherwise, they sit idle.

And as I mentioned before, I had a save where the problem seemingly fixed itself after I built enough resort bases, but I can't say for sure as I also did a lot of other things at the same time. Unfortunately, save files from before this happened were automatically overwritten by new autosaves so comparing them is not possible.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... drive_link

[MaximKI]

Thanks for the saves. It seems that they require access permissions to download them. Could you please make sure that the permissions are changed so that anyone can download the saves?

[Astornautti]

They should be downloadable now.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[Astornautti]

They should be downloadable now.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[MaximKI]

For galaxy generation and empire spawning issue - what exact game settings do you use? How many empires do you set in your game?

[Astornautti]

Spiral galaxy
2000 stars
normal nebula density
10 by 10 sectors
Hostile races near player: Normal
AI empires:
The problem persisted no matter what amount of AI empires I selected. However with less than 3 AI empires, I was less likely to get "boxed in" from the start, but even then at least one of these AI empires spawned very close to me. I didn't try more than 12. I tried starting a new save probably about a dozen times and then checked the galaxy map using dev mode and each time, no matter how many empires I selected, almost all were skewed towards the side of the galaxy my empire spawned in, leaving the opposite side of the galaxy completely empty of any empires.
I'm not sure what I changed but this issue seems to have fixed itself (or at least improved significantly) after just changing some of the galaxy generation settings to something else and then back to what they were before. I cannot say for sure however as I haven't had time to test this as intensely as before.

[MaximKI]

Understood. If you see the issue happening again, please record the exact galaxy generation settings and definitely drop us a save.