Where the !@#$ are you guys going?

[thedoctorking]

Invasion scenario. Big fight takes place to the south while the transports sail peacefully to the objective. They get there just after nightfall, spend the night sailing around, and then as soon as dawn breaks, they sail away to the north. We never get the transports successfully arrived message. And at the end of the scenario, we failed to carry out the invasion. The result of the battle does not warrant a continuation of the invasion attempt!

We sank four BBs at the cost of a couple of CLs and some DDs. We got two prestige for our stunning victory. And nobody even took a shot at the transports.

Invasion combats are still borked.

[thedoctorking]

I edited the .sac file by changing the invasion transport groups' tactical stance to 2 and sinking the shore batteries. The invasion transports then sailed to their objective.

[mrchuck]

And I will re-use this Subject: line because it works!

I am playing Japan, looking to invade Southern Korea which is held by China.

Can't see the destination; clicked Locate.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:

invasion target southern korea.PNG (37.97 KiB) Viewed 421 times

And sure enough the invasion convoy dutifully sails off the NW, intending to get the South Atlantic via the Eurasian land mass.

Invasion fails funnily enough.

Save attached. For heaven's sake fix this guys, it happens too often and is really, really annoying.

[mrchuck]

Update: taking a cue from the Doctor King, I've hand patched the sac file so I can continue my game.

The original co-ordinates for the objective were 159N 208W, which is of course impossible. Looks like the co-ordinate arithmetic is way off somewhere, and the fallback is that chunk of ocean off W Africa which looks suspiciously like 1,1 or thereabouts.

I patched the objective, after a good deal of trial and error, to these values:
Objective0Location=1262700E 354800N
which translates to 126-ishE and 35-ishN which is at least in the ballpark, and in the right ******* ocean.

Location seems to require 7 digit integer for long and six for lat or it don't work as expected. Looks like it might even accept more digits, but not less. First three digits in the long are the degrees, the remainder might be minutes or might be decimal points of a degree, arctans, radians, cubits, hectares...I dunno. First two digits in the lat are degrees, the rest whatever. Great for positioning down to the yard/metre, but only if the calculations are right, guys.

Remains to be seen whether the invasion fleet will actually sail there; about to try it.

[mrchuck]

Nope. Still obstinately heading course 292, into Mongolia.

Going to hack on the save file some more to see if I can do anything about it.

[mrchuck]

Utterly exasperated by all this, I've unset AI control for the invasion force.
I forgot to mention that this is my second attempt to invade S. Korea in five months, and exactly the same thing happened both times. I'm not having it.

This is going to make the invasion easier, but if it all worked properly I wouldn't have to. I still need to get through the Chinese fleet, so it's a fair fight in all other respects.

[mrchuck]

Success. 5 Cruisers badly knocked around, vs. 2 Chinese Bs sent to the bottom.
Invasion successful.

Conclusions:
1. Geographic objective setting seems to have an intermittent but nasty bug. It works, usually, but when it doesn't, oh boy.
2. Changing the overall objective in the save doesn't seem to prevent the invasion force AI heading somewhere stupid regardless. That is interesting. Perhaps I needed to change it more places.
Absent documentation for the save files, who can tell?
3. If you encounter this in a game you don't feel like writing off, find all occurrences of AIcontrol=1 for invasion forces, and set it to 0. This is a cheat, or perhaps a workaround if you will, unless someone has a better solution.
But you'll still need to change at least the first occurrence of the objective in order to get the win. Unless your TRs can get to w. africa in 23-ish hours, of course.

[WLRoo]

Yes, I think the 0,0 co-ordinates are the default/'safe' co-ordinates; so always report any of those issues so the scenario can be checked and fixed.

[mrchuck]

And it's happened again. This time I'm trying to invade Sakhalin. The Locate bullseye is at 0,0

Save file attached.

Hacking the save file once more...

[mrchuck]

I tried changing every occurrence of the objective I could find, to the one plausible value I found in the sac file. This turned out to be the right place, and there were batteries there.

However, the transports were still trundling off to the NW for a walking tour if Inner Mongolia when I started the scenario. So once again, I saved out and removed the transports from AI control. There is obviously something else going on.

[MaximKI]

Thanks, we'll investigate.