Fleet decides to wait for tankers, with full tanks, in middle of combat!!!

[100thMonkey]

Platform: Steam
Build version: v1.3.1.0 Beta + Expansion and all DLCs
Severity: Medium
Annoyance factor: Through the roof!
Saved game:

The Culture - Wekkarus - 2777-09-12.7z

(5.83 MiB) Downloaded 4 times

Once again, fleet automation’s brilliance shines through the darkness of space!

Automated 2nd fleet (attack role), while in the middle of combat (in a mission to eradicate Gravillex from Sacreya 5) suddenly decided to stop fighting and wait instead for fuel tankers!

That is already extremely annoying.

But it gets worse: all 2nd Fleet ships have a full tank (selection panel indicates fuel at 3888/4500 (612 to fill)):

Insane 2nd Fleet.png (198.18 KiB) Viewed 8896 times

Here, you can see that even though the fleet’s mission is now to sit and relax, the fleet’s ships still show that their mission was to fight the gravillex at Sacreya 5:

Situation overview.png (1.66 MiB) Viewed 8896 times

And to add another level of annoyance, 3 of the fleet’s tankers are far away:

Tankers far away.png (359.24 KiB) Viewed 8896 times

I’ve let the game run for a while, and at one point, some ships started attacking the gravillex, but the fleet’s mission stayed at “No mission - Waiting for Fuel Tankers”., even though the fleet tanks are still pretty much full.

And I wonder if that would have even happened (ships attacking) if the fleet tactics would have been overriding the ship’s tactics!

Again, the fleet could do something useful and needed, but it just stays there. Even if all the gravillex have been elliminated and its tanks are full.

Since I’ve launch this new game (with v1.3.1.0 Beta), it feels as though the automation has worsened quite a bit, instead of improving!

[MaximKI]

Thanks for the report. Do you happen to have a save from before you noticed the issue?

[100thMonkey]

The closest save I have previous to the one already posted is from 3 years earlier. So I doubt it would be useful (I can't open it at this point to check it out: I have too little free RAM to launch DW2, and I can't close what's opened for now). But here it is:

The Culture - Wekkarus - 2774-04-23.7z

(5.56 MiB) Downloaded 1 time

[MaximKI]

Yea, that's too far back. If you happen to come across this issue again, if you happen to have a save from shortly before you notice the issue - that would be ideal.

[100thMonkey]

Hopefully, those ideal conditions will occur. And if they do, I'll definitely upload a new save.

But does your request for another save mean that nothing can be done with the uploaded save to understand what triggered that fleet behavior? Seems to me that one (or more) of the conditions in the code that triggers fleet to wait for tankers must have something wrong in it (not enough precision / inclusion of something that shouldn't be included in the condition). Isn't in possible to check those conditions without having a new save (genuinely asking)?

[MaximKI]

The initial save you provided is still useful. The reason why we want a save, ideally from before the issue occurs, is to get a better sense of how the code behaves in the moment of decision. Why did the fleet or ships decide to behave in this way in the first place? Also, if something happened along the way that may have affected their decisions is useful to track.

[Xmudder]

The initial save you provided is still useful. The reason why we want a save, ideally from before the issue occurs, is to get a better sense of how the code behaves in the moment of decision. Why did the fleet or ships decide to behave in this way in the first place? Also, if something happened along the way that may have affected their decisions is useful to track.

That would be a lot easier if the game had more autosaves on a shorter cooldown. 10 autosaves every 5 minutes isn't enough in my experience, something like 20-30 autosaves every 2 minutes would work better. Not as a default option, but as a "debug autosave" alternative.

You can even Throw in a "you've been playing for an hour, get up and walk around" alert if you want

[100thMonkey]

That would be useful indeed (more the autosave than the alarm )

[MaximKI]

You can set how often your game autosaves in the settings menu. By default, it's set to 5 minutes, but you can set this to a value that's more suitable. Do note that the game will keep 10 autosaves and will start overwriting older ones once it reaches 10.

[100thMonkey]

@MaximKi

Yes, that's true. And 10 saves, one every few minutes, should suffice most of the time. But when dealing with particularly weird or difficult bug, it might be useful to be able to keep more than 10.