Report - Current Bugs and Issues

[sven]

game_892 - the default design for Heavy Cruiser has 4 Turbolasers in the turret, but only 2 (or 4 smaller Defense ones) fits if you try to redesign it. Bug or feature?

Working as intended, I think. You need to click on "RF" to enable the "rapid fire" mod to get a 4x turbolaser on a newly installed weapon. But, the AI's autodesign already has RF enabled.

[bjg]

You need to click on "RF" to enable the "rapid fire" mod to get a 4x turbolaser on a newly installed weapon. But, the AI's autodesign already has RF enabled.

Thanks for the tip.
But why someone wouldn't want to activate it upon mounting (unless it's a special case, in which they can deactivate it)?

[bjg]

game_893 - there is an empty transport at Astir, and there is a tank on a planet, but can't embark. Reproducible.

[sven]

You need to click on "RF" to enable the "rapid fire" mod to get a 4x turbolaser on a newly installed weapon. But, the AI's autodesign already has RF enabled.

Thanks for the tip.
But why someone wouldn't want to activate it upon mounting (unless it's a special case, in which they can deactivate it)?

In theory, because RF increases the weapon's power use. In practice, it's a pretty small power hit, and I think you probably always do want RF enabled, once you have it researched. I should probably add some special case logic for that.

[sven]

game_893 - there is an empty transport at Astir, and there is a tank on a planet, but can't embark. Reproducible.

Ah. Minor logic error was preventing you from embarking tanks if the source world had < 1 unit of population. Should be fixed on 'dev' r14898.

Thanks again for the bug reports.

[bjg]

Update to game_893 case - moving another Yoral to the planet (and moving tank to the second position) fixes the problem.
BTW, couldn't move Yoral from Akkeri using a "rocket" icon (both in the list and in the star system panel). Ctrl-Shift-click worked. Is this a bug or a new morale system feature?

[sven]

Update to game_893 case - moving another Yoral to the planet (and moving tank to the second position) fixes the problem.
BTW, couldn't move Yoral from Akkeri using a "rocket" icon (both in the list and in the star system panel). Ctrl-Shift-click worked. Is this a bug or a new morale system feature?

It's a bug. I think I may have fixed it in the latest patch to stable, let me know if you see this behavior after updating.

[Chasm]

When capturing gremak worlds with mixed populations (as human player), and shipping of gremak to seed other worlds (as a human) I am seeing gremak populations of under 1 mil die out (world still has population, but the gremak part ceases to exist). Using human militia to take the world, then deploying the militia as population to free up the transports. Anyone else seeing this?

[bjg]

If you have less than 2 and move one out the rest will disappear - it's intended (as far as I know). But you can always roll back.

[Chasm]

Only seems to happen with gremak tho, that's the weird part.

[sven]

Only seems to happen with gremak tho, that's the weird part.

The rules around exactly when a small "remainder" population vanishes after a population move are one of those small details I've adjusted several times in the past. Right now, the rules are impressively inconsistent:

1) If you move population via the transport pool mechanic, and the remaining population of one of the species you moved off is less than .75 pop units, then the leftover population "vanishes".

2) If you move population by embarking on a transport (using, say, the embark/disembark buttons in the planet info pane), any remaining population should, I think, never vanish. This means it's possible to end up with very small population sizes like, say, .01 units, if you're moving population "by hand", but if you use the pool mechanic, it's impossible to be left with anything less than 0.75.

All of this is needlessly confusing, and the rules need to be adjusted. I've yet to decide exactly *how* to best adjust them, however. I think destroying very small population sizes (.1-.25ish) is probably wise. Such small populations are easy to create by accident, and their slow growth rates and potentially high pop cap impact would likely create confusion and annoyance. Also, as Chasm mentioned earlier, there are situations where it's useful to ship *all* members of a certain species off a planet, and if you have just enough that they easily fit on a transport, that's probably a case where it's sensible to just round down a little, and pack your 1,000,100 humans into 1.0 pop units.

But, if I am going to apply a "small populations are destroyed" rule, it really needs to be applied consistently everywhere in the game -- in particular, it needs to be applied when population is moved around via the embark/disembark buttons, as well as via the pool mechanic.

It's also worth noting that any time you try to move population off a planet, your attempt to do so can be deemed invalid on the grounds that "abandoning a planet is not allowed". But, what exactly does it mean to "abandon a planet"? If a player has 0.1 Phidi, and 1.1 Gremak on a world, should they be allowed to move off the Gremak, even though the remaining planet would be left with such a small pop that it would take an extremely long time to grow back up to a meaningful pop size on it's own? So in addition to the pop vanishing rule, we also need a related "planet abandonment restriction", and both need to be designed to avoid troublesome edge cases.

Sorry if that was a bit tmi

Short version: I'm sorry the behaviors are a little strange, they should get less-strange soon.

[bjg]

But, if I am going to apply a "small populations are destroyed" rule, it really needs to be applied consistently everywhere in the game -- in particular, it needs to be applied when population is moved around via the embark/disembark buttons, as well as via the pool mechanic.

Or you can disallow transporting population via embark/disembark (leaving that to military units, including militia).

[Chasm]

Would suggest .25 mil as the min fraction (ie minimum genetic diversity) especially if you are allowing movement of fractional populations.

[sven]

Would suggest .25 mil as the min fraction (ie minimum genetic diversity) especially if you are allowing movement of fractional populations.

That makes sense to me as well. .25 mil is being used as a magic number in the guts of the ground combat system, (planets are guaranteed to always end ground combat with at least .25 mil total pop, no matter what else happens) so there's a certain symmetry there. I've updated the rules in the dev build (r14919), and the pop-clamping should now be applied consistently in both the case of embarking population "by hand", and doing moves via the transport pool.

[bjg]

game_905
Click Refit on the planet's screen, point a cursor to one of the ships - it does not show the stats anymore, making it hard to choose which ship to refit. I've never liked the way it was, prefer to have that information written on or next to ship's icon, but it was better than nothing.