AI Bug found? Infinite Loop problem

[Darkstar]

Hello one and all.

I seem to have uncovered a bug I have never encountered before, or one that I have forgotten about. So help me out if you know about this...

There seems to be a problem with in the AI code in which it goes into an infinite loop where... a player navy unit, under AI control, wants to bombard a target. Only the target has air cover. Result... infinite loop.

I've encountered this problem twice yesterday (2 seperate games of Speed SMAC). I'll try to make sure that is EXACTLY what it is, but I thought I'd ask the board to see if anyone here knew of it. It's DEFINATELY AI controlled navy responsible... and going into an infinate loop.

[RedFred]

That is a new one on me, Darkstar. I am almost positive I have seen the AI bombard me successfully when I have air cover over a port base. Is there an additional factor in the cases where the game went into infinite loop?

[johndmuller]

Darkstar,
How do the symptoms differ from the scrambling air defense bug (that is, if you've experienced that one) ?

I'm not sure that I know for sure what those symptoms are either since I've only experienced 1 repeatable problem in which the machine went unresponsive while centered on an AI base with lots of Yang's humongous Air Force in it. It certainly seemed to be endless loop like (or did you mean the kind where you could actually see units endlessly doing the same thing?). That's what I think of when the scrambling bug comes up, although I don't have the intellimouse or whatever is generally blamed for that one.

Perhaps there is a naval equivalent of scrambling air defense?

[Ned]

I too had a similar problem with a naval unit on automatic insisting it wanted to bombard a Spartan unit in a Drone port. At the time, I had a truce with the drones. When the attempt was made, I was given a popup asking whether I wanted to cancel the truce. When I said no, the naval unit repeated the attempt.

The sequence had no end. I had to cancel the truce to go forward in the game.

Ned

[Avenoct]

Ycch! I've seen a unit expend it's movement going back and forth every turn for the rest of the game, but never this one. It seems perfectly plausible though and should be reported to Firaxis as a bug. If an automated unit is designed to 'try again from a different angle' when it fails to achieve it's objective then this is perfectly understandable, if unpleasant and in need of correcting!

-Smack