Know this Bug? (Moo1)

[AIL]

I noticed a bug, that seemes only to appear on impossible, at least I did not see it in lesser difficulty settings. Maybe it ain't even a bug but a badly designed "special" for impossible. Here's what it does: Sometimes in the later part of the game, the AI-players gets increadibe ammounts of ships out of nowhere, maybe caused by some overflow. Even large or huge designs! As a result of this it cannot pay it's fleet maintenance wich is a terrible problem for the AI. They can't keep their planets clean and die in mountains of waste, they can't research new technologies and get overtaken.

I've seen that to happen to the Klackons in one game, they were the absolute supermight but fell back then. In another game the 3 biggest empires suffered under this bug, letting the Alkaris who had double the planets, that I had fall behind me in population!

I got the 1.3 patch and have no clue how to prevent that to happen! Did someone else notice this problem?

[vmxa1]

I can't say that I have, but I am not sure I would notice. Have you seen this on different universe sizes? I tend to play small maps mostly. I try to keep an eye on the fleets that they have and they rarely have more than 9000 in one stack in my games. Like I said, I try to stay at war with them all the time so they will continue to send fleets over and I can keep them in check. Also I do not want them to war with each other and gain an advantage. If they are at war with me, they will be less likely to fight each other and if they do it tends to be short wars.

[AIL]

It's more likely to happen in bigger galaxies. Try to play a lost game to the end (until you'r dead) this increases the probability. It just happened to the Sakkra even on hard! The Maxpop of all their planets halved or so and the Fleet Strenght Bar touched the right side like the Technology Bar does when you got Techlvl 50 in average. It's like if it would happend when their overall production reaches a critical value. Maybe it's even a problem of too few Ram or so... Really don't know what causes those pop-ups of 32k-Large-Ship-Fleets.

[vmxa1]

32K large ships? dang! I don't mind 32k small, but large could be a serious issue. I hate to play on those large maps as it is a lot of work and time.Maybe I will give one a shot. If you seen it post the game. You know that a 32K stack can actually contain 65xxx ships, so you could kill 5,000 and it may still say 32K.
Anyway the bar graph at 100 pixels will require close 128,000 ship points. That could be 128K small ships or more than 1000 huge ships. The maint will be 2% of the current cost of building, which goes down over time.
The scale for production is 100 instead of 125, so the max (100 pixel) is 121,000.

[vmxa1]

So lets say it is 600BC cost on avg for a large and they have 1000. That only 12,000 bc, not a problem for 121,000 empire. If they had 10,000, it would be 120,000 or about all they have. This does not count for missile bases or star gates. If they had instead 120,000 small and they cost avg of 10bc, it would yield 24,000BC.
Not a problem. I have no way of knowing if they are off the scale and to what degree.

[AIL]

Good idea!

Check the Klackon-Fleet enroute to Kholdan! 2 x 32 k Large Ships!

[AIL]

I am quite sure the only difference the Impossible-AI has to a human player is, that things are far cheaper in production and maintenance. However there's still no way to maintan 64k Large Ships in a Medium Galaxy.

The worst thing I have ever seen were 3 x 32k Huge ships hanging around in an empty system. I killed em with about 100 Medium Ships using the BHG/Stasis-Field Exploit.

[vmxa1]

Ok, i will peek at it. I am in a large ma on impossibl now. I had forgetten how fast they can get research with so many planets. I have never seena nything like what you are talking about so here goes.

[vmxa1]

I could not look at the stacks to see if they in fact had more than 32K or not.
I did find that they are paying 10.4% for ship maint (includes star gates). They paid 8.7% for bases.
Trade was 458 and reserve was 5556. They were generating net 13396BC.
I found this by making all of his planets yours, so the numbers are slightly off due to your planet being added.
In any event they can afford them. I have never seen a stack of large any where near that size.
I would recommend that you consider spying in future games. At impossible (even hard to a degree) you must steal to catch up. I put 4% or so into it and spy on whoever has tech and is at war with me.
The klacs has about 8600 factories. I did not check the pop, but it generates income as well.
I will let you know how they do in my large map, but I am sure they will not create that many ships. At least not of te large size.

[AIL]

If this bug does not occure in your game, I could imagine it might be caused by a RAM reason. I have a little less than what the readme.txt says I need. I'll try to free up as many as I can and then give it another try. Even if unlikely, I hope this could fix it.

Maybe the patch I have isn't the newest out there? I'll check this probability now.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by AIL
If this bug does not occure in your game, I could imagine it might be caused by a RAM reason. I have a little less than what the readme.txt says I need. I'll try to free up as many as I can and then give it another try. Even if unlikely, I hope this could fix it.

Maybe the patch I have isn't the newest out there? I'll check this probability now.

The versiojn I have is 1.3. I doubt that mem has anything to do with it. I presume you are talking about the conventional requirement. I have found that the game will not load, if I do not met this, except for the sound. IOW if I load with it configured without sound and still do not met the min, it will not load. That min is larger if you have sound configured on.
I am not convinced there is a bug here. I mean I did not have access to their tech and the ship designs so I do not know what the ships cost them to build. I would guess that if the design are new, then something is wrong as they could not build 100,000 ships in a short time. If the stacks are of an old design, then they will be dirt cheap to build and maintain. A small will be down to 1bc and they could make hundreds per turn on most planets. Large is more problematic. If it is fairly old, it will be under 200BC and could be much lower. If say they are 100BC, you could make 10 per turn on most planets. If this was done on 6 planets, you get 60 per turn. 6,000 in 100 turns, so it seems unlikely. Hard to say.

[vmxa1]

Here is a test you could try. Play a game with only one race in the game. Play on say simple level. This give you the type of a boost the AI has at impossible. Once you get to the point of having the tech that was on the ships in your other game keep that design. Run the game out to the date that your game was at when you posted it and see if what the design now cost and how many you could crank out. Remember you can eliminate the other player and keep playing. You want to have the same empire size tht they had attained.

[vmxa1]

BTW the game I played, I never saw them get any large fleets going. The game ended on a vote, so I am not sure they had enough time. They were never going to get there, I would say as like I say I stayed at war with the top dogs most of the time and kept their fleets thinned out. This is my normal tactic at hard or impossible. If I try to be peaceful they will use their power to crush someone and get even stronger and I will be doomed. Eventually they will send an unstoppable fleet. I prevent this primarily by getting them to send smaller fleets to attack be at regular intervals, now they can not build up to a doom fleet.

[vmxa1]

I ran a limited trial where I had only one other race and I bombed it down to one planet with less than 20 pop. Once it got to that number I bombed it back down. They still created ships, even with out factories. This was on impossible.
At 2383 I made the best design I could for small, med and large ships.
Small cost 24BC and I could make 14 per turn on a size 110 planet wit no robotic control boost.
Med 143 and 2 per turn, large was 824 and .33 per turn.
Now consider I have handicaps in that the AI will be getting bonus and research is cheaper. This means, the AI would have a lot more tech than me and these numbers would be much, much better.
Now it turns out that Kholdan got the random upgrade to Rich later.
By turn 2481 those designs had these values:
11(234) 61(47) 349(7). Small to large. Note that by then I had gotten RC5, so more factories and some increase in pop (no soil).
Compare the price drops in about 100 turns. I can only guess at what the AI would be gettting and if it was a race like Psilons they would be so far ahead in tech here.
Having said all of that I plopped these numbers down:
say the AI was doing twice as good at this point 14 large. Say in 100 turns the cost went down by 50% (now 21) and that it doubled its production with RC, Soil, Pop boost 42 ships). How many large ships would it be making during that 100 turns, minus the production hits to get the pop and soil and RC? Maybe 3000? I do not see it having a problem with the med or small ships as by this time, it may be able to make 1000 a turn. I just do not see it making 2 stacks of large that have at least 32,000 ships? So it could be a bug.
Hold the press, I forgot that have 14 planets and could be doing some portion of this production on all or nearly all planets. IOW they maybe making 400 large ships or more per turnl. If those assumption are fair, they could make 8,000 small in a single turn, 1500 med per turn.

[AIL]

I am absolutely sure these fleets were NOT BUILT they popped out of nowhere from one turn to the other and even disappeared to come back again. A short time before the Save I posted they had a fleet with only 1 design of 32k large ships enroute to a Psilon planet. When it arrived there were negative numbers for the fleet sizes even tough the readme.txt says this would have been fixed in 1.3 the Fleet stregth was down to a normal value again. 2 turns or so later it was maxed out and after a short search i found these fleets. It definately was a bug!

I would not have thought it could have to do with the mem because of the reason you mentioned. Another thing was what the install.exe said. It said it would not run but it did either! I never had the bug when playing MOO on my cousins PC, but I had it 3 of 4 times when playing at home. I reconfigured my autoexec.bat and config.sys so that I now have 602k of free conventional memory. I ran 2 test-Games, one of em in a Huge Galaxy / Impossible with one opponent. They got the bar far right, but when I checked it out there were no buggy seeming fleet. Their biggest fleet had: 32k small ships, 2 x 20k medium ships and roundabout 1k large ships.
The other game was medium/impossible like the one of the savegame. I had an increadibly good start with 11 planets. In the first elecion I had more votes than anybody else,that did not prevent the others to vote for the Psilons. So I lost 20:10... I went to Final war. After some success in the beginning of it I got outteched quite fast and lost all but 5 planets. The AI seemed content with what it had and left me alone for a very long time. Uncounted turns later, when they feeled like it, any of them sent exactly 1 huge ship to one of my planets to destroy the colony on it. I used alt-galaxy to check what they have but noone had an unbelieveable big fleet. The last colony revolted (Darloks were in...).

I'll simply continue enjoing MOO and if the Bug does not come back again, i'll be happy!

To your test game: You don't get a boost on Simple other than a slightly cheaper research than on average. The difference is that the AI get's penalties.