Know this Bug? (Moo1)

AIL · January 4, 2003, 07:18

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 · January 4, 2003, 14:30

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 · January 4, 2003, 15:28

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 · January 4, 2003, 16:31

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 · January 4, 2003, 16:40

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 · January 4, 2003, 17:16

Good idea!

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

AIL · January 4, 2003, 17:29

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 · January 4, 2003, 20:18

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 · January 4, 2003, 21:32

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 · January 5, 2003, 10:21

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 · January 5, 2003, 15:09

Quote:

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 · January 5, 2003, 15:15

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 · January 5, 2003, 15:22

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 · January 5, 2003, 18:27

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 · January 6, 2003, 06:02

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.

vmxa1 · January 6, 2003, 13:56

Yes it could be a bug. I would wonder if you noticed the version number during load up? Did it actually say 1.3?
I am deep into a huge map now and have not seen it. Psilons are more than half of the map. They do have some 2K stacks.
I did not mean to imply you actually get a boost at simple, that is not correct as you say. I was thinking the effect in comparison to being on impossible.
Bottom line, I would tend to agree that it is a glitch. I just have not seen it.

AIL · January 6, 2003, 15:53

"Program Version 1.3 © 1993 Simtex Software" is what it says.

What's your opinion on Larger Gals? Is it harder than on small ones?

vmxa1 · January 7, 2003, 00:10

Well I feel that the bigger th map the tougher it is in Moo1 at impossible level. The Ai will have so many planets and the break on research makes it very hard. You have to sort of turtle and hope to with stand the assaults until you have enough tech to start hurting them. In a small galaxy you at least restain the amount of planets they have and therefore the tech.

DaveV · January 7, 2003, 08:46

In the strat guide, Emrich and Hughes opine that medium galaxies make for the most difficult games. They say that the AIs fight each other for real estate on small galaxies, and the human player has enough time to establish himself before having to battle for turf in large/huge.

AIL · January 7, 2003, 13:48

I shortly had a game on hard in a medium galaxy that was just increadibly easy compared to that I had after it on a Large one.

What is this strat guide you talk about? A book?

I read a strat guide from Jon Sullivan Page that gave quite a lot of info but don't think that's what you are talking about.

DaveV · January 7, 2003, 14:08

Quote:

Originally posted by AIL
What is this strat guide you talk about? A book?

Yes, a really useful book. If you're serious about this game, it would be well worth your while to find this book. Authors are Alan Emrich and Tom Hughes; my memory fails me on the title, but it's something about Master of Orion.

vmxa1 · January 7, 2003, 18:54

Quote:

Originally posted by AIL
I shortly had a game on hard in a medium galaxy that was just increadibly easy compared to that I had after it on a Large one.

What is this strat guide you talk about? A book?

I read a strat guide from Jon Sullivan Page that gave quite a lot of info but don't think that's what you are talking about.

Alan Emrich and Tom Hughes offical strat guide to Moo1.
That is what I am saying, as the ma grows and the level grows, it is worse for the human in Moo1.

vmxa1 · January 7, 2003, 19:06

Quote:

Originally posted by DaveV
In the strat guide, Emrich and Hughes opine that medium galaxies make for the most difficult games. They say that the AIs fight each other for real estate on small galaxies, and the human player has enough time to establish himself before having to battle for turf in large/huge.

Yes, I read that, but disagree. Remember they wrote this before all the final touches and then the ppatches.
I can only say that if you fire up a Huge map on impossible with 5 players as I just did, you will be shocked at how far you will be behind in no time.
I was able to grab a lot of planets, but soon the Psilons has 40 planets and when I spied on them they more tech that I had yet to learn, than I had altogether. 8 techs in each fields, that I did not have. Fleets of 1200 med and scores of large were common. I had none.
Later they had +8- pop, while I have +10, you get the picture. They have a research boost and the AI boost for the level, so it is much harder to get tech for the human. Since the AI is stupid, I have managed to hold on with only 2 planets destroyed. I was able to beat many fleets at my planets and maybe getting their fleet in check now. I have stolen a ton of tech from them and traded to the other players whenever they were not mad at me to get anything, even giving them good stuff for bad stuff, just to make it easier to steal the good stuff. I boosted them some at time to help them hold off the Pslions. I captured a number of other AI palnets and now will be making a move (I hope). I got star gates up on the best planets and in a turn or two will have HEF. This will let me start going on offense to really thin out their fleets and grab planets form others (I hope).

vmxa1 · January 7, 2003, 19:14

Anyway:
The real danger is that the biggest race will get votes and win before you can get in the game. This is easier to control on a small map. If the large race was human, this game would have been over long ago.
With fewer planets it will be a much longer process for any race to get all the tech needed to elimate others.
The fighting will start as soon as available planets gets low (sooner for some races). This will occur regadless of the map size, it is just the length of time require that varies. Who fights with who is not a function of map size. It is racial preferences and location. If you are in a small map and in a corner, only so many can get at you for a long time. So I reject the idea that the AI will fight each other more because it is a small map. You relations and size and location are the determinates.

vmxa1 · January 7, 2003, 23:47

Ok, I may have ran into the bug. I noticed a fleet on one of their planets that have three designs that had negative numbers.
Soon after I saw they had stacks of 32K. They came with large stacks of plasma torps and tore up planets. I was attempting to attack their fleets, but it was wierd. 30-50 large ships with all tech available where not taking damage often due to the disrupter device that makes them shakes an dyou miss.
(displacement device is what I meant)
This is way over powered as it works far to often. I would hit them with stack of 80 or so large ships with auto guass and HEF and not do ny damage. Anyway the idea was to see if the bug would show and it seems it may have. The game was too lenthy with a huge map for my taste.

AIL · January 8, 2003, 02:42

Sad thing to hear!

I had hoped you would not run into it and it could really be because of the lacking memory. Now I think it's an outcome of battles between AI-players. Thats what was not in my two testing games since the one was with only one opponent and the other with a Final War from very soon on, where they do not attack each other.

The device you are talking about is the displacement device (disruptors are snot-collored beam-weapons that always have a range of 2) the description says it makes 1/3rd of all attacks miss, regardless of any defense and attack boni and if it's a weapon or special that would normally always hit. But I don't think it's the only reason for you of not doing any damage. Gauss Autocannons do not do so much max-damage in average. And if they had Class XV shields, what is likely at this time, you'd hardly do any damage with Gauss.

vmxa1 · January 8, 2003, 13:31

Yeah, I knew that is was not a disruptor, but if figured if I tossed in the shaken part, people would know what it was. I will edit the old post. I was too lazy to look it up.
So it would seem in a game were you struggle for a long time and other races are not eliminated, you may see this bug. Since I play mostly on small maps I do not see it. When I play on large maps, I will either do well enough to keep the ohter races down or get killed before the game will get deep into the time line.

vmxa1 · January 8, 2003, 13:36

AIL, I would have never seen the problem in that test game, if I was not looking for it. Two reason, 1- I would not be checking the ships of theirs so closely 2- I would have abandoned the game much sooner. I only struggled so hard to give the game a chance to see the bug.

AIL · January 8, 2003, 15:18

I also have not been looking after this bug. I found it because I was so worried about a pop drop one race had between 2 elections. So I checked their planets and found they all had a very low maxpop. I then saw, that their fleet size was just increadible and after looking around a little bit I found these giant fleets. Well, I hope Moo 3 will come out soon and hopefully not contain bugs like this. I really don't like moo2 very much for the reason that the AI makes so increadibly weak ship-designs and colonizes so slow. Another reason is that the programmers overvalued some buildings that are VERY useless like the food replicator.

vmxa1 · January 8, 2003, 19:02

When Moo3 comes out and if I like it, it will not change much on my playing of Moo1/2. I will still get in some games of each. I love Moo2, with all of the flaws.