SEV Official: "What's Left to Patch?" Thread... for older patch: v1.20 (New patch 1.25)

Shield Regenerators are still borked, placing multiple regenerators on a ship no longer improves regeneration since 1.17 despite stats claiming otherwise (they worked in 1.13 if you flipped the values so they weren't corrupt). Placing regenerators of different strengths results in unpredictable regen rates.

AI doesn't colonize any planets if you enable 'Colonize breathable planets only' in the games setup options. Even planets with the correct surface type and atmosphere are ignored.

He who thinks - defeats

Shield regenerators are not apparently supposed to stack they are set up as a one per ship/base item and putting more in just wastes space. The only bug is that you can put more than one on the same ship

They don't seem to work for me, unless it's because i added recharge rates to my shields... Need to check that.

I encountered this in SE-4 and its back for the replay in SE-5. I created a component with all three colonization ability's and in the planet screen it shows 3 ships for each ship with one of these modules present. Apparently the game reads each ability of the component as 1 ship. It would also seem the ministers don't really know what to do, they will still only colonize breathable home planet types. I Balanced it so the component is only available after all three colony techs and the quantum reactor is researched.

"We are pleased to see that your enthusiasm for our product continues unabated, and would like you to know that the two thermonuclear missiles currently converging upon your vessel are merely a courtesy we extend to all prospective customers."

I need to get round to testing these myself but...

- Are Weapon Reload Disrupt/Increase effects still bugged?
- Units launched into an existing unit group (out of, or in combat): do they still get deprived of their initial supplies?
- Do Fighters move at full speed even with 0 supplies?
- Do Drones lose supplies as they move and per turn in space?
- Are Drones no longer recoverable as intended? As in, even with the Cargo Transfer window?
- How are supplies distributed between units in a unit group with less than max supplies? Everyone shares or some units at full while others at 0?
- Edit: Can the game read the score for itself, i.e. do Mega Evil triggers and score-based victory conditions work?

Those were the ones I remember off-hand that I don't remember seeing on the change logs.

All official bug reports and submissions should go to the Projects section. Malfador is sent an email for each bug posted, and users can keep a list of all bugs and their severity.

You can keep posting here to discuss whether bugs still exist, but keep bug discussions in the feedback forum.

There still appears to be a memory leak. With lots of star systems, and lots of empires, later in the game turn progression will start to grind to a halt. Generally, you can only get through three or four turns until it takes so long that the "Processing after players" bar simply stops moving.

The text on the back of the retail box reads, amung other things: Large Galaxy - 255 solar systems with 15 planets each.

This is a theoretical limit (technically the limit of the software) and not a playable limit. The ability of the game to process turns in a timely manner peaks at about 60-70 solar systems. Furthermore, the default values in the Settings.txt file specifically cap the number of solar systems at 100. This is therefore a misleading statement, as the game cannot be played with this many systems after modding it, and without modding it you cannot even ATTEMPT to play it with this many systems.

- Emissive Armour is doing no damage reduction.
- Weapon reload disrupt/increase weapons fail to do so.

I think emmisive armour simply stops any damage of x or less, it doesn't reduce damage by x.

Big difference, which makes it (almost) worthless except in the hands of skilled modders.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I think i will be that modder .

Not sure why (or if it has anything to do with my mod, or Kwoks one) but weapons platforms don't seem to take damage from bombardment (well, after a while they start to take damage but about everything else is gone by then). Also, while designing one i removed it's armor then saved it : structure was now displayed as a negative number.

Too late, I'm basing a mod around it (well, in part...) so that weapons that hurt small ships can't hurt big ships... and anti cap ship weapons can't hit smalls hips anyway, soooo....
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I see... you're right about Emissive Armour... furthermore only 1 armour per ship is effective...

Well, in Balance Mod that means it's only useful for stopping fighter weapons but it's good to know how it works.

1.20 seems to have re-broken (or omitted) 1.18's fix #7:

I've done even better, i've tweaked armor so that with a powerful enough weapon, you have penetration damage. To counter this, i've made damage resistance stack so having multiple armor plating reduce the risk of shots to damage the internals.

That's not regular behaviour. The APB is actually one of the most accurate weapons in the mod (since its accuracy at range decreases at half the normal rate). What happened if you increased the range between the ships?

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

The AP miss bug happens sporadically. It seems to be linked to a specific enemy ship -- if you miss once against a ship, then you'll miss it for that entire combat, and for all additional combats you fight against it that turn.

Hypothesis: Some defensive data field isn't initialized properly, and its random garbage value starts out "infinitely" high?

I've fought ~100 combats total with my APs.
- Most of the time, it's as expected: my hit rate is ~80% at max range (of 90 for AP3s), and my retreat ambushes at range ~30 are ~100%, for nearly instant kills.

- Against a few individual frigates (~5), it's as I described above: I shoot with AP{2,3}s for the full 3 minutes, and go either 0-180 or 1-179, for a hit rate of less than 1%. Long range, point-blank, medium range, doesn't matter. I've tried going from very short to long range (the Maximum strategy + automove tends to do this for you whether you want it or not ), and it just keeps missing.

- Case: I build 1 frigate and retrofit a 2nd. They are buddies. They sortie one turn out, and see an AI frigate. Next turn, they burn all 24 movement on 1 dogfight + 3 retreat ambushes, and combine to miss it in all 4: 2-698 out of 700 shots with AP2s, mostly at point-blank range. (It's not 720 because we took some time to engage in the first dogfight.) The AI frigate escapes with most of its armor intact (it was running because of 0 ordnance). The buddies are out of supply (one turn out from their home base!), and must limp home. I took more damage from 1 DUC1 + 20 ordnance than I inflicted with 2 AP2 x {1 dogfight + 3 ambushes}.

Other particulars:
- This happened once when the AI was stern-chasing me, both undamaged. We missed each other for ~150 seconds, and then his 8 comrades (+ Ion Engines 2) caught up and killed me instantly.

- In the other ~9 cases, I was undamaged (or only armor/shields dinged), AI had lost all {armor + weapons} or ordnance, and I was stern-chasing him.

- (Other ~90 combats): APs performed as expected, in dogfights, retreat ambushes, AI stern-chasing me, and attacks vs. immobiles (satellites/bases/planets).

At first, I thought that maybe APs couldn't fire while moving. Now I suspect it's a data initialization glitch.

To do:
[_] Before every combat, save as $A.
[_] If it happens, save as $B, reload $A, retry combat.
[_] If it duplicates, submit game file as bug report
[_] Quit, restart, reload $A, retry combat.
--
Eric / Gilmoy

1.20 + Balance Mod 1.00. (spaceempires.net won't let me post in the Balance Forums for 24 hours, so I hope Kwok reads this here.)

Observation:
- Early game (turn ~15).
- My Frigate 1 has 2 Anti-Proton 2 (range 80), Combat Sensors 4, full crew, no damage.
- AI's Frigate 1. Range was 3 (not a typo; the AI had retreated next to my 2nd ship).
- Neither of us had any combat-related racial or societal abilities.
- My hit chance should be 100 (base) -"about 3" (range) +20 (CS4 in Balance) -30 (vs. Frigate) = 87% in Balance, and ~80% in standard 1.20.
- In 180 seconds, I fired 180 shots and scored 1 hit. One. The other 179 shots, at range 3, missed.

Are AP2s supposed to have a point-blank hit chance of less than 1%? Depleted Uranium Cannons and Meson Blasters at level 1 perform as expected, e.g. 50-60% hit chance at range 70.

It's only turn 15 -- too soon for any oddball effects to hose damage (e.g. the AI doesn't have ECM level 20 or such, if that even exists in SE5). It's my stone-age frigate vs. his stone-age frigate. If I had Mesons, the fights are over in about 5 salvos. This game was my test for Anti-Protons, and so far they've been beyond useless.

Insult to injury: My Frigate ran itself out of supply doing this. 180 shots * 6 = 1080 supply. And he fought twice. Seems like a high price to pay to hit a naked AI frigate once!
--
Eric / Gilmoy

The Intelligence system is b0rked.

1) Once you start intel against an enemy empire, there's no way to stop it. You can set the expenditure to 0% and it still goes through. Even better, you can change the project and now the new project gets through.

2) Espionage results aren't updating in-game. If you steal star charts, the only thing you get is knowledge of where the system is and how many stars are in it - all hexes are Red (not seen never seen). If you find out what tech levels the enemy has, you have to write it down - the report in the Empire window isn't updated. If you steal ship designs, well, you just wasted the intel project because they aren't put into the Design window and there's no other way to look at the blueprints.

I don't think that's correct. I've stolen enemy designs before and I was able to view them in the Design window. I had to change the filter settings to show enemy units, though.

Well, no matter the project, if you set it to 0% you don't perform it at all.

Updating the tech reports would be nice and logical, on the other hand.

I haven't had any problems with this in version 1.20. Had you started a new game or where you continuing with an existing one?

There is a work around for this, just hit the ESCAPE key to start the combat Works every time, I know it should be the Retrn Key, but it ain't.

You can't accept a counter proposal for alliances if your already treatied with the empire.There is no accept option.

I installed the patch: v1.20 and now the blasted program won't work.
the first screen comes up I press the play button. then the Strategy First Screen comes up and everything slows to a crawl. Then eventually the SE5 screen and main menu comes up. The cursor doesn't move and everything freezes up and then the computer starts to freeze up. I can get the task manager up and running eventually and kill the SE5 program and everything then returns to normal.

I downloaded the patch from Malfador Machinations' web page.

I even uninstalled and reinstalled the 2 times and I still have the problem

SE5 is an unmitigated disaster. I have never seen a game with this many problems get released to the public before. I can't believe I spent $39.99 for a game this crappy and bug filled.
I think I'll stick with SE4 Malfador Machinations they did an excellent job with that one.
They also didn't get pressured to rush SE4 out before it was finished.

I hope someone can resolve this problem because it sure ticks me off that I can't get it to work.

P.S. I like the spell checker you have here. Also I can't login using Internet Explorer 7.
Anyone have any idea why???

You nailed it.

When read about MM giving away the series to SF, I was afraid this could happen. Damn I was right.

Please help!!

Im playing with 1.20 patch, no mods. So the bugs:
- If you have a satellite deployed at a planet, and you recover it in tactical combat, it does get recovered but its "ghost" will remain in space. Having no stats it cannot be destroyed, but it is still fully functional. This way my lone scout satellite wiped out 5 ships from about 10 that attacked my planet before the rest ran out of ordnances and retreated.
- talking about planets, damaged facilities can only be repaired by ship yards (and repair ships, I guess) but I really doubt its meant to be that way. After all if they can constuct it, than maybe they can repair too. However I noticed that ship yards have a structure repair rate, but its still illogical.
- Planet Utilization tech stops at lvl 21, meaning the best atmospheric modification plant you can get is the lvl 2 one, working over 9.5 years. Even at tech lvl 30, the 5 years facility would be a bit too harsh IMHO, but 9.5 years... That hardly even worth building.
- When you create new designs, some of their stats - like amount of shield and armor - will get displayed as 0 in design list until next turn.
- I dont know if this is a bug, but certain empires ships are REALLY hard to hit. They have no racial trait for ship defense, or any defensive equipment on the ships, still my ships about never hit them, while they can easily hit same ships from other empires. I realized this at start of a game, when all empires had same ships. Its not a miss bug, as they can be hit at very close range, but still at far lower chance.

Also a few annoyances:
- Boarding is very poorly desribed. You dont get any hint about how many of certain level components you would need to successfully board ships with certain amount of crew. It was clearly stated with numbers in previous SE games so you could plan, but in SEV, its totally up to experimenting.
- Resource usage should really be "fixed" as currently it seems you use your stockpile for building/maintenance in each turn, and only after that will your income arrive, meaning, that you must have more storage capacity than your usage. As I see it should be the other way: first your income gets added, then your expenses substracted, and finally, if you are still above storage limit, the rest gets dumped.
- I bet this was said many times, but why do the game has to enter tactical combat every time ships hit one of my minefields? I would be perfectly happy with just a report about it, especially as quite obviously nothing happens in the combat.
- Why isnt there a "chase" command for ships in tactical combat. I know I can turn on auto-move, but sometimes that just doesnt do the trick, like when I only want one ship to go chasing.
- facilites on planets have way too low structure rate, even a few very basic ships can wipe a planet in no time, making bombardment weapons totally useless. IMHO only a few weapons should be able to be fired at planets. Its a bit strange that space-fighter ships can destroy life on a whole planet. Thats like "bombing" cities with machine guns.
- The idea of organic ships/etc. is a bit strange, as they dont give you any bonus besides using organics not minerals. I still use them, just to lower my minerals consumption a bit, but if they are already there, and you had to use those points to get the tech, then shouldnt they have some special ability? For example organic ships/stuff self-repairing or generating supplies at minimal rates would make sense.
- Maybe I just missed it, but I cant seem to find any repair queue. I know you can set the priorities, but still, if you have two damaged ships from same class, they will get repaired simultaneously, and you cant tell to get one fully repaired first, can you?
- Again, maybe its just for me, but AI empires seem to completely reject even the idea of surrendering. Even in late games, empires with one planet and a few useless ships remaining refuse to surrender.
- In tactical combat, in many cases whole fleets can chase your ship in a big column (on top of each other) if you make a few circles around them. And since vertical distance doesnt seem to be counted they can all shoot you at same time.
- It is also be quite clear that scrapping population should have certain effects. Killing a few hundred million of your own citizens is not something that would evade global news, or the attantion of other citizens in your empire. Actually does global news work at all?

Sorry for the long post.

Bug: Can't stop intelligence

I am currently playing a game where I stopped intelligence on an empire several turns before destroying its last colony and losing contact. It has been 3-4 turns and I'm still performing intelligence on that empire. I've gained several tech levels and while free techs are always nice I'd rather it worked like its supposed to. I haven't confirmed it, but it also seems like this bug prevents you from performing intelligence on another empire.

Bug: Missing crew after retrofit
I believe this has been reported before elsewhere, but I wanted to make sure that is was clear that this bug still exists in 1.20. Sometimes after retrofitting a ship at a world inhabited by a race (or races) other than your own, the ships crew is set to 0 and is affected by all the negative penalties associated with that condition. I believe this might have something to do with retrofitting ship control components. Note: If this is not a bug and simply a new feature I would like to note that, in my opinion, it sucks.

Bug: Issues recovering fighters during combat

In my current game I've discovered something odd. I am at war with Empire X and have a treaty with Empire Y that doesn't include swapping minefield codes. Now, when Empire Y hits one of my minefields, there's no combat, just a log message. But when Empire X hits a minefield, there's a combat. I didn't notice what happens when my minefield is hit by an empire I am neither at war with nor have a treaty with.

Some of the weapons need some tuning to make them even worhtwhile of being in the game...

- There are some weapons like Ionic... (the gun that should kill the engines) that are stopped by the armor, now if you have to blast your way trough the armor before it takes effect it's pretty useless.
- And ofcourse the Wave Motion Gun's Range.. it needs fixing..

Now personally I can do the fix myself the game is easily modified on that aspect...
But I would like it that when I install the game and just run the latest patch over it that little things like these will be fixed.
The biggest problems should be fixed by the 1.20 patch and I haven't run into any problems with the game. There is the bug that the launch/recover units menu in battle freezes up the game when you have a carrier with fighter or anything.

But these are all small problems that I would like to see fixed in the next patch just to indicate that the biggest bugs are worked out and the finer tune-ups are being worked on.

The Balance mod might be of use to you Exile 1A, it fixed many little insanities like that.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

Sounds good I think I'll do that. Thank You

make sure that if you play the ballence Mod you reserch mines early as the AI loves its mines

Hahahahaha, thanks for the tip...

I have been building a list of several issues, some are probably known bugs, otherwise are improvments. I haven't seen many mentions of these since everyone appears focused on the AI issues. I left out AI issues because I'd be typing for hours and everyone pretty much is aware of them. If there is a better way to submit these please let me know. Please excuse any typos.

Hardware/crash/performance issues:

- Mouse cursor becomes invisible on the black screen with the prompt to begin ground combat on the second or later occurrance of ground combat between turns.

- When running in Windowed mode the mouse cursor is uncontrollable when over the SE:v window. The mouse cursor flys around erratically in the wrong directions. (latest DirectX 9, Intellimouse Explorer 2.0).

- Game crashes when if you swap to desktop for a period of time or if the workstation is locked.

- Game leaks memory over time making each end-turn sequence slower, it is common to see the SE:V process take 500MB+ of memory after 10-20 turns.

- Clicking on an existing saved game in the save game screen causes painful delay of 5-10 seconds. It seems that the save game files perhaps lack some kind of simple header of game details to populate the game info and race boxes and instead the game parses the entire save game file.

- Attempting to load a saved game during combat will usually cause a crash.

Combat actions:

- After the last enemy is destoryed during combat the remaining ships fly aimlessly and break formation. On the next battle in this sector the ships waste precious time doing a "dance" to re-formation themselves. This causes majors problems when ships are guarding warp points as the AI fequently suicides ships through warp points that immediately flee the sector in chase. In some scenarios where multiple fleets are at a warp point one fleet destroys the enemy ships while the other is still reforming and after each battle those reforming ships drift further and further away from the warp point until they end up in a neighboring sector breaking out of the fleet.

- Fighers that are out of supply or resources or have nothing to fight should return to their carriers, it makes no sense for fighters to flee the sector as they cannot go anywhere. Likewise carriers shouldn't launch fighters that cannot fight. This probably applies to drones as well.

- Ships refuse to make a "safe-distance" ground troop delivery on a planet defended with weapons platforms when planetary bombardment is not allowed (usually by treaty). The ships insist on making a head on course for the planet then stopping or parking themselves above the planet ensuring they take the maximum damage or death in doing so.

- When giving ships manual move orders they insist on stopping their engines and turning in place instead of making a wide arc turn at speed. Dreadnaught sized ships take ages to do a 180 degree turn this way and should never happen in combat.

- Maybe I'm not doing it right but ships refuse to "stop" or hold ground at a point in a sector. They insist on flying in circles. How can I order ships to sit next to the wrap point as if they were a baseship?

- Carriers that have fighters but no weapons keep fleeing the sector instead of maintaing a safe distance. This causes problems when carriers with no weapons are guarding a warp point or other sector.

- Ships and units that flee in combat to a neighboring sector should lose supply equal to 1 sector of momement. It is rediculous that one can chase drones in combat across dozens of sectors in a system with no resupply and the fleeing ships/units never lose any supplies.

- Not sure if this is my error, but during combat ships routinely fire their entire wad of missles on the first ship in range in a massive overkill. Ships/Fleets with sufficient experience should refrain from firing more missles than obviously necessary to cripple or destroy a target and save the missles for any remaining targets.

- There is some limit on the number of troops that can be dropped on planets. If multiple ships attempt to drop more troops on a small planet than possible the "drop ships" get stuck going in circles above the planet. If the combat timer runs out then those units are lost. Ships should not drop more troops than can fit.

- Certain commands in combat are disabled when multiple ships are selected such as drop troops or break formatation and many others. If multiple ships are selected then these command button should be enabled and if selected apply to all ships selected for which the command is possible to be carried out.

Ships/Fleets/Design/Retrofit/Construction:

- Fleet names stop automatically working at a point and start using the same name every time a new fleet is created. It should not be possible to have ships or fleets with duplicate names.

- If a retrofit operation on a ship does not require swapping cargo/fighter bay components it should not be necessary to have to remove the cargo from the ship.

- Retrofitting a ship at a planet should automatically remove any cargo to the planet if the planet has storage space. Requiring the user to manually unload cargo in this case is pointless.

- Why are space yard ships that are constructing units in their own cargo/fighter bays be restricted from movement? Is this a game rule or a bug?

- Not a bug per say, but the functionality of design names automatically updating their roman numerals during ship design upgrades should also extend to the name of the ship if the design name is part of the ship name. Tracking which ships have been retrofitted is extremely painful because most displays show the name of the ship and not the design name.

If a random "event" occurs that mysteriously transports a ship to another system that the player has not explored then the ship becomes comes hidden and inaccessable. The system cannot be seen on the starmap nor can the ship by reached by the UI. The ship exists as the AI complains about it and eventually combat breaks out, but until the system is explored or revealed through intelligence the ship cannot be reached to give orders.

You can't process the turn in a multi human e-mail game except through the Command Prompt option. It worked in ver 1.17.

About that carrier problem you need to give it the right strategy otherwise it will flee... Select "Fighter Attack" as strategy and it will work just fine..

SE5, v1.20

Me and a friend were playing a hotseat game. We had an alliance but figured it was a bit too tedious and both left the alliance. Puzzling enough it remained in the Empires list. That didn't bother us much so we played on. After a while and a bit of alt-tab back to WinXP the graphics got garbled. So we save the game, restart SE5, load the game. Result: "Unable to load ". Seems the last autosave we were able to load was quite some turns back, with the alliance not being empty yet. Leads me to conclude that he game somehow tripped over that empty alliance while loading.

If I'm attempting to capture an enemy ship, and my boarding vessel fires its boarding pods while flying over a planet, the pods don't seem to be able to lower themselves to the same plane as the target ship, and just follow the target to the edge of the map. I only encountered this once, but the conditions for this occuring to me have only come about once.

Still, I like the whole flying over planets thing. Much better than flying through planets.

~ Kingside_Bishop

[/communication]

I forgot to mention that it's the retail version of the game that I'm having the problem with, and as I said in my previous posts uninstalling and reinstalling has not worked. I don't have any mods in use. My computer is P4, 3.4 GHZ, with 1.5 GB of ram and a 256MB NVidia Geoforce FX 5500. I have no idea what to do to get it to work. Any help would be greatly apprecated. Thanks

P. S. I don't know if any of the info is of any use. let me know if more info is needed

Hmudd - I have a similar setup as you do. A P4 2.4Ghz with 1 Gb RAM and the same video card, but I don't have any problems. What kind of background programs are you running?

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Apparently there was something wrong in the registry setting that was causing the program to take up a lot of processor capacity.

Once I cleared the registry of any thing to do with SE5 and reinstalled the program every thing now works great.

Thanks for the help offered

The ANTI-SHIP drones can attack and destroy planets.

Anti ship drones will lock onto planets as targets for preference, conversely anti planet drones will target ships and blow them to bits 15k damage will do for most things but it’s a waste of a drone meant to blast planets.

It would be nice if this where fixed especially when drones are a great recon in force weapon to soften up well defended planets

I find the strategic combat screen very difficult to use. When a ship is "Centered", it's centered on the screen but not on the viewable area thanks to the fairly large GUI, leaving it easy to miss stuff on the bottom of the screen. Likewise I don't see an easy "Exit" button when I want the rest of it to autoresolve.

This may have been posted before with all the "missile weapons win" posts. But even with balance mod, missile weapons (or any weapon with a longer range than the opponent) still win, even if the enemy ships have faster engines than you. If you're set to Max weapons range or just keep on moving your ship away from the AI, the AI always fires at maximum range, and by the time the discharge reaches your ship, you're out of range. It's very odd, cause the enemy ship seems to stop when it fires, keeping your ship right on the edge of its range, rendering its superior engines useless.

Try using this Mod as it seems to have the best AI for dealing with Point defence systems misiles are also rather harder to get than they are in either the balence mod or the stock game.

I second evilginger about the Interrelated Mod (IRM). It's still an Alpha, but is coming along very well and includes major changes to tech & components, especially w/ regard to weapons.