Can you fix this issue? I have been waiting 2 years to play this.

[Saberuneko]

Referring to the following thread:
Stellaris - Ships disappear from fleet manager

I started to experience this problem on 2018, did not report it until 2019 as it was not game-breaking back then, I waited patiently, but it is almost end of 2020 and this is still not looked into. From what I could see, I am not the only user experiencing this issue when playing the game, even if difficult to track down, this is not a rarity, it is quite widespread and known.

This is often game-breaking and I am barely able to finish 20% of the games I play.

If we take into account both the content I purchased for myself, plus the one I purchased for my friends to play together in order to support this altogether it almost adds up to 400€ invested in you with Stellaris only! Paradox, I understand that development is a busy matter, but can you at least provide some sort of response or attempt in fixing this in a time frame smaller than 2 years?

I have changed of computer and operating system since then, I purged all my game data for a clean install, made sure nothing remained in Steam Cloud or wherever else, yet the issue remains a constant. This should discard that this is a problem with my device.

I even tried to start playing differently to see if I could stop triggering this bug.
- Tried to play normally
- Tried to play making every ship design update manually
- Tried the above making separate different designs and replacing
- Tried to play without using the fleet manager if possible (it is still mandatory for retrofitting/upgrading ships)

In all cases, I ended up running into the very same issue. Shipyards would get clotted with ships with "-1" remaining build time. Unable to cancel, restarting the game sometimes fixes it, sometimes does not. Dismantling the shipyard slots on the starbase and rebuilding them does not solve the issue. Dismantling the starbase altogether and rebuilding it does not solve the issue. And even then, we should not be needing to spend almost as much Alloys and ship building exclusively dedicated to rebuilding the shipyard to work around this defect.

I used to be a very content customer, please tell me. What happened there?
I am just asking assistance to be able to use what I already paid for, nothing more!

 

[AndrewT]

I am very sorry for you having this bug, but I'm afraid we here in tech support cannot answer your questions, and cannot fix this issue for you.

@Guraan is this an issue you are aware of?

 

[Saberuneko]

Is there nothing that can be done about it? Can I provide any other information that might help fixing this?

I would need to start looking up again, but I technically should be able to point the exact patch/update that broke this, if that helps. It has been consistently broken since that one, with varying negative effects as game mechanics were changed over time... I will try to look it up for you guys, might narrow down where to try looking at to fix this.

 

[Saberuneko]

2.0.2
Fixed wrong numbers displayed when reinforcing fleets in the fleet manager

This was not fully solved and likely is one of the key issues. Fleet Manager still displays wrong numbers, and excludes some of the existing ships if they join the fleet under specific conditions.

2.2.6
Ship upgrading is now handled individually, on a per ship, per shipyard basis. This means if the process is interrupted part way, some of the ships will still be upgraded, rather than losing the entire upgrade progress. Also, alloy costs are now deducted one ship at a time, rather than for the entire fleet in one go, so you don't have to wait until you can afford everything to start the upgrade process

With this change, issue worsened slightly. In order to reproduce the issue, try building aditional ships from fleet manager, then have fleet upgrade. If the new ship arrives before upgrade is complete, it will arrive as the older model, and remain unlisted as part of the fleet.

2.6
Fleet reinforcement is now handled as an MIA event: When a ship is built to reinforce a fleet that is not in their system, they will go MIA for as long as it would have taken them to get to the fleet. In order to reinforce, a path with no hostiles (including pirates and space wildlife) blocking the way to the fleet must exist.

After this change, issue became game-breaking. With reinforcements no longer accounted as an existing ship while in transit, one could upgrade the ship design while ships are MIA, then call an retrofit/upgrade order for the fleet that new ship. After the reinforcement ship returns from MIA status, it joins the fleet, often unlisted.

Unsure of how things work together beyond this point, but I know that this often ends up triggering the "-1" build time bug that paralyzes shipyards.

2.8
Fixed completed construction items for reinforcements not being removed properly from the fleet manager.

This is the key issue, when the "-1" remains at the fleet manager only, it is no issue. But when this happens at a shipyard itself, it fills its building slots until it becomes impossible to use. This still happens nowadays with the latest update. Seeing this mentioned in 2.8, which is some months ago, indicates that the issue was at least noticed/recognized at some point. It still seems to persist, as shown in my attached screenshot in the original post.

 

[AndrewT]

I can't explain how you get this in 80% of your games; while you are obviously not the only one seeing it, if it was that prevalent the game would be more or less unplayable by everyone! And we know it is not.

Anyway I'll see if I can get dev attention on this back here, as my attempt above was obviously not successful, perhaps due to the winter break.

 

[Guraan]

Good Morning!
Hmmm interesting, well i have not heard nor experienced this myself but that does not change the fact that you are and that i apologize for.
So if i read this correctly this is more of a general construction issue than the fleet manager one you refer to since the ships gets added to the starbases and are indeed being constructed but instead of deploying they get stuck?
Will c if i can get some QA eyes on this, but in meantime it would ease if you could attach a savegame where they are stuck (does not really matter if it fixes itself upon loading the game) and/or a savegame where you have a construction that will become stuck instead of deploying and/or if you can provide accurate steps to reproduce with or without a savegame.

 

[Uncia]

Hi, QA weighing in as well!

I definitely know the issue you are talking about - it's one that we've known about and struggling with (and have partially fixed in waves), especially since as you say it gets very disruptive. In testing, we've now been fortunate enough to not see it in a long time (because even when it was fixed not to disrupt the shipyards, having "-1" ships queued in the fleet manager meant that those slots didn't reinforce, which meant you needed to constantly disband and reform fleets, etc.

Do you have any saves or regular occurrences of this happening in Necroids? I _think_ this may have been found and resolved in versions-as-of-yet-unreleased version but if you have a setup where this happens regularly for you then we can run that through the paces on both the current live build and some of the work-in-progress ones.

 

[Saberuneko]

Hello,

I hope this information is useful, please let me know if you have any more questions or if I can make specific testing for you. I am willing to cooperate as much as I can on this if it means we can finally resolve this issue.

@AndrewT:
By the 80% of times, this mostly includes the time when I played multiplayer, where I had to drop out cause people would not agree to reload or revert to previous savegames when the bug took place. If playing singleplayer, the ratio is a bit lower cause reloading sometimes randomly solves the -1 issue, otherwise, even if it hurt, I could backtrack 2~3 autosaves towards a healthy one (this kills chances for doing IronMan mode though). This was certainly frustrating cause there was a time where I mostly played multiplayer games and I often had to drop mid-way.

@Guraan:
The issue is tightly tied to the fleet manager and how it handles fleets merging. The more merging that takes place, the more likely that the issue will happen (with reinforcements coming often, this increases the chances by a lot)

Please see the following example I just generated on latest (current) public Steam version, it is possible to trigger this one from minute one since game version 2.0.2, this specific issue persists even after reloading the save game:

Please see the steps on how to reproduce this, it still works with a 100% chance of intentionally triggering this behavior, following the steps below:
- At the start of game, separate each one of the initial ships into an individual fleet. (To retrofit them separately to 3 ship designs).
- Make the designs for each ship, delete the old automatic design and replace with the new one, but do not retrofit yet.
- Try merging the 3 fleets back into one and see what happens. (See attachments)
- After this bug triggers, try hitting the upgrade/retrofit button. The issue carries over time (See attached savefile)

We are triggering this specific merging issue in purpose here, but it can also happen on its own when upgrading+reinforcing, or sometimes only while reinforcing.

This is not a big issue until the fleet reaches its fleet cap. When new ships exceeding this cap try to merge or get built and set as MIA while upgrade/reinforcement orders are still pending on the fleet manager, this tends to be the event that seems to trigger the "-1", stuck shipyards, etc. This is a bit more non-consistent and I have not found a 100% reliable way to trigger it, but it happens when this is done.

@Uncia:
I do not keep an specific savefile with the "-1" issue taking place, part of my tests for trying to get rid of the issue involved purging the whole install and user files. I also uninstalled the game completely again after the issue persisted the very last time I tried to play (mistake on my side, should have kept that savefile). Still, please see attachment and information above, which could be useful. The last time I experienced the issue was on December 2020 (cannot remember exact dates, but definitely after Necroids release).

As soon as I have some free time, I will test this again, and actively try to reproduce the usual events that triggered this bug to get a newer example save with latest version, the savefile I provided can be a good start for testing this (just try to bring the provided glitched fleet to maximum fleet size, preferrably with a mixture of newer and outdated ship designs, retrofit and/or reinforce, and it will sometimes trigger the "-1" bug).

Edit: I have been playing a new game, the same bug triggered after dividing one of my fleets mid-war. No signs of "-1" issue yet, but will keep playing from this point and see if I can trigger it. I needed to divide forces to handle two fronts at some point, once I re-merged the fleet, it shows as having zero ships (see "fleet-manager-bug-2" savegame)

 

[Uncia]

Hello,

I hope this information is useful, please let me know if you have any more questions or if I can make specific testing for you. I am willing to cooperate as much as I can on this if it means we can finally resolve this issue.

@AndrewT:
By the 80% of times, this mostly includes the time when I played multiplayer, where I had to drop out cause people would not agree to reload or revert to previous savegames when the bug took place. If playing singleplayer, the ratio is a bit lower cause reloading sometimes randomly solves the -1 issue, otherwise, even if it hurt, I could backtrack 2~3 autosaves towards a healthy one (this kills chances for doing IronMan mode though). This was certainly frustrating cause there was a time where I mostly played multiplayer games and I often had to drop mid-way.

@Guraan:
The issue is tightly tied to the fleet manager and how it handles fleets merging. The more merging that takes place, the more likely that the issue will happen (with reinforcements coming often, this increases the chances by a lot)

Please see the following example I just generated on latest (current) public Steam version, it is possible to trigger this one from minute one since game version 2.0.2, this specific issue persists even after reloading the save game:

Please see the steps on how to reproduce this, it still works with a 100% chance of intentionally triggering this behavior, following the steps below:
- At the start of game, separate each one of the initial ships into an individual fleet. (To retrofit them separately to 3 ship designs).
- Make the designs for each ship, delete the old automatic design and replace with the new one, but do not retrofit yet.
- Try merging the 3 fleets back into one and see what happens. (See attachments)
- After this bug triggers, try hitting the upgrade/retrofit button. The issue carries over time (See attached savefile)

We are triggering this specific merging issue in purpose here, but it can also happen on its own when upgrading+reinforcing, or sometimes only while reinforcing.

This is not a big issue until the fleet reaches its fleet cap. When new ships exceeding this cap try to merge or get built and set as MIA while upgrade/reinforcement orders are still pending on the fleet manager, this tends to be the event that seems to trigger the "-1", stuck shipyards, etc. This is a bit more non-consistent and I have not found a 100% reliable way to trigger it, but it happens when this is done.

@Uncia:
I do not keep an specific savefile with the "-1" issue taking place, part of my tests for trying to get rid of the issue involved purging the whole install and user files. I also uninstalled the game completely again after the issue persisted the very last time I tried to play (mistake on my side, should have kept that savefile). Still, please see attachment and information above, which could be useful. The last time I experienced the issue was on December 2020 (cannot remember exact dates, but definitely after Necroids release).

As soon as I have some free time, I will test this again, and actively try to reproduce the usual events that triggered this bug to get a newer example save with latest version, the savefile I provided can be a good start for testing this (just try to bring the provided glitched fleet to maximum fleet size, preferrably with a mixture of newer and outdated ship designs, retrofit and/or reinforce, and it will sometimes trigger the "-1" bug).

Edit: I have been playing a new game, the same bug triggered after dividing one of my fleets mid-war. No signs of "-1" issue yet, but will keep playing from this point and see if I can trigger it. I needed to divide forces to handle two fronts at some point, once I re-merged the fleet, it shows as having zero ships (see "fleet-manager-bug-2" savegame)

Thank you so much for the additional information - we are definitely hunting this bug down, and the additional data is very much helpful.

As always, unfortunately, we can't really promise anything until we've essentially got the fix in a patch and ready to drop, as there are so many moving parts in gamedev that may cause a potential fix to fail etc. But the issue is definitely not forgotten.

 

[Saberuneko]

Thank you so much for the additional information - we are definitely hunting this bug down, and the additional data is very much helpful.

As always, unfortunately, we can't really promise anything until we've essentially got the fix in a patch and ready to drop, as there are so many moving parts in gamedev that may cause a potential fix to fail etc. But the issue is definitely not forgotten.

Got it, hoping the issues with Fleet Manager get fixed eventually... I understand these things take time though.

All I can say for now is... I ran the whole playthrough without encountering the '-1' issue on this case. That is a good sign.
I should try to get one or two friends around to try running a playthrough on multiplayer and see what happens. Will share savegames if any of us run into the issue.

Thanks

 

[Saberuneko]

Ran into the -1 bug on multiplayer once more, reloading fixed it this time.

As the defect usually seems to be complicated to catch on a save file, is there any way to make a memory dump or something similar that could copy the exact state of the game when this happens? If so, how can I capture one for you so it can be used for analysis?

 

[Saberuneko]

Hello!

Sorry for the delayed response, kinda forgot about the thread.
Just writing to say that I have been playing the game for quite a while and noticed most of these issues are resolved!

There are a few very rare cases where fleets will not reinforce as expected with the Fleet Manager and end up split, but that is a minor issue.
I have definitely been enjoying the game for quite a while now

Thank you for your efforts, I definitely noticed the improvement.