Human controlled AI Country Fleet stops & breaks up when restarting saved game

[MagooNZ]

I've been asked to mention this well known, long standing bug, just to keep it flagged as an on-going issue.

From memory, this only occurs for large sized fleets, and is particularly bad if the fleet is carrying troops as the fleet cannot be reassembled in the ocean province where it has stopped. The split groups of the fleet have to go to a land province, unload and reassemble there. Even a large human controlled AI fleet in a port splits, usually screens are separated from capitals. Becomes a pain on restarting the game as I have to firstly go around all the AI national fleets (that I have military control of) and reassemble them before restarting play.

 

[Czarina Julie]

This is on the list but not sure if it will be 1.13 or 1.14.
Also, is there a way to replicate this issue?
The only time I've seen the game do this, is if I save a game, reopen it as another country (not even starting it or changing anything) and then resaving the game.

 

[MagooNZ]

Sure, no problem, only about the 3rd saved game file and I found this gem:
GER_44_02_08CP, date 8 Feb 1944. The only human player is GER, with military control of Japan, Nationalist Spain, Italy etc.
Five fleets that I, (as GER) have military control of have been split upon loading up this saved game file to start a new game play session.
These are three JAP fleets located as follows: Manila port, Babuyan Channel (carrying troops), and Ishikari Bay.
One Italian fleet in Miami port. One Spanish fleet located in Central east Guinea Bay (west of central africa) & carrying troops . There might be other fleets around but five examples should be more than adequate. If you recombine these five fleets they will all have number of screens matching the number of capitals. They have definitely been split by the AOD game; mismatching the number of screen & capital ships, and providing a national type name for the new offshoot fleet.

My AoD1.12 checksum is not XEAV as I have made a number of edits, presumably this wont be a problem to open and view. Some events may be messed up.

I am surprised that you haven't seen this bug on a regular basis. I see it all the time & have had to adapt to & tolerate it. Usually I try to get all my MC'd AI fleets to a port and unloaded before ending my current game play session, then saving for a future restart.

 

[MagooNZ]

The easy way to verify this bug is real is to open the saved game file in notepad, confirm the fleet ship sizes (17, 28, 19, 22,28), then open in AoD and observe these fleets have stopped & all fleets have each split in two with zero hours game time elapsed.

The obvious explanation why Czarina Julie is unable to experience this bug without undertaking the above mentioned convoluted resave process, while I experience this bug all the time, is because Czarina Julie never assembles AI nation fleets under her military control that have transport and other ships types (eg screens, capitals) together in the same fleet. Do this and you will experience this bug. I could try assembling AI nation fleets that either only contain transports or dont contain any transports to verify that they dont experience this bug. I guess I should do this because its always possible that AoD will once again surprise me when I least expect it.

 

[MagooNZ]

I have confirmed that fleet size is irrelevant. I set up a 3 ship JAP fleet of 1 transport, 1 screen, 1 capital. This fleet stopped and split in an ocean province.

While some other fleets stopped their programmed movement, they never split when the fleet was composed of either all transports or all capitals plus screens.

So I have confirmed that splitting only occurs when transports and non-transports are mixed in the same fleet. I trust this helps.

 

[Czarina Julie]

The obvious explanation why Czarina Julie is unable to experience this bug without undertaking the above mentioned convoluted resave process, while I experience this bug all the time, is because Czarina Julie never assembles AI nation fleets under her military control that have transport and other ships types (eg screens, capitals) together in the same fleet. Do this and you will experience this bug.

What an assumption...
and you're right

I did look at the code how it assembles the different AI fleets. The code goes through many conditional statements (if this then X else Y) with each conditional statement defining a fleet type (Attack Fleets, ASW Fleets, Transport Fleets, Wolf Pacts, Scramble Attack Fleets, etc.) and other managing fleet logic.

and is particularly bad if the fleet is carrying troops as the fleet cannot be reassembled in the ocean province where it has stopped.

This is one of the fleet types the AI looks to make/define.

Becomes a pain on restarting the game as I have to firstly go around all the AI national fleets (that I have military control of) and reassemble them before restarting play.

And this is where the issue occurs. I'll confirm my theory once I'm finished with soft coding and can concentrate on the hardcode (game executable). From just the quick look at the code and how the game plays, the Admiralty code logic doesn't take into consideration what country controls each ship in the fleet, just who it belongs to.

1. UK controls a fleet consisting of UK, Aussie, Kiwis, South African, and French ships
2. when the save file loads it goes through the Admiralty code logic as 5 different countries (which it is)
3. The AI Admiralty code logic then assembles the ships into different fleet types by country
4. UK controlled fleet is now broken into at least 5 different fleets.

If this theory is correct, then the fix is to create logic before the Admiralty code to use the controlling country as the country for all ships in that fleet, regardless if the combined fleet is AI or human control. So the game is controlling the AI fleets and ships even if the AI nation's ships are controlled by a human.

 

[MagooNZ]

Sounds like this bug is very similar to the expeditionary forces bug that randomly transfers AI expeditionary divs to the human player on a permanent basis, often including the accompanying AI leader. This can occur when one reloads a saved game to resume a gaming session. That's another reason to scrap the expeditionary forces feature as it still has this bug. It is another control vs ownership issue involving two different countries.

 

[Czarina Julie]

Sounds like this bug is very similar to the expeditionary forces bug that randomly transfers AI expeditionary divs to the human player on a permanent basis, often including the accompanying AI leader. This can occur when one reloads a saved game to resume a gaming session. That's another reason to scrap the expeditionary forces feature as it still has this bug. It is another control vs ownership issue involving two different countries.

Yes. What the issue seems to be is that when a human player loads a saved game, the AI control nations go through the admiralty code/logic. So if you're UK, have a combined fleet (like the one above), then your UK ships do not go through the AI admiralty code but the other four nations that make up your combine fleet does. So the above mentioned code change, should skip the admiralty code.