Black Hole! Panic stations!

[Marvin Kosh]

....is what my ship captains must be saying. I'm in a PBW game (simultaneous turns), and I'm sending ships through a black hole system regularly, and for some reason they are clearing their orders.... looks random but I just don't know for sure. I've had them set to warp through several systems and this one is in the middle.

It's nippy, because if I wasn't such a micromanager I would have just lost my repair ship to the black hole.

[dogscoff]

Hmm... Don't know why that would happen. Are you sure there's not an enemy presence in the system? Some shipsets are really hard to see against certain backdrops. Check on the galaxy map to see the system is marked with a "I'm on my own" circle or a "foreign influence" triangle.

[geoschmo]

Is it possible that your ships are passing through a damaging warp point? I think ships will clear orders when damaged as well. And it may be that the damage is less that it would take to destroy a component, so you may not actually see the damage. But you should get a log message about it.

Geoschmo

[Marvin Kosh]

I just had a second look for ships. It's pretty darn unlikely because (heh) the warp points leading to the black hole are of the really nasty variety, save one. The ones you explore when you've researched armour, repair, etc etc like I *had* to do just to get out of my home system

OK, I should probably shut up now lest I give my position away ;-) I just wanted to flag it up more than anything else, see if anyone's seen this happen.

Could it just be that the original path the ship plotted got disrupted by the black-hole movement? As far as I can see, that happens AFTER normal movement in simultaneous....

EDIT: I know they should have their orders cleared if they take damage, but I'd swear they went Scooby AFTER passing into the black hole system.

I checked my previous turns, and I think my repair ship cleared it's orders and fell toward the black hole instead of following it's plotted course out through the far warp point. Of course it's difficult to tell because my orders were naturally cleared when it entered the system.

I don't know if this is because it's a repair ship, because some of my other ships (colony/pop transport) have exhibited this behaviour whilst passing through the system.

A likely explanation for this is that I messed up my turn submission and the orders didn't take, and this wouldn't affect things in my empire too much because I have orders for everything stacked and queued, but it would affect ships whose orders were cleared because of damage.

However, what's the chances that I messed up my submission every time a ship passed into the black hole system? There's something at work here I just can't pin it down....

[ August 02, 2002, 14:09: Message edited by: Marvin Kosh ]

[geoschmo]

"Went Scooby". snicker. I'm not sure what that means, but I like the term.

[Arkcon]

Clearing their orders is a common occurance on non-simultaneous. Here's what happens. You order the ship to warp out a warp point on the far side of the black hole system (to get somewhere you want to be). The ship exhausts it's movement points AT THE WARP POINT INSIDE THE BLACK HOLE SYSTEM. If you look at it's orders (the little eyeball icon) it says only one thing -- WARP. Next turn, before it can move, the system's abilities pulls it 2 spaces in. Now it tries to execute it's orders -- and can't so it does nothing. I don't know if this is a more common problem on simultaneous.

Basically, you have to keep an eye on your ships in black hole systems. This will happen sometimes, and preventing it isn't really easy.

Maybe if you tell the ship to MOVE TO a sector past the warp point where you want to be warp wont appear in the orders list, but maybe not -- but I think still if it stops at the inside warp point, this still happens.