SE5 Demo Bug Reports & Annoyances/Requests

[Q]

When you try to conquer a enemy colony frequently the population is killed and a colony with 0 population is left. This can happen (but it is too often IMO) and not itself a bug. However this ghost colony cannot be destroyed even if you give the specific attack order. That IMO is a bug. I read that you can occupy this empty colony by dropping population on it. However you still should have the option to just nuke it.

[Q]

If you colonize a planet with foreign population that breathe a different atmosphere, which matches this planet, you should of course get an undomed colony. However always 1M of your original population is added (migration I suppose) which gives then a domed colony!
You as a human player can commit mass murder by jettison your original population into space to get back the undomed colony. But I am pretty sure the AI will never do that.

[Captain Kwok]

It's actually not from migration. Migration only moves from high to low and only to breathable planets.

It's from the auto colonization amount in settings.txt ...

[Q]

So you can turn that off. That is good news. I would then suggest that the standard value is 0.

[Captain Kwok]

I will give migration props though. It makes population management so easy. Population increases really quickly on breathable planets without having to micromanage population transports and you don't lose any population from your homeworld being at the maximum population amount as many will migrate elsewhere.

When you capture races of different atmospheres - they'll start migrating to planets of their type, which you can then remove your own population and then make them undomed - reducing 50% of the work required to do this in SE:IV or if you prefer to just jettison your own people into space it's 100% reduction.

[Q]

I agree completely that migration is a good feature of SE V.
I was talking about the auto colonization amount that I would set to zero as standard.
What just gets very important IMO is that the population minister/AI can handle the migration benefits from foreign population and removes unwanted races from a colony to undome it.

[Phoenix-D]

Well, the auto-colonization could be left alone- just make it so when you colonize with people already in the hold, it doesn't add that amount.

[dmm]

Phoenix-D said:
I'm not seeing the "Drone bait" problem with the default strategies. Are you using custom ones?

I did change the default strategy for "max range," because the default strategy was faulty. Instead of staying at max range for every enemy ship (if they could), missile ships were only staying at max range for the ship they were currently attacking. So, of course, once that ship's engines got damaged and it fell behind the rest of its fleet, the missile ships would allow themselves to come within range of the (undamaged) untargetted enemy ships. And they would quickly get destroyed. (The problem is quite similar to the "drone bait" problem.)

But, if I remember correctly, all I did was switch the order of preferred targets to put "nearest enemy" at the top of the list, and had them "break formation immediately." This causes ships with long-range weapons to stay out of range of everyone else (assuming equal engine technology). It doesn't work perfectly for larger vessels because (like all SEV ships on autopilot) they fail to account for the time it will take them to turn tail and run after coming within range. Therefore they start their turn too late and this allows the enemy to get off a shot or two at extreme range. But it works much better than the disastrous default "max range" setting. In practice, it makes ships with longer-range weapons almost invincible to other ships with the same engine tech.

[Phoenix-D]

That's why, then. Move Target Type near the top of the list and put drones down near the bottom of the Target Type list, and it should solve that issue.

As far as I can tell what the ship is doing is looking at its PDCs and saying "Hmm, what's the nearest target these can shoot at?" There's only the one drone and thus..off it goes!

[dmm]

Phoenix-D said:
That's why, then. Move Target Type near the top of the list and put drones down near the bottom of the Target Type list, and it should solve that issue.

As far as I can tell what the ship is doing is looking at its PDCs and saying "Hmm, what's the nearest target these can shoot at?" There's only the one drone and thus..off it goes!

I agree with your second paragraph, but your solution in the first paragraph won't help. It MIGHT help for drones but leaves the underlying problem uncorrected, which is that there is a bug in the way targets are selected. When you pick "max range from nearest target," the computer SHOULD use the max range of the longest-range weapon that can target any enemy. But it doesn't. (Certainly not with PDCs, and my guess is not with other weapons.) My missile ships dutifully stay at max PDC range from the enemy drones as they attempt to pick them off with PDC. Meanwhile, they fire their missiles at the nearest enemy ship, so they clearly know about the enemy ships and their distances. But the max PDC range is over-riding the max missile range, even though it is smaller. That's a bug. I don't think it is solvable by tweaking strategies. (If it is, then the default settings for the max range strategy are wrong, which is still a bug, although a more-easily fixed one.)