[1.11 Bug] Ships get stuck and can't fire

I’ve had this many, many times – to the point where I can’t even begin to beat Return to Andromeda because of it.

My ships will tend to fly around and bunch up with each other and the enemy. They eventually end up in positions where they can’t shoot, because they are out of targeting range, but they can’t move to a suitable position because other ships are in the way.

Happens to me too. AI settings are:

Attack frigates (default priorities, 950 range)
Attack cruisers (default priorities, 950 range)
Move around
Coop
Rescue
Vulture

See attached image.

This didn’t happen is 1.10.

happened to me on the new scenario - 4 cruisers all sat atop an enemy. nothing but point defenses in range, but they just sat there forever.

in fact, they sat there even when other targets arrived - as though they were fixated on the ship bumping hulls.

This happened to me too, and i see this bug as critical.

If anyone has a deployment where this always happens can you email it o me at cliff@positech.co.uk. You will find the deployments under MyDocuments\MyGames\GratuitousSpaceBattles\deployments\survival1
Cheers

This happens to me any time I use Keep Moving, almost without exception. If you have anything more than about 4 cruisers on each side, sooner or later they end up running into each other. We’ve got a Max range from target option, easiest way to sort this would be to give us a Min range from target option too, so we can force our cruisers not to follow within a certain range. Although that would only solve the problem vs enemy targets. Need something to keep our own ships away from each other when they’re on Keep Moving and not using Formation.

As I mentioned in another thread, I keep having enemy cruisers come sit on top of my ships in survival mode. Then they explode and take out an armor module, spelling doom at the hands of fighters for my ship. >:-(

It seems you don’t need to have the ‘keep moving’ order to get the bug to happen.

Are you guys loading your cruisers with engines? I’m wondering if speed could be the issue.

My cruisers are usually as fast as I can make them, but I also tried this with much slower ships and it still happens - sooner or later you get a pile-up, because ships run into each other before they can destroy each other.

I’m at work right now, but I’ll send you an example deployment when I get home. It happens often enough that I shouldn’t have much trouble reproducing it.

My guess is that there’s a bit of collision avoidance logic somewhere with the wrong sign, so rather than turning the ship away from a collision, it instead turns toward it, making a massive pileup inevitable. This really is a frustrating bug, as I don’t think I’ve evere lost a cruiser armor module to anything other than a reactor explosion in survivor mode.

Actually, that would make sense. I find, with lots of frigates, they all pile up on the last remaining enemy, rather than staying at range. Maybe it’s because there is no “stay at least x” order. It seems to be worse with “keep moving”, because the frigates try to orbit the enemy and end up bumping into each other, getting stuck.

It might also be a problem with ships needing to turn in order to fly another direction. When they first start to bunch up, I notice them turning side to side, bumping into the ships next to them, never able to go where they want to go.

Again, I’ll provide an example deployment later tonight.

I’ve sent in a couple of deployments that do it reliably.

I think it has something to do with whatever logic makes the ship try to maintain a minimum range. If the ship is too close to use a weapon, it should back off so it can use it again. What appears to happen instead is that it turns towards the target and accelerates instead of away. The ship often has a shaky motion while it moves, as though it’s trying to find a particular angle.

There seem to be a number of different minor calculation screw ups going on here, that I am investigating and fixing now.
Cheers

great news!

It certainly seems better now, it will be in the next patch

Ta very much.

Ive just picked this up from another thread, and to be honest I dont know why I havent mentioned it myself here - the problem also affects fighters.

Once theyve closed the range, they orbit the target. Thats fine if theyve got lasers, but if theyve got torpedoes or rockets, most of your fighters orbit the target within the minimum range, so essentially they become useless.

As someone mentioned elsewhere, this seems to come down to ships not knowing/understanding minimum weapons range.

The problem, if I really did find it (we shall see with the next patch) was twofold. In one case, ships which were using Keep Moving, could sometimes wander slightly too far away from where they should be. In other cases, if the ship somehow strayed a bit too close, rather than moving away it would always move to within 33 meters and never get further away…
Anyway both should be fixed soon.

I have a problem where ships refuse to move into range. For example I have frigates with nothing but torpedoes and both frigate and cruiser attack range set to 1000. They will initially move forward and engage but once the first line enemies are destroyed they sometimes just sit there throughout the battle until something else comes into range. I attached a screenshot to show their placement. They did not move from that location and simply waited for an enemy ship to come within their firing range.

That’s great news; as I’m sure more of us would make the Survival scoreboard if we didn’t keep losing ships to Fighters after opposing Cruisers try to mate with each other…and lose Armor for the trouble.