I’m playing in the campaign mode right now and it was fun for a while, but something is really bothering me. First off is the fact that fighters will surrender at about 50% hp if they are the only thing in a group and they haven’t destroyed more than 10% of the enemy fleet (even if they have caused lots and lots of hull damage on several enemy cruisers). This seems to reduce to 40% at some point, which seems to be if you get it below 90% and it is all cruisers. Rules seem different still if the enemies are only frigates. Okay so I get that. It is really annoying, as even with the orders, my fighters don’t seem to attack the right ones all together (even with vulture and co-op on). Next is the annoyance that there is one ship that seems to be more vulnerable than the others and a group will shoot it as an opportunity, but go back to shooting the ones “ping” and require golden beebees. If the fighter squadrons would focus on only one of them, like they should, they would even destroy the ones that they ping on. At that point in the battle I click the fast forward button so that they get enough damage on the vulnerable ship to destroy it so they will begin focusing more on a single ship and then all of a sudden it says that I as defeated. That right there is absolutely wrong. In campaign if you are going to do that you should have them flee or something. I shouldn’t lose 10-20 squadrons that were perfectly fine, but hadn’t figured out how to organize themselves with my orders to focus on the same enemies.
Next I’ve gone through a lot of turns and taken over 62% of the map and pounding back and forth with a few systems that I can’t seem to get a good foothold on and suddenly I make (3) a brand new series of cruiser designed after one of the ones I captured and my maintenance went from around 2400 up to nearly 12000 instantly. I scrapped a bunch of stuff and got it down to 10463, but the only thing that is left at that point is my actual attack fleets, which consist of two fighter squadron only fleets and a cruiser/frigate fleet. The cruiser frigate fleet wipes out one of the strongholds that I was having trouble with and I go to stomp the next one and the same strategies didn’t work and I lose all of my new cruisers and all of their accompanying frigates and with only my fighter squadrons my maintenance is over 9900. Why did my maintenance increase so much? Is it general war malaise? Is the population just getting tired of a war that has lasted almost 10 years?
All in all I’m generally frustrated. The game seems really neat at first glance, but the orders seem to have almost no effect on what anything does.
I think I figured out what happened at least for the maintenance cost increase. It seems that the maintenance is actually stored rather than recalculating it, at least as far as I can tell. Thus when I run into a bug that either crashes it or something else that may not even crash it, there is no way for the game to figure out that it had “leaked” maintenance since it only does adjustments (adding and subtracting maintenance). That is probably considered a bug and hopefully at some point an update will make it such that the maintenance is recalculated at least at each time you open and close the campaign instead of trying to store it.
I still think that in campaign settings, that the fighter squadrons shouldn’t auto surrender after a set amount of time, or if it does, then put the time somewhere on the screen so you know how much time you have left so you can flee before you lose huge fleets.
First, I sort of agree with you on fighter surrender, although a group of maintenance/repair cruisers set to maximum range will generally give you fleet stability vs. surrender in an engagement. That’s what I do now. Actually, I generally build one carrier with repair bays, and then screen the cruisers I capture to decide which ones I will keep as escorts.
Regarding maintenance: I had some concerns, but was able to determine that it is independently is re-calculated each turn, based on the ships you have in your fleet at that moment in time. You can see the calculation in the debug file for each game. It’s not a running total. Based on your difficulty level, it’s based on a set percentage of the cost of each ship.
I was playing at captain with a medium size area. I scrapped all my ships to see if it was working and waited a turn and it didn’t change anything. I stopped, restarted and quit and it was still at that 9900 level with no ships at all. I looked through the config files and found one of them that had a listing of everything it seems and one thing it had was maintenance. I changed it to 0 and re-entered the game and it was 0 with 0 ships. I waited 1 more turn (and lost a star system because of it) then I rebuilt some of my ships and it increased to the correct value. If it is recalculating then all I can say is that there is some kind of problem in the version I’m using because I finished the game and it never went back up to that astronomically high value.
What version are you playing? We are up to 1.56 now, and a lot of bugs were fixed in the last two updates. If you look in the debug file, you will be able to see each turn where it calculates your new maintenance total. The maintenance figure is then stored elsewhere, but is updated each turn. Sounds as if that link was broken (possibly a corrupted file). If you haven’t had the problem again, then it may have been fixed with another update. Or, you can always uninstall the game and download the latest version for a re-install (Impulse is very good for this). The game files are saved separately, and so are not affected by the uninstall/reinstall, although if you downloaded some mods you will need to make a note and re-download them as well, or you will get error messages anytime you try and access an old game file that has ships and/or weapons that are no longer available.
Well I do have 1.56. I got mine through steam. Well I found which debug file you were talking about. It looks like it was counting someone else’s fleet in my maintenance cost, cause I for sure didn’t have that many ships. After zeroing it out in the config file it seems to have forced some kind of recalculation cause it was closer to right then.
I have enough insanity trying to figure out the game on the regular difficulties. I’m just an honor harrington junky who wanted to do fleet battles. Unfortunately I can’t seem to be quite as creative as the alliance.
I just got hit by this bug in V 1.56.
I scrapped every single ship in my fleet: Maintenance = 1500
I edited the progress.txt and reloaded it. The maintenance was 0 then jumped back to 1500.
Nothing seems to help short of restarting the campaign.
Has everyone here who’s suffering from this Galactic Conquest bug posted about it at the Support Forum? If not, you should. Cliffski is likely to learn about it quicker than posting here. He can’t repair a bug that he doesn’t know exists.
If you really want to be proactive, post there and send him a forum P.M. directly, too.
Pendra: you can see the maintenance calculations on a turn-by-turn basis in the debug file that goes with progress.txt. When your maintenance jumped back to 1500, did that file show what ships you were being charged for?
This is getting odd. I had no fleet but the game calculated maintenance after ~1000 fighers + some escort.
Then I left, deleted the saved game and overwrote with an earlier saved game. It had the issue, too. But then I won a battle and the maintenance went normal. I was happy. The it struck again, all of a sudden I had 4000 maintenance. Then I killed an enemy fleets and it went back to normal.
I looks like I pay for the enemy fleets spawning up.