Comet Bug?

[Cyneheard]

So a weird thing happened in a recent Klackon game (playing kyrub's patched version):

- Silicoids grabbed a Radiated world near me, that I slowly proceeded to bomb into oblivion. So far so normal.
- While I was bombing said world, the Comet never destroyed the world nor went away
- I'm pretty sure (would have to check saves) that the Silicoids even resettled the world after the comet would have passed.
- Even holding a Huge Megabolt ship over the uncolonized world for years didn't change anything.
- it was 40-50 years later and the world still had COMET over it but was still Radiated and could be settled.

I've attached a few saves from the game; 176 is the last turn before I won and didn't feel like mopping up everyone else. I can go digging to find the best years if we think it's a useful bug to investigate.

[RFS-81]

Luckily, I've saved a document by sargon0 that described the save file format (attached in case anyone else finds this useful). It turns out that the comet timer only ticks down when the Silicoids had a colony there, which I found out by allowing them to resettle it. Unfortunately, the Psilons of all people didn't want to let me perform my experiment and blew the colony up again. I'll experiment with editing the save, to see if there needs to be a Silicoid colony or if it can be any colony.

As for fixing it, well, I'll check how 1oom is handling it, but I don't have the skills to fix it in the DOS binary.

EDIT: The clock is ticking if anyone has a colony there.

[Cyneheard]

Luckily, I've saved a document by sargon0 that described the save file format (attached in case anyone else finds this useful). It turns out that the comet timer only ticks down when the Silicoids had a colony there, which I found out by allowing them to resettle it. Unfortunately, the Psilons of all people didn't want to let me perform my experiment and blew the colony up again. I'll experiment with editing the save, to see if there needs to be a Silicoid colony or if it can be any colony.

As for fixing it, well, I'll check how 1oom is handling it, but I don't have the skills to fix it in the DOS binary.

EDIT: The clock is ticking if anyone has a colony there.

If my ships counted against the Comet's power, it would've probably been fine - I may have been able to blast the comet in time? Since the original bombing squadron was a small stack of medium missile boats, it might not have been.

I'm not surprised that their system skips processing Comet events if it's not a colony - saves clock cycles that wouldn't normally come up & normally wouldn't do anything.

[Ianus]

This is an interesting question: does ANY fleet count against the comet, or is it only the colony owner’s fleet that battles it? I suspect the latter but it would be good to confirm.

[Cyneheard]

This is an interesting question: does ANY fleet count against the comet, or is it only the colony owner’s fleet that battles it? I suspect the latter but it would be good to confirm.

So there’s two things:
1) It’s very clear that the comet wasn’t battled while the world was empty - I eventually had plenty of firepower sitting over that world to keep the Silicoids away that the comet would have been gone in a couple of years.
2) If it’s a non-owner fleet in orbit, I suspect the turn processing wouldn’t check for non-owning fleets. Ockham’s Razor applies to their programming decisions - the simplest decision that checks the fewest things would usually be their choice because they’d knew they had hardware limitations.