Negative Fleet Bug

[dathon]

When I was reading through the after-action reports that got me interested in playing this fine game, I saw rumor of the mysterious Negative Fleet Bug, whereby a large fleet of ships suddenly attains a negative quantity. Well, last night I was guiding the Klakon empire in a white-knuckle, large, Hard game against a rather, um, large Psilon opponent. Tensions are mounting, cold war could break out at any moment, and what do I see? A stack of -218 Star Streaks. So, my question to those on the Forums with more experience and wisdom than me (read: 99.9% of the people here). How can I get around this??? This game has been BY FAR the most enjoyable game of Orion I've played yet, and I'd hate to see it go up in smoke to a bug.

Thanks,
dathon

[Zed-F]

There are two approaches you can take.

1) Do your best to ignore the fleet. If it is equipped with weapons that will damage your planets, you may lose any planet that the stack assaults. However, in the late game it is sometimes possible to take planets faster than the AI can bomb them into nothingness. You may be able to literally work around the problem.

2) Try to eliminate the bugged fleet. This will require technologies that can affect multiple ships at once. Depending on the ship size, tech level, and armaments of the bugged opposition fleet, any of the following may prove useful:
- Repulsor Beam
- Warp Dissipator (unlikely at the late game though)
- Energy Pulsar/Ionic Pulsar
- Black Hole Generator
- Stasis Field
- Ion Stream/Neutron Stream

Without knowing the specifics of your situation, providing more than general advice won't be possible.

[Sirian]

There is a third option. You can use OREO to edit the saved game.

Grab Oreo from Jon's MOO1 page. (You've got that bookmarked by now, right? My page too?)


Load the saved game, scroll to the right to the fleet columns for the applicable opponent, hunt through the listing for the negative fleets (or 32000 ship fleets) and change them to say 1 ship. Then save.

IMPORTANT: You can only edit orbiting fleets, not fleets in transit.

IMPORTANT: Oreo fails to save any and all "future" tech. If none of the civs in the game have gotten to Advanced Tech in any category, you're perfectly fine to fix the problem with Oreo. If anyone does know Advanced Tech, knowledge of those techs will be lost and the game will be tainted if you use Oreo. (This is why Oreo is not the ideal fix. Most of the time when you run into this bug, it's late in the game, usually larger maps where tech flies faster, and somebody has gotten to future techs.)

Exactly how much damage the Negative Fleet Bug is going to do to the Imperia, I don't yet know. When I launched the tourney, it was at a point where I believed Oreo was a complete fix. It's not. :unsure: But it can fix some instances, at least. Maybe it can fix your game.

Now if some clever programmer could fix Oreo, or figure out how to hexedit the saves in a way that can allow a true fix to be crafted, maybe we can overcome this issue once and for all. I can't make any promises. I've been pretty busy lately, and haven't devoted enough time to MOO to advance this issue.


- Sirian

[Selentine]

If you want to edit fleets in transit, they begin at 0x4DA0,
and the format is
PLAYER (lo-hi)
XPOS (lo-hi)
YPOS (lo-hi)
DESTSTAR# (lo-hi)
SPEED (lo-hi)
Design#1s (lo-hi)
Design#2s (lo-hi)
Design#3s (lo-hi)
Design#4s (lo-hi)
Design#5s (lo-hi)
Design#6s (lo-hi)
followed by six bytes I have not deciphered. for each fleet.
The total number of fleets appears to be stored at 0xE1B6

I looked into this a few weeks ago wondering if a savefile hacker could permit a semblance of head-to-head play, but I too have been occupied and haven't finished deciphering the savefile.

Selentine

[DaveV]

Interesting. Rather than the player having to look for negative numbers and then fix them, it would be even better to run a program in the background that would check the auto-save files for negative numbers and either fix them automatically or pop up a warning message. As I understand it, the AIs pay negative maintenance on their negative fleets, so to minimize the impact on the game the problem must be fixed right away.

I would think the savefile format has been cracked for a long time; I remember using a save-game editor many years ago. I did a quick search of usenet and the web and didn't come up with anything, though.

To address the original question, and amplify on Zed's advice: if you can't beat the monster fleet in battle, destroying all of the owner's planets will eliminate his fleets.

[dathon]

I tried the OREO editor, and it worked great. Thanks Sirian :D I just barely made the find in time, as the Psilon's are almost to Advanced Tech. Which I am grateful for, because eliminating enough of their planets at this point in time would probably be termed, um, suicidal :axe: Let's just say these Psilon's have the galactic nickname of "Runaway" in this game. Wish me luck in pulling off a diplomatic coup.

Thanks,
dathon

[THUORN]

i would love to see an updated oreo or similar device, hell if we are talking wish list what about an updated moo, ahhhh to dream...