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Author Topic:   Disappearing Units!!!?

ChairmanLee posted 05-10-99 08:37 AM ET
I have lost a number of units to nothing during my last game. I should not be losing them to probe teams since I have the Hunter Killer Alogorithm.
3 where in hold, one of which was a ship at a base. (I knew I had it there because I soon needed it only to find that it was gone.) The others were there during one turn then gone the next. I have continued to play this same game because I was doing so well, but the units are still disappearing on me?
Is this a known bug?
I am currently using patch 3.0 of the game with memturbo to help clean up the memory problems of the game. (Could it be the real cause of the problem?)
I will look over the autosaved games to see if I can cause the problem to happen again. (With and without memturbo) If so I will send it to you once I find the right E-mail address to send it to.
I still like the game, sometimes it's fun to find these bugs. It's almost a challenge in itself. You play the game based on the rules you know, bam a bug hits you out of the blue an everything changes. Sometings in your favor, other thimes not. This makes for a frustrating, but interesting game.
DeVore posted 05-10-99 11:44 AM ET
Is this a "bugs are good" or "bugs are bad" post ?
/Dev
Zozo posted 05-10-99 06:50 PM ET
It happened to me a few times and it turned out, in my case, that it was my own fault
(on top of the program's idiocy). The unit table was running out of slots and so SMAC suggested a few choices of units to make obsolete to make room for the new designs. I merely responded to all the prompts with Yes without reading all the texts and it turned out this caused all units belonging to the obsolete designs to be disbanded. I had drone riots in several cities due to this.
Urban Ranger posted 05-10-99 10:56 PM ET
The autoprune doesn't work worth beans. It should just retire all the designs that aren't being used (no active or production units) every turn. Right now, I have to do that by hand, and the stupid way it is set up -- every time you delete a design it jumps to the first empty slot at the end of the scroll bar -- makes the process a pain in the posterior.
Zozo posted 05-11-99 09:57 PM ET
SMAC sometimes acts more like a cat thrown into a cold bath and pitifully screaming attention to itself than a program trying to facilitate what you're trying to do. It puts more emphasis on its own train of thoughts rather than on your train of thoughts.
The scroll bar to disband units in the Workshop is one symptom of this screaming-wet cat disease. Why the &#@*& do I care which slot it puts the deleted units into, I want to go through the whole list and remove all the unused units without having to scroll back to where I was because the program keeps jumping to the place where all the obsoleted units are stored, probably to make me feel remorseful about all the beautiful designs that I deleted ?
Another thing is when you play the game. You might have your HQ surrounded my Believers troops one turn after they declared vendetta on you, and you want to look at the HQ to see if you need to buy the Peripheral defence and also at the surrounding cities to see if they can send reinforcements, etc. all that emergency stuff. But, after you examine the HQ city, SMAC would pop right back to some former on the North Pole somewhere which blinks for your instruction. So, you have to click to where your HQ is then look at the next neighouring city, and then SMAC pops right back to the #@*#*& former which I wish could just be a nice lunch to a thousand mindworms for being a complete annoyance. The only way to work around that is to activate a sleepy unit near the HQ area so that SMAC won't force you to look elsewhere. I can hear SMAC talking to me: "What do you mean you want to look at that area where a thousand Believer troops are surrounding your HQ. I want your attention on my shiny yellow former in the North Pole, right here, and I want it right now. I'm not going to do what you tell me to do, you will have to do what I tell you to do, dude !". Civ2 didn't have this problem. If I pick a certain area to look at then the screen will STAY in that area until I tell it otherwise. If I want to figure our where the current blinking unit is then I only need to hit V twice. No sweat.
Same thing with many other screens. SMAC just puts too much emphasis to where it was rather than where you were everytime it goes back to the previous screen. It's a self-interface, not a user-interface, since it tries to help itself, not help me. Its UI needs a serious re-thinking, on all the screens.
Mergle posted 05-12-99 03:04 AM ET
Zozo - I completely agree about how irritating the "jump back to piece after viewing city" is. What I do now is shift-right click on the city, then left click to view the city. This puts you into view mode in the correct area, so when you exit the city you stay where you are.
RSHER posted 05-13-99 05:31 PM ET
ZOZO -
You are correct that is annoying, but it can also be turned off by changing one of the options. I don't use it myself, but I have seen it. Check in the preferences.
Rodney
LocustOfChiron posted 05-13-99 08:55 PM ET
I have something of the same problem: if I try to obsolete the scout patrol within the first 100 or so years, it just says obsolete and continues to keep the design. I had to tell the governor to stop producing units so I didn't have an army of wimpy scout patrols.
ChairmanLee posted 05-15-99 06:24 PM ET
Thanks for all the replies but I'm sure now that it's a bug that happens for no obvious reason. (Such as the ones that have been described in this thread.)
I was playing last night, first time in a while, and it happen again. This time I lost a transport with eight combat units. I could have really used them.
So I went back to replay from the point when I still had it using a saved game. It was before I finally loaded the transpost and sent it out on it's way.
Everytime, no matter which way I went, the next turn it was gone. I tried this a number of times with no luck.
Ok Firaxis would you like this saved game. I can e-mail it to you with details, just tell me where, and to who.
I'm just tring to help you guys at Firaxis make us a better, playable game.
Warp Warrior posted 05-15-99 09:52 PM ET
I know what you mean about that annoying terraformer screaming for attention. I also hate it when you select a unit to attack a city, it destroys the last defender and I want the unit to finish it turn and take the rest of its movement points and take over the city, but no, that idiot terraformer 10,000 klicks away decides he's more important. You could just tell it to wait its bleed'n turn but then another !&*@*#$'n terraformer butts in and does the same blasted thing. Arrrrg! >
ChairmanLee posted 05-18-99 11:26 AM ET
Me again, an I'm still tring to play that same game, but I only keep losing units!
It seems almost as if I make a new one an older one somewhere has to go???
Is there some sort of unit limit?
brad posted 05-18-99 05:30 PM ET
I agree with Urban Ranger and Zozo about the autoprune routine in the Design Workshop. It takes too much time to go through and carefully decide which units are obsolete but that you do not want to retire, and which are obsolete and you can retire, which are new units that need prototypes, and which are new units that dont need prototypes. Figuring out what the upgrade costs will be and then deciding which units to upgrade also takes time.
And the images of the units on the bar (and on the "Garrison" dispaly) are way to small - and it is imposssible to tell if a unit is a marine or not (at least the paratroops have the little orange flames).
Rackam posted 05-19-99 08:24 AM ET
I actually enjoyed the game after disabling these things; Governers, Autoprune and Suggest new design.
Now, the only prototypes that appear are the ones I design and I do all upgrades manually. Granted it can get a bit tedious, but only when I'm doing it and I don't have the game annoying me with new designs every time I get a tech advance.
~Rackam
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Author	Topic: Disappearing Units!!!?
ChairmanLee	posted 05-10-99 08:37 AM ET I have lost a number of units to nothing during my last game. I should not be losing them to probe teams since I have the Hunter Killer Alogorithm. 3 where in hold, one of which was a ship at a base. (I knew I had it there because I soon needed it only to find that it was gone.) The others were there during one turn then gone the next. I have continued to play this same game because I was doing so well, but the units are still disappearing on me? Is this a known bug? I am currently using patch 3.0 of the game with memturbo to help clean up the memory problems of the game. (Could it be the real cause of the problem?) I will look over the autosaved games to see if I can cause the problem to happen again. (With and without memturbo) If so I will send it to you once I find the right E-mail address to send it to. I still like the game, sometimes it's fun to find these bugs. It's almost a challenge in itself. You play the game based on the rules you know, bam a bug hits you out of the blue an everything changes. Sometings in your favor, other thimes not. This makes for a frustrating, but interesting game.
DeVore	posted 05-10-99 11:44 AM ET Is this a "bugs are good" or "bugs are bad" post ? /Dev
Zozo	posted 05-10-99 06:50 PM ET It happened to me a few times and it turned out, in my case, that it was my own fault (on top of the program's idiocy). The unit table was running out of slots and so SMAC suggested a few choices of units to make obsolete to make room for the new designs. I merely responded to all the prompts with Yes without reading all the texts and it turned out this caused all units belonging to the obsolete designs to be disbanded. I had drone riots in several cities due to this.
Urban Ranger	posted 05-10-99 10:56 PM ET The autoprune doesn't work worth beans. It should just retire all the designs that aren't being used (no active or production units) every turn. Right now, I have to do that by hand, and the stupid way it is set up -- every time you delete a design it jumps to the first empty slot at the end of the scroll bar -- makes the process a pain in the posterior.
Zozo	posted 05-11-99 09:57 PM ET SMAC sometimes acts more like a cat thrown into a cold bath and pitifully screaming attention to itself than a program trying to facilitate what you're trying to do. It puts more emphasis on its own train of thoughts rather than on your train of thoughts. The scroll bar to disband units in the Workshop is one symptom of this screaming-wet cat disease. Why the &#@& do I care which slot it puts the deleted units into, I want to go through the whole list and remove all the unused units without having to scroll back to where I was because the program keeps jumping to the place where all the obsoleted units are stored, probably to make me feel remorseful about all the beautiful designs that I deleted ? Another thing is when you play the game. You might have your HQ surrounded my Believers troops one turn after they declared vendetta on you, and you want to look at the HQ to see if you need to buy the Peripheral defence and also at the surrounding cities to see if they can send reinforcements, etc. all that emergency stuff. But, after you examine the HQ city, SMAC would pop right back to some former on the North Pole somewhere which blinks for your instruction. So, you have to click to where your HQ is then look at the next neighouring city, and then SMAC pops right back to the #@#*& former which I wish could just be a nice lunch to a thousand mindworms for being a complete annoyance. The only way to work around that is to activate a sleepy unit near the HQ area so that SMAC won't force you to look elsewhere. I can hear SMAC talking to me: "What do you mean you want to look at that area where a thousand Believer troops are surrounding your HQ. I want your attention on my shiny yellow former in the North Pole, right here, and I want it right now. I'm not going to do what you tell me to do, you will have to do what I tell you to do, dude !". Civ2 didn't have this problem. If I pick a certain area to look at then the screen will STAY in that area until I tell it otherwise. If I want to figure our where the current blinking unit is then I only need to hit V twice. No sweat. Same thing with many other screens. SMAC just puts too much emphasis to where it was rather than where you were everytime it goes back to the previous screen. It's a self-interface, not a user-interface, since it tries to help itself, not help me. Its UI needs a serious re-thinking, on all the screens.
Mergle	posted 05-12-99 03:04 AM ET Zozo - I completely agree about how irritating the "jump back to piece after viewing city" is. What I do now is shift-right click on the city, then left click to view the city. This puts you into view mode in the correct area, so when you exit the city you stay where you are.
RSHER	posted 05-13-99 05:31 PM ET ZOZO - You are correct that is annoying, but it can also be turned off by changing one of the options. I don't use it myself, but I have seen it. Check in the preferences. Rodney
LocustOfChiron	posted 05-13-99 08:55 PM ET I have something of the same problem: if I try to obsolete the scout patrol within the first 100 or so years, it just says obsolete and continues to keep the design. I had to tell the governor to stop producing units so I didn't have an army of wimpy scout patrols.
ChairmanLee	posted 05-15-99 06:24 PM ET Thanks for all the replies but I'm sure now that it's a bug that happens for no obvious reason. (Such as the ones that have been described in this thread.) I was playing last night, first time in a while, and it happen again. This time I lost a transport with eight combat units. I could have really used them. So I went back to replay from the point when I still had it using a saved game. It was before I finally loaded the transpost and sent it out on it's way. Everytime, no matter which way I went, the next turn it was gone. I tried this a number of times with no luck. Ok Firaxis would you like this saved game. I can e-mail it to you with details, just tell me where, and to who. I'm just tring to help you guys at Firaxis make us a better, playable game.
Warp Warrior	posted 05-15-99 09:52 PM ET I know what you mean about that annoying terraformer screaming for attention. I also hate it when you select a unit to attack a city, it destroys the last defender and I want the unit to finish it turn and take the rest of its movement points and take over the city, but no, that idiot terraformer 10,000 klicks away decides he's more important. You could just tell it to wait its bleed'n turn but then another !&@#$'n terraformer butts in and does the same blasted thing. Arrrrg! >
ChairmanLee	posted 05-18-99 11:26 AM ET Me again, an I'm still tring to play that same game, but I only keep losing units! It seems almost as if I make a new one an older one somewhere has to go??? Is there some sort of unit limit?
brad	posted 05-18-99 05:30 PM ET I agree with Urban Ranger and Zozo about the autoprune routine in the Design Workshop. It takes too much time to go through and carefully decide which units are obsolete but that you do not want to retire, and which are obsolete and you can retire, which are new units that need prototypes, and which are new units that dont need prototypes. Figuring out what the upgrade costs will be and then deciding which units to upgrade also takes time. And the images of the units on the bar (and on the "Garrison" dispaly) are way to small - and it is imposssible to tell if a unit is a marine or not (at least the paratroops have the little orange flames).
Rackam	posted 05-19-99 08:24 AM ET I actually enjoyed the game after disabling these things; Governers, Autoprune and Suggest new design. Now, the only prototypes that appear are the ones I design and I do all upgrades manually. Granted it can get a bit tedious, but only when I'm doing it and I don't have the game annoying me with new designs every time I get a tech advance. ~Rackam