Known Bugs (SEIV)

Please post all known bugs here. Report new bugs in the Talk:Known Bugs for SEIVdiscussion for confirmation. The following is a compiled list of all known bugs in Space Empires IV v1.95.

1. When launching missiles the range is calculated to the nearest planet square. However, missiles have to travel to the upper-left corner of the four central squares. Thus if ships stay at maximum range they do no harm to the planet no matter how much they fire. This bug also applies to direct fire weapons so they can have range penalty -100% when firing at range 8.

2. Many of the happiness modifiers don't work in simultaneous game (IIRC for example New Treaty War, Facility Constructed)

3. Political messages sent before saving a game manually are lost, although the game remembers that you cannot send to that race a second time.  Always send your messages just before pressing "end turn"!

4. Retrofits that fail in simultaneous games give the same "Vehicle Retrofit" message log on the left pane as a successful retrofit. You have to click on it and read the center pane to find out if it was successful or not.

5. Warheads on drones that are rammed do not damage the ramming ship (other than the contribution to overall mass of the drone).

6. When you try to mothball ships with population on board, the mothball fails but you receive no error message about it. Unless you specifically go check, you never know it didn't work.

7. Ramming planets by ships in strategic combat does not work.
An order can also be given to ram a warppoint, star or other space object... which works great if you lack a self destruct device and are in danger of being captured.

8. The abilities Generate Points Minerals, Generate Points Organics, and Generate Points Radioactives do not have their generated points tallied anywhere. The ship/base/whatever making the resources makes no mention of them. They are not totaled in the production levels by the Empire Status screen. The points are still generated each turn and added to the stored totals, they are just not shown in any counts of the resources produced each turn. It is very difficult to play with a mod that uses them, since you have no idea whether you are really going to lose 120k minerals next turn or not.

9. Units destroyed in combat are listed as "taken" in the combat reports.

10. Ships in a fleet with 'Don't hurt me orders' do not obey the fleet orders but revert back to their class orders.

11. Fighters fleeted together do not share supplies

12. Drones temporarily fleeted using shift-click will warp thru a warp point one at a time. Thus it is impossible to try to overwhelm warp point defenses with a mass of drones.

13. Fighters won't resupply at a Resupply Depot if the RD is on a moon.

14. Facility "tags" won't show up on the system view if the facility is on a moon.

15. Captured ship designs from intel projects (Crew Insurrection) are not added to your list of known enemy designs.

16. In strategic combat, ship strategies will sometimes be completely ignored (a lone ship with "do not fire on planets" or "don't get hurt" can happen to fly to the corner for the first combat turn, then mysteriously turn around and glass a planet or get shot down by the WPs).

17. "divide points evenly" causes you to lose points (research and intel) when you complete a project. Excess points are not given to other projects.

18. In tactical combat, if a ship outside the current viewing area fires a Direct Fire weapon at a ship in the viewing area, you see the explosion from the hit, but it doesn't display the beam.

19. The same thing happens in the other direction, too. In tactical combat, if your ship fires a direct fire weapon at an enemy ship outside of view, then the game doesn't display the shot being fired.

20. In the construction queues screen, the "ships" button doesn't seem to do anything.

21. If you have a transport ship containing more than one type of alien population, then if you go into the ships/units screen and click the 'cargo' button to show the contents, the cargo list shows the same number for each type of population, even though you may have different numbers of each alien type on board.

22. If you have more than one atmosphere breathing type of population, the transport minister will take will actually harm your empire by taking wrong-breathing population to planets. When he does this, the planet will become domed. Not that I use ministers.

23. Temporal Spaceyards don't upgrade from standard ones. I know it is easy to mod, but this should be fixed since setting up multiplayer games should not require a mod for this.

24. Not really a bug, but an annoying occurance: If you use a saved fill queue to construct things on a planet, and there aren't enough facility slots available to take the list, then the warning message, "There is limit of X facilities on this planet" appears, but the message appears multiple times if your fill queue is over the limit by many items. So if you have a 200-item fill queue for a sphere world and by mistake, try to add it to a small planet, you'll see the warning message 200 times, and you have to click OK that many times to make the warning go away.

25. I'm getting negative "number in service" statistics for all of my trade ships in the Dertran game. It seems to count the ship as scrapped when I trade it away, and then counts it off again when the recipient analyzes it.

26. With Version 1.91, ships still aren't receiving experience from killing enemy ships with seekers.(bug not listed as fixed in v1.95)

27. If you use a mod that has component mounts, your ship designs don't get saved along with the empire when you save your empire.

28. I recently got an "Integer Overflow" error and the game crashed during the A.I.'s turn in a game with a large quadrant with lots of planets. Reloading the saved game and replaying the turn didn't help.

29. Neural Combat Nets don't work. It's not just a display bug, either. I had two identical ships each with neural combat nets, one with 0% experience and the other with 50% experience, fight one very heavily shielded dreadnought. Almost all shooting happened at point blank range, where the base chance to hit in my test game was 25%. The hit rates for the two ships over the many combat turns required to bring down the dreadnoughts shields were well within reasonable random error of 25% for one and 75% for the other. I tested this in both sequential and simultaneous movement, using tactical combat for sequential movement.
Alternative explanation:
Neural Combat Nets do work, but the experience giving ship must have a lower Ship ID than the experience receiving ship (and both must have NCN).

30. If you have a Robotoid Factory already built on a planet, adding a new one to the build queue does not give a warning about already having one.

31. Sometimes in simultaneous movement games, when a ship/fleet is ordered to move to a location (or waypoint), the ship/fleet will end its turn at its required destination, but the order won't be cleared from its order queue. This prevents the ship/fleet from being selected with the "next ship" or "next fleet" hotkeys/icons because the game still thinks there is an outstanding order. If nothing is done, the ship will complete its order on the following turn, but this effectively delays you from giving the ship/fleet new orders for the additional turn; unless you are very observant and notice this without the aid of "next ship/fleet."

32. Successful intelligence projects with specified targets (not with random targets) are neither automatically removed from the queue nor adjusted to a new target if repeat projects is selected. Points will continually be wasted on these invalid projects. This is most notable when the target is destroyed or otherwise no longer under control of the target empire as a result of the project. (Incoherent with 33.?)

33. If a specifically targeted ship bomb project results in the ship's destruction and repeat projects is selected, it remains in the queue but has a different target ship. The new target might not be visible to the player.

34. There is no warning for building multiple Nature Shrines in the same system.

35. Ships armed with modded weapons which can only target other ships will not move away from planets, fighters, etc. They can not fire on these targets, so they just mill about. This can be especially bad if there is an enemy ship or two on the other side of a planet. Your ships will advance and destroy it, but then they will just sit in place, even when in the range of weapon platforms on the planet.

36. Viewing the component description of a weapon with a to hit modifier does not show that penalty/bonus to hit. Few people know of the +70 to hit of Point Defense Cannons, or the +30 to hit of Wave-Motion Guns...

37. If a spaceyard on "emergency build" finishes building, it will still accumulate time on emergency build. There is no warning log entry to alert you to this fact.(Mothballed SpaceYards?)

38. If you build a unit but have no cargo room to store it, the unit will attempt to get built, you will be charged for its resources, no actual unit will appear, (you do get a log entry about no storage) but the build queue won't be cleared and if nothing is done, the planet will attempt to do this same thing all over again.

39. The AI pathing routine is terrible. Many times I have seen a troop transport fail to capture an undefended planet because it can't figure out how to get around a moon or maybe even a couple of ships in your own fleet.

40. In the Empire Options, if you turn off "Display note when similar system-wide abilities exists", it doesn't really turn off. It still pops up with a warning message when you add a system-wide facility to the queue if you have one built already.

41. When using a robo miner (or one of the other two robo units) in a field or planet with a rating of 250% to 300% (only in modded games?) the field will drop to 249% on the next turn. It also appears you only receive resources as if it were 250% and no more.

42. In simultaneous movement games, ordering a fleet to cloak or decloak shows immediate results correctly, but only the first ship listed in the fleet will actually follow the order when the turn is processed. If the first ship listed in the fleet can't cloak, then the order is ignored entirely when the turn is processed. Fleet cloaking works correctly on the turn the fleet is created, but not after.

43. Resources from scrapped facilities in simultaneous games appear to return resources immediately, but they really do not return any resources if you figure it out after the next turn is processed.

44. When using a torp.bmp image for a seeker, the following occur:

- The ship first fires the seeker like a direct fire weapon, which I never saw to hit an enemy target even with favourable to hit chances.

- The ship then displays a seeker (with appropriate stats) with a garbled image from the race main.bmp. This seeker can hit the target.

45. A subjugated race loses 40% of its resources to the dominating race, but it also loses 40% of its research and intel which apparently disappears down some black hole.

46. SEIV crashes with the following error when you have more than 255 items saved in a Fill Queue: "Access Violation at address 005C9A0E in module 'SE4.EXE' read of address FFFFFFFF"

47. Ships set to Max Weapon Range primary move strategy with secondary move strategy set to Don't Get Hurt, do not always move away after firing their weapons when they start out in range of an enemy. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, making this tactic unreliable.

48. You can abandon a colony that has enemy troops besieging it.

49. If a PPP intel project results in the planet breaking off to form its own empire, and the original player had the AI shouldn't make changes to empire option turned on, so will the new empire. Also, all the population on the planet spontaneously changes to breathing that planet's atmosphere.

50. Another problem is that I can also confirm that the reported 50% success rate of PPP seems a bit high to me. In my Last few games, I have used PPP a lot (and I'm sure that I have overcome the enemy CI projects) and it seems to me that the success rate is more like 1/4 or 1/5.

51. You can crash the game by using the "Shift-A" hotkey and giving an order that some selected items can't perform. The description for "Shift-A" is "Select All Ships in Ship List" but it really selects all of your things in the selected sector (planets, ships, bases, sats, mines, etc). So, for instance, if you have a sector with a planet, ships, sats and mines in it, and you Shift-A and then click on an individual ship and hit hit "Y" for "Sentry", you will get a range check error. This can also happen if you "Shift-Click" units that can't receive whatever order you give them.

52. It seems like the AI pathfinder has trouble dealing with sectors containing multiple wormholes. It may work well, and there is usually no problem, but something may go awry and the AI can choose a poor path to reach the target (fairly annoying if coordination is required). I did not pick systems to be avoided, and there were no minefields or enemy vessels to make my fleets go somewhere else.

53. Satellites have a cloaking button, but are already cloaked. Likewise, drones are always cloaked, but you can "switch" on and off their cloaking (without any actual effect). I would expect fighters to behave similarly. If units were supposed to be able to cloak and decloak, then this is also more than a display bug.

54. The Maintenance Problems intelligence project does damage points, and is currently set in the unmodded game to 1, so it will only kill units with up to one point of structure. (Same problem with Cargo Bomb? Suggestion: set to 160 and 80)

55. Normal damage weapons seem to do 1/2 damage to shields against Weapon Platforms. A small WP with 1500 phased shield points requires 3180 damage or so to destroy (3000 for the shields, 180 for the MC and 4 phased shield generators in my test).

56. You can ram a warp point.

57. In regards to the issue of messages not being sent if you do them first in your turn, it was noticed by someone in one of my PBEM games that if you send messages then SAVE the game, when you start the game next it will say you've sent those messages but none will go through. So, again, make sure you do your messages last WITHOUT saving before ending your turn.

58. Inherent to-hit bonuses for weapon components are not displayed anywhere in-game when viewing the description/details of the weapon. Players are forced to look in the data files to find such information. (redundant with 36.?)

59. If a racial tech requires a non-racial tech as its only prerequisite, the racial tech will show up as an expected result of researching the non-racial tech for all races, even those without the appropriate racial trait.

60. System gravitational shield facility only prevents against star destroyer components. Natural novas still happen with the facility in place.

61. While on day 0 of movement replays, you can access the diplomacy screen and give diplomatic orders, which can cause the game to crash during the subsequent execution phase if it's a simultaneous game.

62. Completed AI counter intel projects will act as offensive intel against the targeted empire (AI counter intel projects are targeted, which is impossible for human players to do) and deplete the counter intel of the attacked empire.

63. When playing simultaneous games against humans, if you give an attack order against a specific ship and the other player changes the name of the ship that same turn, the attack order will not be executed.

64. Shields on weapon platforms count double. (Once as shields and once as structure?) Shield regenerators do not work on weapon platforms (as they are an unit). Tip: Weapon platforms are randomly damaged in combat.(Damage not sufficient to destroy one of them stacking with the next shot?)

65. You can drop troops from a planet to an adjacent one.

66. Inaccurate math / Misleading presentation of pop growth rate: Pop growth rate % is shown as being for a whole year - 10 turns. But this is inaccurate - for instance a 20% growth rate shown will give you a (1+0.20/10)^10 = +21,9% growth rate over a year (assuming no changes in population and growth rate occur during the whole year, and not taking into account the rounding/quantisation which tend to grow the population even more).