Fleet supply problem in 1.91!

[PvK]

Ok, I thought fleets would share supplies evenly between all the ships in a fleet. Always seemed to work that way in all previous experience with previous patches.

In 1.91, I try this and ... it looks like some ships aren't getting any added supplies. I'm kind of stumped.

Example (each line is a ship with supplies/total):

Turn 1:
1555/1720 (165 less than full)
1555/1720 (165 less than full)
1555/1720 (165 less than full)
1555/1720 (165 less than full)
1555/1720 (165 less than full)
7640/7850 (210 less than full)
2465/2800 (335 less than full)
3320/3600 (280 less than full)
3320/3600 (280 less than full)
3320/3600 (280 less than full)

Total = 1875 supplies short of full for all ships.

My orders are to join all these ships into one fleet. My expectation is it will divide its excess supplies amongst the fleet, so all the ships will be topped off except the ship with 7640 supplies, which will be left with 7640 - 1875 = 5765. That is, more than everyone else, so everyone else should be filled up.

Instead, the result is like this:
Turn 2:
1720/1720
1720/1720
1720/1720
1720/1720
1720/1720
7850/7850
2800/2800
2784/3600 (816 less than full)
2784/3600 (816 less than full)
3022/3600 (578 less than full)

Total = 2210 less than full.

That is, it looks like there are two bugs:

1) It chose weird ships to not fill up, with no good or understandable reason to do so. This breaks the use of supply ships to resupply fleets reliably!

2) 335 supplies were actually lost somehow!

Argh...

Has this been noticed/investigated before? Any other info about it? Is it a new problem in 1.91? Is there a workaround?

Oh, and the "fighters can't resupply on a moon resupply depot" bug is apparently still there. I expect people probably already knew that, though.

PvK

[Tanus]

That's very odd.

I tried it 3 times, and every time I tried it worked out exactly as you thought it should. Here's one of my tests:

Turn 1:
1760/2000
1800/2000
1840/2000
1840/2000
1840/2000
2800/3000
2800/3000
2920/3000
2920/3000
7800/8000

Total 28320/30000

Turn 2:
2000/2000
2000/2000
2000/2000
2000/2000
2000/2000
3000/3000
3000/3000
3000/3000
3000/3000
6320/8000

total 28320/30000

I did it multiple times, with different numbers, and every time it only took supplies off the big supply ship until it's supplies were on par with the rest of the ships

I wish I could offer an explanation as to whey yours turned out as it did... but... I'm at a loss.

[PvK]

Thanks for checking. I hope it's just some rare fluke condition that causes it.

I do notice that the ships which weren't supplied fully, are the largest ships in terms of kT size, even though they had fewer supplies than the "tanker" ship. I know that hasn't been a cause of this in the past though, since my tankers are often smaller than the warships they have supplied... in Versions before 1.91, anyway.

PvK

[Litcube]

I haven't experienced it yet. If I do, I'll be sure to post my findings.

Was it a stock game per chance?

[PsychoTechFreak]

This has been an issue in 1.84 but just with fighters mixed in fleets already. AFAIR, the ship supplies got divided by 2 every turn (in case of fighters in the fleet).

See:

fleet supply warning

[Saber Cherry]

Could the problem be related to the ships' order within the fleet? In other words, if the big ship is listed Last in the fleet as opposed to first, that might cause the bug to occur or not occur...

[Spoo]

Did your ships have components that use up supplies? (like activated cloaking devices)

[PvK]

Originally posted by Litcube:
... Was it a stock game per chance?

No, my Proportions mod Version 2.5.2.2. Nothing really about the mod that would impact supply distribution. These are just ships with engines and supply components (and some typical fighting gear) on them. Well... I guess there could be some weird side-effect of something or other. Seems improbable though since we're just talking about sharing supplies.

Originally posted by PsychoTechFreak:
This has been an issue in 1.84 but just with fighters mixed in fleets already. AFAIR, the ship supplies got divided by 2 every turn (in case of fighters in the fleet).

Yes, I know about the fighter issue with supplies in 1.84, but.
1) This is 1.91, and isn't the fighter issue with supplies supposed to be fixed?
2) This problem does not work the same way at all. Some ships are filling up while others are actually losing supplies even though they have less than some, and the ship with the most supply capacity actually got filled up to its maximum! Also, the amount of lost supplies is a weird number and less than the amount if a whole ship were jettisoning supplies (as in the fighter case). It is an idea that if this is somehow a similar phenomenon, maybe the supplies lost is somehow related to the transfer amounts. In fact, my best hunch is that maybe this is a side-effect of fixing the fighter/fleet supply bug in 1.84!

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
Could the problem be related to the ships' order within the fleet? In other words, if the big ship is listed Last in the fleet as opposed to first, that might cause the bug to occur or not occur...

That's a possibility. The order I showed was the order they appear in the window right of the sector map when the fleet is selected. It's a different order if you look at the Fleet Transfer interface. And I think both are different from the order of the ships if the fleet is broken up. I'm not sure what the specific theory would be though. In this case, the supply ship was the fleet leader, it appeared in the middle of the ships that got resupplied, it got resupplied itself, and the ships at the end lost supplies.

Another hypothesis is it might be related to the order in which the ships were build, or to their names. The three ships that didn't get supplied were I think built before the other ships except for the resupply ship. Two of them were built on a different date from the other, and although they're now the same class, the class they were originally built as were different... and had fewer supplies... I'll have to check if maybe they got filled to their original capacity in their original class.

Originally posted by Spoo:
Did your ships have components that use up supplies? (like activated cloaking devices)

No. The ships are all pretty ordinary warships, had no orders before fleeting to resupply, and aren't cloaked or doing anything but sitting there, and training crews.

An additional bit of info is that a few turns earlier, using 1.84, the ships which just failed to resupply did successfully resupply with the same supply ship, as expected. However the smaller ships were not involved in that resupply.

PvK

[ March 14, 2004, 01:47: Message edited by: PvK ]

[PvK]

Further info. I removed the ships that were filled up from the fleet, and the next turn, the tanker refuelled the larger ships, as expected. No supplies vanished from the sum this turn.

PvK

[se5a]

from memory fighter no longer get refulled in a fleet (they act as if they are not in a fleet)