Unavoidable Empire Death?

General discussion for the game Anacreon
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MDFification
Anarchist
Anarchist
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat Dec 21, 2013 8:37 pm

I just lost my empire (New Emdief Union) to what I'm fairly sure was a bug with my Trading Hub.

My hub stopped importing Trillium after suddenly trying to import millions more than I had. Demand for Trillium export at the hub was only 5000, with 4 connected worlds each capable of exporting that by themselves. I tried re-designating everything, adding more Trillium sources, nothing worked. I'm extremely doubtful that I had any kind of shortage - no resource in any world was being consumed faster than the local surplus was growing, and I tallied total production vs consumption and came out with massive surplus across the board. Only the hub had any irregularity.

Am I wrong about the cause of the problem? I impulsively abdictated, but I want to know if its worth the agonizing task of trying to submit a bug report (my keyboard is broken, every a, s, d, f, j, k, and l in this post had to be copy-pasted in)?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.
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Militia Captain
Militia Captain
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It sounds like you just ran into the infamous graviton launcher bug, which has destroyed many empires' economies. This is a known bug that isn't very intuitive- it's avoidable, but only if you know about it in advance. It's the cause of sudden, insane trillum demand in most cases.

Did you have a TL9 or TL10 jumpship autofac connected to the hub? The easiest fix is to manually set all jumpship autofacs' graviton launcher exports to 0- even though they will already appear to be at 0%, you must manually enter 0. Alternately, if you are always building even a small number of Undine jumpcruisers at a TL10 jumpship yard connected to the hub, this will prevent the bug.

This can also happen with certain TL 9 or 10 starship components if you only have TL8 or lower starship yards connected to the hub or autofac.

There seems to be an integer overflow associated with certain high-TL jumpship and starship components when they're being built at autofacs if there is no demand for them. Usually the culprit component is graviton launchers, which are used to build Undine jumpcruisers. The overflow makes TL9 or TL10 jumpship autofacs try to build 25,500% graviton launchers instead of 0% every so often. This makes the autofac demand a huge amounts of trillum from the hub, which in turn causes the hub to pull a ton of trillum in, which can screw up your economy

It's usually not a problem if a hub stops importing a resource if there is a big stockpile on the hub- it will automatically resume importing when the surplus is cleared. If a hub stops exporting trillum, it's usually because there is only one trillum extractor attached to the hub. For some reason hubs usually need to be importing from at least two connected trillum planets to function properly.

If a trade route doesn't seem to be working properly, try canceling and re-establishing it. It takes a few cycles for the route to be functioning at 100%, but it will clear any manual % assignments that may have gotten entered. I think that if you had a situation where all your autofacs were manually set to export a certain % and that % was <100%, it could cause a persistent deficit.

Does any of this map to your situation? One last thought: I believe hubs can act strangely if they do not have at least a few % industry dedicated to the starport structure. If you have 100% of labor dedicated to any combination of planetary defenses or habitat structures it may cause strange issues with imports and exports.
MDFification
Anarchist
Anarchist
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat Dec 21, 2013 8:37 pm

I figured I had that - I had a t9 jumpship autofac connected, but disconnecting it didn't seem to restart the trillium imports. I feel pretty silly for abdictating, I assumed that the refusal to import was permanent. Oh well, Krual can certainly make use of the expansion opportunity. Good to know I don't need to write up a bug report though.
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