Colony Ship woes

from Stardock Forums
Okay, both of these problems occur with colony ships, but I think they are two separate problems. Please forgive me for posting them together.

First, when I have colony ships autopiloted to a star system and on the same month as the colony ship arrives at the system another ship is finished building or a social improvement is completed, the colony ship docks at the planet first, then the improvement completion screen comes up, and dealing with that undocks the ship. I think that the ship movement including the colonization of any star systems should complete before the beginning of the next month.

A slightly different problem occurs when I'm exploring manually in a scout ship with colony ships on autopilot. The scout ship is moving along, and then focus is shifted to the colony ship, and the colony ship takes the keyboard strokes intended for the scout. I think that when the focus is shifted from one ship to another ship, the keyboard buffer should be flushed.

Thanks!
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Umm...I'm surprised that it even ends up selecting the ship on auto-pilot...it's not supposed to jump to a ship on auto-pilot...don't you at least get a pause between shifting?
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
No, no pause. That may be because I'm running a relatively underpowered system (K6-2 @ 0.6GHz w/128Mb). Or maybe I should say that there are *lots* of pauses so that the pause is imperceptible to me.

So I've usually got 5-8 colony ships going somewhere and a survey ship or two also going somewhere, but I like to pilot my scouts manually rather than using the autopilot (a slightly eratic course can reveal a much larger section of the galaxy than a straight line course). So I move my scout (small pause) move it again (longer pause) move it again (long pause) move it again (short pause) each time I don't know when the pause is over until I enter a keystroke and it is accepted. So, usually I enter a keystroke into the buffer so that the scout will move as soon as it is able to -- however, if the focus shifts to a colony ship then there is already a keystroke in the buffer and the colony ship moves out of the system it is supposed to colonize.

Thanks!
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Frank,

This is one of the reasons I play with autoturn off. The end of turn is more evident. Since the movement of ships on
autopilot have been changed from early in the turn to at the last of the turn it has resulted in some confusing actions,
such as having a ship finish its autoturn and getting its last moves overlayed with project completions.

I think one of the bugs here is that the "next turn" function should be suppressed until all ship movement has been
completed. Any ships with moves left should require either direct action from the player or a popup that asks if the
player really wants to leave all unmoved ships unmoved. I think this would cure both of the problems you mentioned.

Cheers,
Jack