[Bug] Ships refuse to auto-attack (Singleplayer)

from Sins Forums

This just started recently, after I began experimenting about with some mods I noticed that for some reason when in a battle allot of my ships just sat there not doing anything. Even if they were getting attacked they would just sit there and not fight back. After looking into it a bit more i noticed that it wasn’t just my ships, but every ship I encountered (militia, pirate, enemy) just refused to auto attack anything at first.

What’s stranger is that it doesn’t last, they do auto-attack eventually about 20-30 seconds later but this delay is really annoying and has spoiled some of my best games. This only seems to affect frigates though, my capital ships and fighters still attack fine and since I’ve only experimented with it in a few early-stage games I’ve not been able to see if the cruisers are affected too.

Thinking that it was just the mods responsible for this I naturally removed them, but the problem persisted. Eventually I even reinstalled the game and still the problem remains. I am at a loss as to how to solve this issue, i know it sounds like only a minor annoyance but its impact on gameplay has essentially stopped me enjoying the game altogether. D=

I have a hypothesis on why this happens:
Based on my (very limited) understanding of how the game works and several assumptions I think that ships pick their targets for auto-attacking by performing a "scan" (for lack of a better word) of all ships in their designated attack range, and based on a number of factors pick one of these ships and make it their target. If this assumption is correct it seems to me that this "scan" process would have a number of triggering events, like  "upon entering gravity-well" or "another ship arrives in gravity-well" and for some reason these trigger events aren’t being triggered, so as a fallback some kind of timer elapses that starts the "scan" process every 30 seconds say, and that’s why these ships only "detect" enemy ships to auto attack after a delay (waiting for the timer to elapse). I hope I'm wrong though because if I'm right then this problem can't really be fixed. =S

2,253 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
By removed did you mean you turned off the mods in-game? Also, are the frigates a part of a fleet? If so, are the fleets mixed (frigates, crusiers, capitals) or frigate-only? If frigate-only, have you checked the engage rules in the fleet sub-panel?
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Did you delete the folder C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\Sins of a Solar Empire after you uninstalled? Could be something that was left over that was not copied over during the re-install.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
@maerlyn
At first I just turned them off in the mod manager but afterwards I deleted them altogether from the application data directory.
They are part of a fleet, 5 frigates and one capital ship. but as i say this happens to both my ships and others, including the local militia and I don't think they are fleeted. Even so I have gone over the engagement rules and they are all set to "all auto attacking" and an engagement range of "gravity well".

@ZzZGuy
The second time I reinstalled I deleted EVERYTHING, the original install folder, the application data folder, even all the registry entries that i could find.