Autosave - problems and a suggestion to autosave at the end of turn

from GalCiv3 Forums

My autosave setting is 1 turn, meaning on every start of the turn the game is saved. I have two reasons for this.

1. I like the fact that I can decide to exit the game at every turn without the need to save myself.

2. It minimizes the loss in case of game crashes

I noticed the following problems with this:

1. Apparently if a shipyard has finished a ship and it should be launched at that turn, it does not get lauchned if you reload the autosave. Instead, the ship stays in orbit of the shipyard without any notification. I play bigger maps in many sessions over weeks and in the course of the games I sometimes find all kinds of ships in orbits of shipyards that should have been launched.

2. Apparently stuff like annexing of planets and other events happen after the autosave. That is somehow weird, because if you continue to play that event is part of that turn - but if you exit and continue by reloading the event might not happen or happen the next turn.

3. If the game crahes during the AI-turns, you lose all the work you did in your turn.

 

What I would like - and what would also fix the problems - is that the autosave function saves the game at the end of my turn. Meaning if I hit the turn-button, the first thing should be the saving of the game. That way, you wouldn't risk of losing your work because of AI-turn-crashes and the problems with save at that start are also eliminated. Also if I load the save, I can hit the turn button again or decide to do even more in that turn.

13,406 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Interesting , definitely sounds like a bug

 

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

1. Apparently if a shipyard has finished a ship and it should be launched at that turn, it does not get lauchned if you reload the autosave. Instead, the ship stays in orbit of the shipyard without any notification. I play bigger maps in many sessions over weeks and in the course of the games I sometimes find all kinds of ships in orbits of shipyards that should have been launched.

Take a look at When Loading autosave Constructed Ships Stay in Shipyard and take notice of the posting date.

Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

1) ive noticed this as well and think i even made a post about it at one point as well

 

What I would like - and what would also fix the problems - is that the autosave function saves the game at the end of my turn.

i actually dont like this i play with 50+ races in my current games and while the hotfix has sped it up (considerably) the ai turns can take a while and the game is very slow to respond to me while the ai is taking its turns i would rather lose what i did in my turn then have to wait through the ai's turns again i would prefer that they find a way to fix 1-3

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


My autosave setting is 1 turn, meaning on every start of the turn the game is saved. I have two reasons for this.

1. I like the fact that I can decide to exit the game at every turn without the need to save myself.

2. It minimizes the loss in case of game crashes

I noticed the following problems with this:

1. Apparently if a shipyard has finished a ship and it should be launched at that turn, it does not get lauchned if you reload the autosave. Instead, the ship stays in orbit of the shipyard without any notification. I play bigger maps in many sessions over weeks and in the course of the games I sometimes find all kinds of ships in orbits of shipyards that should have been launched.

2. Apparently stuff like annexing of planets and other events happen after the autosave. That is somehow weird, because if you continue to play that event is part of that turn - but if you exit and continue by reloading the event might not happen or happen the next turn.

3. If the game crahes during the AI-turns, you lose all the work you did in your turn.

 

What I would like - and what would also fix the problems - is that the autosave function saves the game at the end of my turn. Meaning if I hit the turn-button, the first thing should be the saving of the game. That way, you wouldn't risk of losing your work because of AI-turn-crashes and the problems with save at that start are also eliminated. Also if I load the save, I can hit the turn button again or decide to do even more in that turn.

The game is autosaving saving at the end of your turn (which happens after you press turn and the game resolves any actions you've queued).  However, that doesn't mean there isn't a bug and we'll look into it.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting pshaw, reply 4

The game is autosaving saving at the end of your turn (which happens after you press turn and the game resolves any actions you've queued). However, that doesn't mean there isn't a bug and we'll look into it.

Is auto-launch of a completed ship considered part of the end of a turn or the start of the next turn?  Because I complained about this in the GC3 beta, and it's behaved this way in every previous version  of GC that I can remember (except of course that in the previous versions the ships got left in orbit around a planet instead of at shipyards).

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Today I had a game crash and continued from an autosave. In addition to the points mentioned I noticed the following problems:

1. A shipyard that had been launched that turn was orphaned. Apparently the dialog that allows you to select the sponsoring planets was not triggered.

2. There were several planets in the "idle colony"-status, that still had one improvement that could be upgraded. No, there was no reason the planet did not upgrad it by itself. The planet was full.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

There is always allot of funny business with reloading a game.

 

The other day the Drengin were attacking me with overwhelming force, then suddenly their fleets turned to attack someone else, i was very relieved, but then i ran out of time and had to save the game and go to bed. Next day, reloaded, first end turn of reloaded game, Drengin fleets immediately turned 180 and came back to attack me!!!

in hindsight i should have left my computer running overnight!

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Publius, reply 5


Quoting pshaw,
reply 4

The game is autosaving saving at the end of your turn (which happens after you press turn and the game resolves any actions you've queued). However, that doesn't mean there isn't a bug and we'll look into it.



Is auto-launch of a completed ship considered part of the end of a turn or the start of the next turn?  Because I complained about this in the GC3 beta, and it's behaved this way in every previous version  of GC that I can remember (except of course that in the previous versions the ships got left in orbit around a planet instead of at shipyards).

When you press the "turn" button, the game finishes any remaining turn actions before actually ending your turn.  So the auto launch should be happening AFTER you press turn and BEFORE the next turn starts.  

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting pshaw, reply 8


Quoting Publius of NV,
reply 5






Quoting pshaw,

reply 4


The game is autosaving saving at the end of your turn (which happens after you press turn and the game resolves any actions you've queued). However, that doesn't mean there isn't a bug and we'll look into it.



Is auto-launch of a completed ship considered part of the end of a turn or the start of the next turn?  Because I complained about this in the GC3 beta, and it's behaved this way in every previous version  of GC that I can remember (except of course that in the previous versions the ships got left in orbit around a planet instead of at shipyards).



When you press the "turn" button, the game finishes any remaining turn actions before actually ending your turn.  So the auto launch should be happening AFTER you press turn and BEFORE the next turn starts.  

Then the autosave must be happening when the turn button is pressed, and not after the game finishes the remaining turn actions, since what we observe is that after loading the autosave the ships have not been launched.

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Thanks for the feedback everyone.  We are going take some steps to improve the auto-save for 1.82.  

Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top

issue here with autosave is that it takes so much time to complete. durations in the order of 10 minutes are the norm.
as a rule, turns with autosave happening last about 10 times the ones without.
fortunately the game hasn't crashed once yet, and consider to skip altogether autosave usage.

any pointers, welcomed.

c

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting carlopaggi1, reply 11

issue here with autosave is that it takes so much time to complete. durations in the order of 10 minutes are the norm.
as a rule, turns with autosave happening last about 10 times the ones without.
fortunately the game hasn't crashed once yet, and consider to skip altogether autosave usage.

any pointers, welcomed.

c

There is no reason an autosave should take 10 minutes in any kind of reasonable usage.  Even with extreme maps and settings using larger data sets, it is still just a process of dumping data to a disk drive. My theory is that there is something happening external to the game that is interfering with your disk access.

If nothing else, I would certainly set the auto save to every 5 to 10 turns since it is not crashing for you.  You still get the "insurance" but much less inconvenience. Nowadays, I have SSD and don't worry about such things, :) but that is what I used to do with a much slower HDD I used to have.