Reinforcements in Transit?

[MonzUn]

What is this? I have two stations right next to each other and my ships disappear for 6 months instead of just merging with my fleet.

Edit : It takes longer for them to get to my fleet than it would take to just build all the ships at the station my fleet is at in many cases. Seems like something that sounded like a good idea but the execution of that idea leaves much to be desired.

The only issue I'm currently aware about for reinforcements is related to jump drives and FTL inhibitors and is a bit of an edge case.
Although a lot of players keep misunderstanding how reinforcements work so we might need to work on the communication of that.
If you think you have a case where it's not behaving as it should, please submit a bug report

 

[MonzUn]

so I assume there's some simplification going on

That used to be the case and is part of what I changed in 3.2. Now it uses the same ETA calculation as actually travelling to the system with a fleet (with pathfinding and all). I've seen similar complaints but actually never seen a bug report on it personally. I've looked into a few cases where players have claimed that it doesn't work and its turned out to be players being tricked by gateways or just not understanding the system. Your case sounds relatively simple though so make a bug report and we can have a look

I also fixed a case in 3.3, where the system meant to make the reinforcements take alternative routes around hostiles didn't always work and left ships at the shipyard when it didn't need to. But the MIA times should be accurate to how long time it should take a fleet to move from shipyard to the target fleet. If it isn't, it's a bug and I want to squish it!

 

[MonzUn]

Ah, yeah I did some quite extensive work with reinforcement overall in 3.2. Also overhauled how shipyards are selected so it avoids overcapping them unless it's faster to overcap than to build far away.

The original issue in this thread though, it would be nice to have a bug report with a save game for!

 

[MonzUn]

when 3.3 comes out I'll be happy to play it... in the mean time reinforcements appear in a dirrect line from the shipyard they are built from [random] so for example if the system has a enter point at north & south but the shipyard is off to the right, then the reinforcements will appear in the right hand side of the system away from both entry points

Yeah where they enter the target system is something I did not look at so that sounds pretty valid to me!
The selected shipyard isn't random though, but algorithmically selected to optimize throughput of reinforcement to the target fleet.

 

[MonzUn]

Missing fleets and reinforcement kinda work under the same system as far as i know. I sometimes forget to said a home base for the fleet so they go missing for about a year. to end up in a system 2 jumps away while the other ones i did't forget to set send up 6 jumps away in my home system. But the time is super close to each other when they appear. I don't think that works properly.

If you experience this behaviour in 3.3, please submit a bug report

 

[MonzUn]

This is a dumb question, but does the ETA time for reinforcement fleets "in FTL" take into account where a fleet has moved to (and does that update for each ship as it starts construction)? So for instance, if I'm reinforcing a fleet that is flying towards my shipyards, will the ETA time get shorter as the fleet changes systems, and if my fleet is flying away from my shipyards, will the ETA time get longer as the fleet changes systems? Otherwise, I can imagine some fun exploits where you have a 1 corvette fleet right next to your shipyards, starting construction on a lot of battleships, and then moving to an attack position far away from your shipyards, and suddenly dropping a pile of battleships into existence?

The time is calculated when a ship finishes construction (so the exploit you describe will not work very well) and does take FTL and sub FTL travel time into account.
It does not however account for the fleet moving as that would incur a lot of extra pathfinding checks and we didn't feel that accuracy was worth the performance hit at the current time.

There are some clever ways to avoid performing those checks in certain cases though and I hope to be able to revisit reinforcement in the future to make it more of its own feature than a reuse of the MIA system (although there are currently no plan on the schedule to do so).

 

[MonzUn]

Thanks for the clarification. That's actually a pretty neat way to determine when reinforcements arrive. I guess one can still kind of exploit the system by having the corvette fleet move when the battleship fleet finishes building, which would effectively mean the battleships travel to where the fleet is somewhat faster (or alternatively time it so that the battleships pop into existence right before you attack), but I'm not sure how much you can cheat the system that way (especially versus the extra pathfinding checks as you point out).

Since it's ship by ship, even this variant of the exploit is severely reduced in efficiency. Especially since the ETA time on short distances is not long, so the gains are really small and it would only apply to a few ships.

 

[MonzUn]

The only reinforcements issue I've run into occurs when a fleet being reinforced enters combat. That is, if I give orders to reinforce a fleet; those new ships all queue up at the various starbases; then the fleet enters combat. In that case, all of the new ships seem to lose their connection to the fleet. Even for ships built after the fleet leaves combat, the new ships idle at their respective starbases and I end up with a bunch of small fleets scattered all over the place.

That's a good point and a good suggestion! We do have a lot of notifications already and we're trying to keep them down, but this one might be worth the extra ding.