[2020] Can you fix this issue? I have been waiting 2 years to play this.

I am very sorry for you having this bug, but I'm afraid we here in tech support cannot answer your questions, and cannot fix this issue for you.

@Guraan is this an issue you are aware of?  

I can't explain how you get this in 80% of your games; while you are obviously not the only one seeing it, if it was that prevalent the game would be more or less unplayable by everyone! And we know it is not.

Anyway I'll see if I can get dev attention on this back here, as my attempt above was obviously not successful, perhaps due to the winter break.  

Hi, QA weighing in as well!

I definitely know the issue you are talking about - it's one that we've known about and struggling with (and have partially fixed in waves), especially since as you say it gets very disruptive. In testing, we've now been fortunate enough to not see it in a long time (because even when it was fixed not to disrupt the shipyards, having "-1" ships queued in the fleet manager meant that those slots didn't reinforce, which meant you needed to constantly disband and reform fleets, etc.

Do you have any saves or regular occurrences of this happening in Necroids? I _think_ this may have been found and resolved in versions-as-of-yet-unreleased version but if you have a setup where this happens regularly for you then we can run that through the paces on both the current live build and some of the work-in-progress ones.  

Saberuneko said: Hello,

I hope this information is useful, please let me know if you have any more questions or if I can make specific testing for you. I am willing to cooperate as much as I can on this if it means we can finally resolve this issue.

@AndrewT:
By the 80% of times, this mostly includes the time when I played multiplayer, where I had to drop out cause people would not agree to reload or revert to previous savegames when the bug took place. If playing singleplayer, the ratio is a bit lower cause reloading sometimes randomly solves the -1 issue, otherwise, even if it hurt, I could backtrack 2~3 autosaves towards a healthy one (this kills chances for doing IronMan mode though). This was certainly frustrating cause there was a time where I mostly played multiplayer games and I often had to drop mid-way.

@Guraan:
The issue is tightly tied to the fleet manager and how it handles fleets merging. The more merging that takes place, the more likely that the issue will happen (with reinforcements coming often, this increases the chances by a lot)

Please see the following example I just generated on latest (current) public Steam version, it is possible to trigger this one from minute one since game version 2.0.2, this specific issue persists even after reloading the save game:

Please see the steps on how to reproduce this, it still works with a 100% chance of intentionally triggering this behavior, following the steps below:
- At the start of game, separate each one of the initial ships into an individual fleet. (To retrofit them separately to 3 ship designs).
- Make the designs for each ship, delete the old automatic design and replace with the new one, but do not retrofit yet.
- Try merging the 3 fleets back into one and see what happens. (See attachments)
- After this bug triggers, try hitting the upgrade/retrofit button. The issue carries over time (See attached savefile)

We are triggering this specific merging issue in purpose here, but it can also happen on its own when upgrading+reinforcing, or sometimes only while reinforcing.

This is not a big issue until the fleet reaches its fleet cap. When new ships exceeding this cap try to merge or get built and set as MIA while upgrade/reinforcement orders are still pending on the fleet manager, this tends to be the event that seems to trigger the "-1", stuck shipyards, etc. This is a bit more non-consistent and I have not found a 100% reliable way to trigger it, but it happens when this is done.

@Uncia:
I do not keep an specific savefile with the "-1" issue taking place, part of my tests for trying to get rid of the issue involved purging the whole install and user files. I also uninstalled the game completely again after the issue persisted the very last time I tried to play (mistake on my side, should have kept that savefile). Still, please see attachment and information above, which could be useful. The last time I experienced the issue was on December 2020 (cannot remember exact dates, but definitely after Necroids release).

As soon as I have some free time, I will test this again, and actively try to reproduce the usual events that triggered this bug to get a newer example save with latest version, the savefile I provided can be a good start for testing this (just try to bring the provided glitched fleet to maximum fleet size, preferrably with a mixture of newer and outdated ship designs, retrofit and/or reinforce, and it will sometimes trigger the "-1" bug).

Edit: I have been playing a new game, the same bug triggered after dividing one of my fleets mid-war. No signs of "-1" issue yet, but will keep playing from this point and see if I can trigger it. I needed to divide forces to handle two fronts at some point, once I re-merged the fleet, it shows as having zero ships (see "fleet-manager-bug-2" savegame)

Thank you so much for the additional information - we are definitely hunting this bug down, and the additional data is very much helpful.

As always, unfortunately, we can't really promise anything until we've essentially got the fix in a patch and ready to drop, as there are so many moving parts in gamedev that may cause a potential fix to fail etc. But the issue is definitely not forgotten.