Hi Sol, I'm having an issue with the weapon ranges in battles.

It appears that the game is using the Threatened Area slider to set the firing distance instead of the weapon range. I noticed this in my first battle using Nuclear Missiles, which have a range of 60, which is much larger than the range of the Threatened Area slider, even when set to max.

As a result, I need to get my ships much closer to the enemy ships than I would normally have to in order to launch their missiles. The enemy ships aren't affected by this and are happy to blast away at my ships from maximum range as I struggle to close the gap.

I noticed this bug started when I updated UCP from the old version I was using (I think it was 5.8). I did a fresh install of the game and the bug isn't happening in vanilla, and it's not being caused by the other two mods I'm using, which don't touch the tactical battle files at all.

I'd appreciate it if you could try to fix this for me. Thanks!

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by threatened area? If you are referring to the sliders that make like red a donut around your ship that is just the range the ship would like to stay from its target. Ships will fire at any enemy within range and arcs of its weapons. That red donut has no effect on that.

What platform (GOG, Steam, Wargamer) and OS version?

Yeah, it's the red donut. It doesn't make any sense to me either, but the missiles don't fire until the enemy is in the red donut. I'm on Steam and Windows 10.

You using admiral AI ?

Just not seeing it. Tried a frigate that only has nuclear missiles against two pirates. Set the donut as close as it would go to my frigate. The missiles fired as soon as the target was in range, way before they entered that red donut. Tried both GOG Win and Steam Win same results. Both of these where with admiral AI turned on and autocast for the weapons.

I was playing with manual control and autocast, but I turned on the admiral AI and it's doing the same thing.

After more testing the missiles are firing at the maximum range of the red donut, but not at the red range circle that appears when you hover your cursor over the missile icon.

It might just be a coincidence that they're firing at the maximum range of the red donut, but they definitely aren't firing when they should be.

Just to be extra thorough, I did another fresh reinstall after removing the MoO folders and workshop files from my Steam directory and My Documents. Everything's fine in vanilla, but I still get the bugged weapon ranges when I install UCP as the only mod.

I made a video of what I'm seeing: https://youtu.be/i9vDq7lH86k

What is your ship's weapon loadout ?

With a pure missile frigate - I'm not seeing anything. Admiral AI, autocase, the red donut does not matter.

In 5.9 I introduces weapon range averaging for weapons, wondering if that is that is causing your issue.

Can you retest using a ship with only missile weapons ?

OK retested using this setup: Frigate with 3 Lasers and 3 Nuclear Missiles. Modified the lasers to have a range of 15, so extremely short.

Ran combat, admiral AI turned on, autocast turned on, touched nothing. Missiles did not fire as expected - results you are seeing.

Removed code introduced in UCP 5.9 to adjust what I called "effective range" to be the average of all weapon ranges. Reran this same combat, missiles fired as soon as the enemy got into range.

Looks like to me that "effective range" is being used by the game's logic to find targets on the radar. That was not intended.

But since this was put in during 5.9 and we are on 6.1 you posted to the wrong forum thread, so I can not fix it – sorry.

I'm having a ship movement bug on the main map (not in combat) which seems to have just started in 6.1. My transport ships are getting "stuck" and not actually moving along their travel paths between planets and/or warp points. They will have a travel path drawn in front of them and say "1 turn" or "2 turns" or whatever, but after multiple turns they will not have moved.

Sometimes you can get them un-stuck by changing their travel path or having them guard for a turn. In other cases, though, I've had to scrap the ship because it becomes unusable.

This is on a very large map, late game, with lots of ships. I'm not sure if that makes a difference. Also, while it seems to be very pronounced on transport ships, I did have some of my other ships exhibit this behavior.

What mods are you using? Do you have a save you can post? Showing a stuck ship.

Stop your incoming fleets from joining onto a node and see if that resolves.

McGavin, OK I have that "effective range" change from 5.9 backed out.

@Gunndor: One more question that came to mind - was this a new game after installing 6.1 or a continuation of an old game from previous UCP?

Awesome, thanks for the fix! I've made a few mods for other games, so I realize how much of a pain these unexpected behaviors are to hunt down and fix and I really appreciate you taking the time to get to the bottom of it so quickly. I'll wait for the update before I start a new game.

Bugs like that I always find amusing since it has been in there since 2019.06.30 and UCP 5.9. I never saw it myself partially because I use "auto-resolve" probably 95+% of the time. Even when I do not I always make either pure missile or pure energy ships so the mixed ranges never comes up.

I will have to figure out how to put something for that back in cause otherwise you have the issue of different weapons ranges. If you take say a titan arm it with 500 phasors and 1 fighter bay using a mod that increases fighter range. Set it to sniper mode, the AI will goto into minimal range for that 1 fighter bay and just sit there. That is not what I would call an optimal engagement range. But, I will address that in 6.2.