Reoccurrence of a Serious Problem

[smbecket]

I had another occurrence of a problem I had about a year ago, the majority of my units did not move during a turn. This was the second incident in this game and I consider it a critical problem. As background my friend and I are playing on a detailed 4x4 km map with appx. 1.5 BNs each (20,000 pts). The first time was about turn 45 and it is now turn 51. The first time I lost a Panther that stopped broadside to a T-10. This time there was no loss that I can attribute to the problem except the loss of the ground the units would have covered if they had moved according to their plotted paths. And I had a lot of units moving, some were reinforcements rushing to the front and others were at the front and were making risky dashes to positions from which they could observe enemy positions/movement. Some units were moving on roads and some cross country. The units close to the action were primarily in a small city.

I started a thread about the problem the first time it happened last year. That was on a smaller map with less points per side. Phil posted in that thread but nothing was ever resolved as to what could have caused the stoppage. I thought It might be my machine but last year I had a different one. My present computer is an Intel i7 3770k with 32 GB of Corsair RAM. CMBN is installed/runs on a 20 GB RAM Drive. I have never seen anyone else post about a problem like this and I am clueless as to what could be causing it. To give more detail about one third of the units completed part of their movement, perhaps 10 to 20 seconds, and then stopped. The majority moved a couple of meters or not at all. One HT moved for a little over 30 seconds on a hard surfaced road. These were tanks and HTs as well as infantry. The majority were out of LoS of any enemy units. Units that had designated targets did fire the entire turn.

I have a save game just prior to hitting the button to process the turn. File size is a little over 109 MB. I could put the save and the actual game turn I received from my friend in my Dropbox Public folder if anyone wants to take a look. An interesting point is that when I told my friend about the problem he said he noticed that the file size when he finished his turn was in the 90 plus MBs and he wondered why it had dropped so low. It appears that the game engine had already accounted for my units not moving. I would be happy as heck if someone could point out some mistake I am making that would solve this!

[Holman]

To consider the most obvious explanation:

Is it possible that you *double-clicked* on your topmost commander (thus selecting every unit on the map) and then deleted his movement order? This would eliminate the last movement order for every unit selected. It might explain a pattern in which some units move a little (they had two waypoints already and lost only the latter one) while others move not at all (they had only one waypoint, and it was deleted).

I have made this mistake myself. It's easy to forget that you've selected everyone and not just a single unit.

Filesize has to do with events during the turn. If not much (firing, etc) is happening, turns are smaller.

[poesel]

Is it possible that you *double-clicked* on your topmost commander (thus selecting every unit on the map) and then deleted his movement order? This would eliminate the last movement order for every unit selected.

Unfortunately not. When you press delete while you have selected several units this will delete ALL movement orders. This is very unfortunate IMHO since you can't reverse accidental movement orders en masse.

Add to that that there is no indication that you have selected several units that are out of your current FOV and you have an error that can easily happen.

And while I'm at it - there's another oddity: if you first right-click on a units and then left click you get a double-click. If that's an HQ then the above happens. But why would anybody do this, you ask? Well, if you play with a trackpad instead of a mouse and the trackpad has no dedicated buttons then it's quite easy to click just a bit too much to the right.

All these circumstances put together make the 'unvoluntary-HQ-move-delete-redo' a not so uncommon event in my games. Since I guess most people play with a mouse I'm quite in the minority with that.

[smbecket]

Martyr, no that is not possible. I have a save game from immediately before I clicked on the button to process the turn. I have reviewed that save and all the movement paths are there. Interestingly, my friend told me last night that none of his units moved either. I guess I will have to post this on the tech support forum and hope BFC can figure out what is wrong.

[beatmasta]

Have you been able to replicate that problem with the save game you have?

Or is it a random occurrence? If yes, i think it might be pretty hard to locate if that happens twice a year...

And if the problem (even though annoying it must be) is not more frequent than that, isn't it possible to replay the turn?

[Holman]

Martyr, no that is not possible. I have a save game from immediately before I clicked on the button to process the turn. I have reviewed that save and all the movement paths are there. Interestingly, my friend told me last night that none of his units moved either. I guess I will have to post this on the tech support forum and hope BFC can figure out what is wrong.

Hmm. You mentioned that it was a pretty huge scenario: 1.5 Battalions on a side is larger than anything I've ever tried to play. I wonder if that's a factor. Was it a very large scenario when it happened before?

(BTW, I'd go to the Support forum with this. It'll be seen there by people who actually know what they're talking about.)

[womble]

Hmm. You mentioned that it was a pretty huge scenario: 1.5 Battalions on a side is larger than anything I've ever tried to play. I wonder if that's a factor. Was it a very large scenario when it happened before?

(BTW, I'd go to the Support forum with this. It'll be seen there by people who actually know what they're talking about.)

It's not as large as, say, the massive 20k pointer that's in AAR limbo on here; there are campaign scenarios that are that big shipped with the game. If it's a size limitation, it's a size-rig combination thing.

[ASL Veteran]

The biggest performance hits come from map size not truppen quantity. A 4km x 4km map is much bigger than anything that comes with any of the games.