During the game, a pirate fleet can fly past the star system where you can see it and go about its business. However, if you load a save that was made immediately before the "flyby", the same fleet will certainly stop in that system and stand there for at least one turn. Presumably, the target a pirate fleet chooses to move towards is not saved with other game data, so they have to stop and choose another one. This needs to be fixed.

There's some information than is not stored on the save data, AI fleet missions (used to make AI fleet behaviors) sometimes may fail for whatever reason and enter a loop of fail > cancel mission > reassign, as are created every AI cycle.

I made a mod that solve some of those whatever reasons and also fixes some re-calculations on save load. With other AI general improvements: you can search for ENFER Reloaded on Steam.

Is very unlikely Amplitude will do any significant update as the game is quite old.​

First of all, a game sold for money should not end up in a "problematic AI state" that requires the player to reset it. Secondly, if the game lasts obviously longer than the player’s usual period of free time (which is typical for global strategies), a particularly careful approach to saving the state of the game is required. Any noticeable change in game behavior as a result of loading is unacceptable. It is advisable, for example, to save the state of the pseudo-random result generator so as not to tempt the player to abuse save/load for a gaming advantage.​

I will rant for a bit: Most of the information is either stored or rebuilt with identical results each time when you load a save file.

After debugging, found some things that are lost and may be rebuilt very different on a game load:

- The fleets previous valid node position. This is a value used to have always a valid place to hold any code calculation that needs a node position associated with a fleet. This value was only calculated on vanilla AI after a fleet lands or crosses any node, and on vanilla the default value is node 0, so many AI fleets may try to fly to the center of the galaxy (where the node 0 usually is), so if you see an AI fleet going 20+ turns crossing the universe for no reason, this usually is it.

- Also the research need is based on the time last research queued, but on game load this value is lost and doesn't load the current tech being researched as reference. Anyways in vanilla AI barely touches the research part of the tech tree if not for unlocking planets.

- Some fleet missions on AI are bugged, and may not be cleared out until you reload the game. Fleet missions are usually canceled or cleared out if no interest at all after a few turns, but on some occasions these missions are persistent until you reload a save.

All of this is fixed on my AI mod (ENFER Reloaded), on game load the previous valid node position is triangulated with next valid and current position that always exist, also the research value is recovered from current research if no value is stored, and is much more competitive. Also fixed about a dozen+ fleet missions so they work properly at all times.

I debugged about half of the AI code and found about 60+ bugs ranging from insignificant to quite impactful. I'm sure there are still lots of bugs still to be discovered. For some reason the investment on AI from Amplitude is quite light, and the modding capabilities are minimal. The AI code was left full of bugs, and many AI functionallities were ignored. As example, AI is totally unable to boost their populations. Hero management is totally bare-bones, diplomacy logic is a mess, many faction-specific mechanics were ignored.

IMHO Amplitude severely understimates the overall impact a bad AI plays into the games sales and player retention. But it is what it is. 

Ninakoru wrote:

IMHO Amplitude severely understimates the overall impact a bad AI plays into the games sales and player retention. But it is what it is. 

Sadly it's not only Amplitude. An example of good AI is offered by Mohawk Games - Old World.

You are right, I agree with you.