Endless AI turns: advice needed

[Xyth]

I've recently had some reports by players of my mod that their game occasionally gets stuck permanently "Waiting for other civilizations..."

I've been doing some research on these forums and have found out that this problem has afflicted several other mods as well. It wasn't clear to me if this problem occurs in unmodded BTS 3.19. Here's a quick summary of what I found out:

• Caused by a unit grouping and ungrouping over and over in a single turn
• Seems to occur most commonly with naval units
• More common with hidden nationality units, though I couldn't figure out why​

Sure enough, in one of the save games provided by players I deleted a couple Pirate units (an early Privateer equivalent) and the problem vanished.

This thread (from the Better AI subforum) has several SDK based suggestions for fixing the problem at its source. That's not an option for History Rewritten as it's designed to be Mac compatible and thus uses no DLL modifications at all. There is also a Python based 'fix' in that thread that provides a key combination to force units to end their turn; I'm going to try and implement that.

However, I'd like to know if anyone has any insight into how to avoid or minimize the problem in the first place, other than just getting rid of hidden nationality units like the Pirate. Are there any Unit AIs to avoid for such units perhaps? Any other situations that can cause this problem?

 

[The_J]

I think the problem is in general that the AI tries to perform an invalid action over and over again.
So not directly related to units with hidden nationality, but since the modders often try to turn that system into something different, it's more likely to happen there.

It wasn't clear to me if this problem occurs in unmodded BTS 3.19.

It does, but I'm not sure if this was maybe in 3.17 (and very, very, very rarely). Long, long time ago...