Page: Known Game Issues
1.) The Defcon fighter airplanes have shorter fuel ranges than the bombers, and most likely will not make it back to the carrier or airbase most of the time, and even if they could, they will instead find another target. The airbase does respawns fighters 1 at a time and bombers can also shoot like fighters if selected to. The problem is fighters will continue on their own path even if selected to go elsewhere.
FIX TO PROBLEM: Click a plane you want to return and try to get it to return, then notice it will not return, click the plane again but place the target location next to the plane in the direction you want it to go and it will respond, then click it a third time to get it go to a carrier or airbase.
2.) Bombers sometimes go rouge like the fighters. I have had unresponsiveness occur with ships and planes but is rare and happens playing custom maps along with other odd behavior like telling bombers to go to a target and the "orders" show they are deployed but they aren't and the airbase won't show the planes but shows 'deployed' with the menu bar for naval combat and srmb launch highlighted as if they are in flight. When you click for them to drop srmb they actually begin a countdown from the airbase or carrier to launch but then just disappear. The orders remain.
3.) Ships, fleets cross land in places. This is custom map problem and it is a "sailable" image and travel_node image issue I think. You can expand the sailable image coastlines to have larger coastlines, but the travel_nodes may make your ships path odd.
4.) For example I made a map of America and the ships I wanted to go up California, past Oregon and around and over Washington state, but the ships instead went up to Alaska from California before heading towards Washington. I had a square set of travel nodes at the time which explains this I think. Basically I wanted the ships to go up and right but they went diagonally left and up then when high enough to be above Washington went right.
5.) If the text isn't showing correctly, check the "English" document formatting, for instance the Defcon Deterrence mod uses additional wording so all map mods need to have an updated "English" document that includes all the new words.
6.) If it is not the English doc, it might be the .dat documents, that is Cities.dat, coastlines.dat and International.dat. The last 2 are just graphical lines and can be turned on or off in-game. If one of those documents isn't formatted correctly, or you used the modsuite the last thing each document needs to end with is the text b then space, new paragraph and the text "end." If not you will see a random line or a city or city name will not show up sort of issue.
If you get those documents really wrong the game might not work at all, and so just remove the documents, or the mod entirely from the mod folder and if the game will launch simply deactivate the mod until you figure out the problem. So if the mod is broken and active in the mod menu, when you start Defcon it will cause issues is what I am saying. Not just launching a new game, simply booting up Defcon will maybe not even launch the game to get to the mod menu, this is when you need to remove the broken mod.
7.) Custom map issue that can cause problems is if there is a city in the sea. Be sure all cities are on land. Be sure the travel_nodes image which is 800x400 pixels isn't crossing land, this will result in a large red "Connection Problem" text on screen. That is telling you your nodes are wrong. Go to the "preferences" document and go down to "render_nodes" and then change the equals 0 to equals 1 and you will be able to see the nodes and ai_markers in-game.
This fantasy map I made had a travel_node that didn't connect to anything and also crossed land. The nodes need to be interconnected -22 max- like the default game has. To fix this I had to adjust nodes up down left and right bit by bit by making a new image every time until it worked. Took longer than normal to launch the map and sometimes it didn't launch at all and I had to use the Task Manager via Ctrl+Alt+Delete to close Defcon for "not responding." The game does work in this state but is laggy or will eventually crash.
See the blog post How To Mod Defcon for more info on modding.
1.) The Defcon fighter airplanes have shorter fuel ranges than the bombers, and most likely will not make it back to the carrier or airbase most of the time, and even if they could, they will instead find another target. The airbase does respawns fighters 1 at a time and bombers can also shoot like fighters if selected to. The problem is fighters will continue on their own path even if selected to go elsewhere.
FIX TO PROBLEM: Click a plane you want to return and try to get it to return, then notice it will not return, click the plane again but place the target location next to the plane in the direction you want it to go and it will respond, then click it a third time to get it go to a carrier or airbase.
2.) Bombers sometimes go rouge like the fighters. I have had unresponsiveness occur with ships and planes but is rare and happens playing custom maps along with other odd behavior like telling bombers to go to a target and the "orders" show they are deployed but they aren't and the airbase won't show the planes but shows 'deployed' with the menu bar for naval combat and srmb launch highlighted as if they are in flight. When you click for them to drop srmb they actually begin a countdown from the airbase or carrier to launch but then just disappear. The orders remain.
3.) Ships, fleets cross land in places. This is custom map problem and it is a "sailable" image and travel_node image issue I think. You can expand the sailable image coastlines to have larger coastlines, but the travel_nodes may make your ships path odd.
4.) For example I made a map of America and the ships I wanted to go up California, past Oregon and around and over Washington state, but the ships instead went up to Alaska from California before heading towards Washington. I had a square set of travel nodes at the time which explains this I think. Basically I wanted the ships to go up and right but they went diagonally left and up then when high enough to be above Washington went right.
5.) If the text isn't showing correctly, check the "English" document formatting, for instance the Defcon Deterrence mod uses additional wording so all map mods need to have an updated "English" document that includes all the new words.
6.) If it is not the English doc, it might be the .dat documents, that is Cities.dat, coastlines.dat and International.dat. The last 2 are just graphical lines and can be turned on or off in-game. If one of those documents isn't formatted correctly, or you used the modsuite the last thing each document needs to end with is the text b then space, new paragraph and the text "end." If not you will see a random line or a city or city name will not show up sort of issue.
If you get those documents really wrong the game might not work at all, and so just remove the documents, or the mod entirely from the mod folder and if the game will launch simply deactivate the mod until you figure out the problem. So if the mod is broken and active in the mod menu, when you start Defcon it will cause issues is what I am saying. Not just launching a new game, simply booting up Defcon will maybe not even launch the game to get to the mod menu, this is when you need to remove the broken mod.
7.) Custom map issue that can cause problems is if there is a city in the sea. Be sure all cities are on land. Be sure the travel_nodes image which is 800x400 pixels isn't crossing land, this will result in a large red "Connection Problem" text on screen. That is telling you your nodes are wrong. Go to the "preferences" document and go down to "render_nodes" and then change the equals 0 to equals 1 and you will be able to see the nodes and ai_markers in-game.
This fantasy map I made had a travel_node that didn't connect to anything and also crossed land. The nodes need to be interconnected -22 max- like the default game has. To fix this I had to adjust nodes up down left and right bit by bit by making a new image every time until it worked. Took longer than normal to launch the map and sometimes it didn't launch at all and I had to use the Task Manager via Ctrl+Alt+Delete to close Defcon for "not responding." The game does work in this state but is laggy or will eventually crash.
See the blog post How To Mod Defcon for more info on modding.