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[Valguris]

This behaviour is quite common when I'm using combat drones. Upon being released they have a "stay" order and are just zooming around, until I give them some other order. I attach a save where a drone behaves like this. I'll see if I can find out what are the circumstances that cause this.

[Kyzrati]

Ah, this again

Yeah I have notes here about the last save you gave me, which I examined but couldn't find any odd behavior associated with the drone.

I definitely see your drone in this save, STAY even though it's wandering. Wonder how it got that way. Trying to launch these and other combat drones in different ways, I still can't repeat it. They clearly have a STAY order, which is what the UI interprets and displays for you, but the internal AI behavior is somehow set to Wander. No matter now many of these things I dispatch, recall, or order around, this never happens... There must be something else involved in what you're doing, or very specific in the environment (?), to cause this, since I've never seen it nor has it been reported by other players :/

If you tell them to STAY again (even though it already gives that as their status), they'll obey it and actually stay, but I'm not sure how it was possible to start the wander routine. Guess this'll just have to stay there until a way to reliably induce it is found! (or some sort of clue...) Hard to track this one down.

Note: Also while trying to take a look at your save I discovered I couldn't load it, which led to a bunch of searching around and I found a P2 data serialization error in 9.5 that surprisingly doesn't seem to be crashing things in the public release but is nonetheless unsafe datawise, so I'm going to have to release a 9.6 to address this. Might as well do a bunch of the proposed P2 updates in the meantime

[Valguris]

An Enh. Grunt from Cetus Manufactory spawned with a STAY order. And he keeps following me, despite having "STAY" order. So it appears it is not specific to Combat Drones. Either that, or those are two separate bugs.

[Kyzrati]

Yeah it's unlikely a separate thing, good to know another case. Very weird though, because I've built them many times and never noticed that happening, including just now to test and confirm--everything's normal! Why's this only happening to you? What's different?

[Valguris]

I seem to be able to reproduce it (with the drones).

In this save I:
1. Release both drones.
2. Tell my drones to return.
3. Turn on the drone bay.
4. Move until both drones are released again (if the drone bay got turned off before releasing both drones, I turn it on again).

It happens about once in 5 iterations of those steps. But the steps are quick to do, so repeating it until the bug occurs takes only a minute or less.

EDIT: Umm... Nevermind. I got "lucky" getting this bug a few times in a row. But at least this excludes some possibilities like drones aggroing on enemies/trying to perform their last order and so on. I will keep investigating.

EDIT 2: Yeah, the steps to reproduce seem to work from time to time. I couldn't figure out what causes them to SOMETIMES cause the bug, but other times not.

EDIT 3: Moving is not necessary. I just wait and repeat the release-return cycle.

[Valguris]

OK, so I sat at Zh for a while, releasing a drone and ordering it to return. It didn't matter whether I turned on the drone bay before it returned or not. I was not moving and nothing (not even the other drone) was obstructing the path of the returning drone. No enemies were involved anywhere, nor any weird commands. The bug still occured once in a while.

[Kyzrati]

Excellent, thanks Valguris, I've added this to my notes on the topic and will retest when I'm doing Beta 10 debugging work.

[Kyzrati]

Wow, just fixed this for Beta 10 and the root cause was pretty crazy

This bug only started appearing once turrets were added to the game, because the robot AI needed to start having knowledge of whether it was immobile, checking that immediately as soon as it's created, and if so then it automatically gets a STAY "order" as its ally behavior.

But it turns out that doing such a check so early was causing specifically drones with potentially faulty prototype propulsion to consider themselves immobile at creation/launch time because the check is done so early the game hadn't yet set their propulsion to not faulty (since that's impossible for new drones).

So this could only happen with prototype drones when every single one of their propulsion parts were randomly designated faulty, hence the seeming randomness...

[Valguris]

Related bugs:
- This same thing happened to an Enh. Grunt coming out of the Cetus Manufactory. I assume the cause is the same, i.e. his prototype propulsion was deemed faulty.
- Kerapace reported on Discord same thing happening with an assimilated Behemoth, though I understand the cause must've been different. Here's a quote:

Kerapace 24.05.2020
so is allied Behemoth AI supposed to run around like a hyperactive kid who's just been told he's getting a new LEGO set for Christmas?
like, he's not even trying to follow me, he's just running around the 2x2 hallways willy-nilly
weirdly enough, this turned out to be because his AI was set to 'STAY' instead of 'FOLLOW'

[Kyzrati]

Enh. Grunt would be the same cause.

Behemoth I can't be sure, but it's very likely the same source, setting AI order on creation (AI is recreated when assimilated), albeit for a different reason. For example if a Behemoth is in siege mode when converted, that would count as being immobile as far as the AI is concerned. Not sure if I'll be changing that yet since it would complicate things and not be too important...

[Kyzrati]

Okay fine, can't really leave something like this knowing full well what's causing it and that it could be fixed xD

So assimilating siege mode Behemoths will set their ally behavior properly now, too.