[11.31] Cannot replace ships sail-steam

[Sarlock]

Found an interesting issue.  I set a bunch of my passenger ships to be replaced with steam ships and they are now all sailing around with "no load" and "replace" active but they are just continuing their circuit and not unloading at each stop... thus they are never becoming empty and slated for replacement.

Take a look at convoy 2087 as a prime example, though if you look around any of my main cities on the east island you'll see tons of examples.  I'll have to do this manually, which is an exhaustive process with all of the checklist desynchs occuring.

[jamespetts]

Hmm - odd. I cannot reproduce this on a simplified local setup. Could this be an issue of your ships not being in range of a depot?

[Sarlock]

It's not a depot issue... the problem is that they aren't offloading their passengers and mail and emptying themselves to even get a chance to go to the depot.  I just watched one sail right in to the station it had pax and mail for and it stopped there, then carried on with the pax and mail for that station still on board.  So it is never emptying itself and thus never scheduled to go to depot to replace.  So the ships are just sailing round and round with the same pax and mail on board.

[jamespetts]

That is extremely odd. Does this happen with every attempted ship replacement, or only these?

[Sarlock]

I've only noticed it with this batch.  Other replacements seemed to go smoothly.  And some of this batch did convert (though it may have been because they were empty at the time of executing the replacement) but the majority if it is just stuck in this loop.  I'm having to go through each one individually and manually replace them.  Replacement aside - it's the "no load" but not unloading behavior that has me puzzled.

[jamespetts]

May I ask - are there any ships with this problem still around in the online game so that I can download it and reproduce the problem, or have you fixed them all manually now?

[Sarlock]

Still lots, I've only replaced about half of them.  I've also kept the originally referenced ship, 2087, so that you can take a look at it.

[jamespetts]

I think that the problem here appears to be that your ships need larger docks, and so cannot unload. All of the hulls are treated as vehicles in their own right, and the schooner's holds are given a length of 3 to space out the little icons, so you actually need two tile length docks in order to load/unload a schooner with a full set of holds.

[Sarlock]

Aha!  Thank you for finding this, I hadn't realized that this was the issue -- I had just recently upgraded from brigs to schooners and hadn't noticed that they weren't unloading fully before I initiated a second upgrade.  All good now