Quick description: "Normal" AI Riftborn has massive production in its home system in turn 125 on Normal speed, for example 18k Industry. I suspect this may be due to AI Riftborn's compression singularities on their home system persisting and stacking, eventually (certainly by turn 100) resulting in Singularity boost effects exceeding any possible base amount. I believe this also happens on systems other than their home systems. I don't know if their other singularities exhibit this behavior.

Expected behavior: I expect an AI on "Normal" difficulty not to produce 18k of Industry in their home system in turn 125 on Normal speed. I expect a singularity's effect to only last for a fixed number of turns (I think the default was 5 turns), and not to persist and stack with the effects of following singularities.

Version notes:

• My game is currently on version "v1.5.31 S5 GOLD-Public".
• I started this particular game on July 12, so probably after patch 1.5.28 was applied, since I let Steam auto-update my games.
• I bought the Vaulters and Supremacy DLCs, but the Supremacy DLC has been disabled.

Attachments:

Saved games for turns 80, 100, 125: ES2 saved games.zip

Wall of text and screenshots:

The Riftborn AI in my game produced 18k Industry, 8.4k Food, 11k Dust, 9.6k Science, 4.1k Influence in its 25 pop home system alone, in turn 125 on Normal speed. This observation, and all that follow, were from launching the game using the "--enablemoddingtools" launch option, so I hope that doesn't affect my observations.

As background, this was in a 'Normal" difficulty game, and unless otherwise stated I was looking at the Riftborn AI's status in turn 125. When setting up the game, the speed was set to Normal.

In the Riftborn home system (Auva) screen, I only looked at the Industry tooltip, but according to the tooltip they were getting 16771 Industry from Singularity, and 1525.6 Industry from everything else. The singularity was a compression singularity. The home system had 25 pops. I assume this level of production boost from a Singularity is due to a bug, perhaps related to persistence and/or stacking. I also noticed another thread which might be related.

Here's a couple of screenshots showing overall home system production, the components of the 18k Industry production, and the type of singularity:

I've also run into this with a dilation singularity.  In my case, it seems tied to saving and loading—every time I save and load the game, the stack increases.  Observe: In the following sequence, I simply saved the game, loaded it, saved again, loaded the new save, etc. with NO other actions taken at all.  Each iteration, the singularity gets worse and worse.

I'm also running "v1.5.31 S5 GOLD-Public".

Here are my saves:  SingularityStacking.zip

Unfortunately, this is not the only system affected by this bug, and it is making this game unplayable.  :(

This forum channel gives me a very different impression of Amplitude's support for their games than I previously had.  I always got the impression that they support their games very well; they have OpenDev, they seem to take player feedback, they release lots of DLC and patches for years, etc.  But this gamebreaking bug wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, nor has a dev stepped in here to even respond since it was reported. Not even a "hey guys, our QA is having trouble reproducing this, can you try to get us this information" kind of response. It's like they just decided that gamebreaking bugs reported after a certain date "don't count". What's worse is that there is a pretty obvious potential culprit. Patch 1.5.30 introduced this change: "Fold Singularity now properly applies its 'top queue' efect after reloading a save", so there is an immediate place to look in the code to see what is happening.

It kind of doesn't work to release lots of DLC or other gameplay updates if these updates make the game less playable.  I hope they do things differently with Humankind.

Maybe I misunderstand this bug and it's very rare, but even so it seems too risky to allow Riftborn to be in the game anymore. :( Hopefully I am just being overly pessimistic and the situation isn't t his bad.

Oh, my sweet summer child...

Lol, I know they don't fix every bug (there are many), but how common is it to ignore a gamebreaker as bad as this one? Maybe I should just stay out of the bugfix channel...

I always say good things about Amplitude to people, I don't like seeing this side, lol. I don't know what their relationship with SEGA is like, but maybe they are restricted where they can spend money.

Looking into game files, we can see that issue is not on the effect itself but on it's removal (either manually or after it's turn duration)

Here are the singularities definitions

<TimeBubbleDefinition Name="TimeBubbleAcceleratingTime" Duration="10" >
<SimulationDescriptorReference Name="TimeBubbleAcceleratingTime" />
</TimeBubbleDefinition>

<TimeBubbleDefinition Name="TimeBubbleSlowingTime" Duration="10" >
<SimulationDescriptorReference Name="TimeBubbleSlowingTime" />
</TimeBubbleDefinition>

<FreezeTimeBubbleDefinition Name="TimeBubbleFreezeTime" Duration="10" >
<SimulationDescriptorReference Name="TimeBubbleFreezeTime" />
</FreezeTimeBubbleDefinition>

<FastForwardTimeBubbleDefinition Name="TimeBubbleFastForwardTime" Duration="10" >
<SimulationDescriptorReference Name="TimeBubbleFastForwardTime" />
</FastForwardTimeBubbleDefinition>

<RollbackTimeBubbleDefinition Name="TimeBubbleBackInTime" Duration="10" >
<SimulationDescriptorReference Name="TimeBubbleBackInTime" />
</RollbackTimeBubbleDefinition>

If we take the accelerating one we can see it's simulator descriptor adds a 0.25 percentage to a specific Riftborn modifier

<!-- EFFECTS (applied on targets-star system node, colonized star systems, fleets) -->
<SimulationDescriptor Name="TimeBubbleAcceleratingTime" Type="TimeBubble">

<!-- Star System effects -->
<Modifier TargetProperty="SystemFIDSIPercentFromTimeBubble" Operation="Addition" Value="0.25" Path="ClassStarSystem"/>

This modifier is then applied to the basic system production amount

<Modifier       TargetProperty="SystemProduction"       Operation="Percent"             Value="$(SystemFIDSIPercentFromTimeBubble)"         Path="ClassStarSystem"/>

However, removing singularities not always resets SystemFIDSIPercentFromTimeBubble hence SystemProduction 

I did a test on my own Riftborn AI : Talitha system has 4 accelerating and 1 slowing (+25% and -25% respectively) and only one of those 4 has an impact at removal. 

Seems to be because only on of those 5 singularities has "existence" from game engine perspective

It's confirmed on this view : although there are 6 system with at least one AcceleratingTimeBubble, only 4 of them are present in game environment. When those ones are removed, modifiers and system productions are correctly recalculated but not for the "invisible" ones

I looked more deeply into available files for modding but without finding the cause of this bug. I guess it's in the internal (non-accessible) games files.

We'll have to hope a developer is still around (i guess they are all on "Humankind") to solve this.

The alternative solution would be to avoid Riftborn AIs in games until then

Game Ver. 1.5.34. S5

This bug is still here. 

On turn 110 Riftborn 25-pop system has converted two UI systems with 22-pop and 20-pop, all three were settled on the same time. 

Also they put dilation singularity on other Horatio system with 1000+ food, making it starving to death. 

On the other hand, I watched TV-series - and according to lore there are no contradictions here: Time Lords must be omnipotent and invulnerable. It`s wasn`t just implemented yet... Until now!

Now they have done it to me... Farewell, folks!