Stellaris - Fleets won't attack (2024)

I had something similar happen. Only 1 fleet had the issue, and separating a single ship from the fleet led to that single ship fighting, but the rest of the fleet just sat there. I moved another fleet in and it worked properly, while the first one still just sat there, not attacking or being attacked. Also the stance didn't change anything. Don't have the save anymore though.

@iamjmph I'm pretty sure that you have the more widespread version of this bug; the word is that it's caused by emergency FTL causing a fleet to get stuck so they can't engage again. A saving a loading process will fix it, so if you do a save and load after every battle you shouldn't experience this again. Unfortunately @zulu9812 seems to have a different bug, because saving and loading doesn't fix it for them and it affects more than one fleet.

Upon further playtesting, this seems to be triggered by a battle with Fallen Empire ships. I've had four games now that developed this bug during a war with an FE. In my most recent game, it happened mid-battle. Two FE fleets engaged my starbase, the bug happened as soon as the first fleet was destroyed. I wonder if this is related to those FE fleets attempting to emergency FTL out of there?

If you have a save where this is reproducibly about to happen, that'd probably be very useful to solving this bug on the next development cycle.

I seem to have a variation on this myself. I had a squad of troop transports emergency warp out (AI), then they jumped into a nearby system I was attacking. The transports are in one area of the solar system in the "attack" animation, and my battleship fleet (about 12k power) are in another area of the star system but apparently engaged in fighting.. If I bring in another smaller fleet (about 4k power) to fight, the beeline to the other side of the star system near where my ships are.. all fleets are in "attack" animation with ships circling, but since they are both out of range of each other, it is impossible to actually kill the transports and end the battle. I tried reloading the game and save, but the same issue persists.. The system with the issue is the Esmyke system. It on the top half and roughly the middle. This is a vanilla base game.

@netmc Since you're just fighting transports and your victory is certain, I have no problem helping you cheat out of this. Select the transport fleet so their tab is open and then hit the ~ key to open the command console. Type 'damage 10000' which should be more than enough to kill everybody in the transport fleet. Hopefully that'll free your ships.

I'm on Ironman, so cheats are disabled. I ended up having to retreat from battle. Luckily, I didn't lose any ships, but the fleet was out of commission for a year. Since this issue is present in the save file even after a reload, maybe the devs can look at it and see what caused the game to behave so. Thanks for the console info though.

This is happening to me in the latest version. I had 4 fleets of 80k+ vs 1 fleet of 39k. I had already destroyed several other fleets of this fallen empire. I figured it would be a quick and easy battle, so I started working on some of my planets... next thing I know, I lost ALL FOUR OF MY FLEETS? Makes me not want to play the game any more, to be honest. I've played 3 straight games with this same race/empire and I haven't had this problem. Suddenly, I'm losing a battle where my power is 8:1 and I lose... then I look at the battle info and I hit exactly 0% of the time. The fleet of 39k was not all Corvettes, it had some battlecruisers, and I have fought several of his fleets already... so there's no reason that I should NEVER hit. This is ridiculous that it's been going on for years and Paradox hasn't done anything about it.

It os not that paradox has not done anything anout it. They tried to find the cause and reliably reproduce it in order to become able to fix it. They just failed but this does not mean that they wont further try.

I built another 100k fleet to take out that 40k fleet and the same thing happened. In frustration, I shut down the game. When I later resumed the game, suddenly my fleet was able to hit the other fleet and I ended the war. Of course, Paradox can't find the bug if they are depending on players to send them a file where it is happening... they need to actually play their own game a few times...