ships with 28k+ crew crash game on boarding

Author: ZavindurCreated Mar 24, 2021Updated Sep 15, 2026
Labelsbugmechanics

Describe the bug when ships have high crew counts (5k+ each ship) the game starts to lag when first boarding a ship and when exiting the boarding screen; when both ships have a total crew count of over 40k, the game will hard crash after freezing for a couple minutes (it may have run out of ram as ES was using over 10gb of ram).

To Reproduce modify ships to have a higher required crew count, then try to capture said ships with a ship that also has a very high crew count

Expected behavior there should be no lag or crashing with high crew counts on a ship.

System (please complete the following information):

  • OS: win 10
  • Game Source: nightly

Additional context This came up as I'm testing how the game plays with higher crew counts (big ships have much higher long term costs than smaller ships and also are more difficult to capture).

In the discord server, Terin says that the game calculates every possible scenario when boarding so it can give accurate probabilities of capture.

I am aware that having crew counts above 2k is far beyond the current game balance so I don't expect anything to be done to fix this.

From reviewing the code it seems the game caches the all the possible outcomes of the encounter, and then just does a lookup to determine the odds and current attack/defense power available.

I originally thought the odds could just return n/a if there are too many crew; but the issue is the attack/defense power is also cached.