Military Unit Deactivation and Reactivation of Weapons

Gamemasters,

Please take a second look at the auto-deactivation of weapons due to ammunition shortages in military units. In real life military units are not deactivated due to a lack of ammunition. The unit simply waits to be resupplied. The same should be true here.

And if it is not bad enough that you deactivate the unit then we are faced with the long drawn-out process of having to log in and out of our account over and over just to reactivate a small portion of our weapons at a time.

There is no reason to deactivate our units in the first place and it makes even less sense that we cannot reactivate as many weapons as we want at one time. There is no restriction needed on weapon reactivation. There is no such restriction on deactivation.

No player intentionally lets his units run short of ammo. It usually happens because we do not sign in a few days because we have real lives, families, jobs or school.

Please end the auto-deactivation of units or at least allow us to reactivate as many weapons as we want at one time or better yet do both.

Thank you for considering this request.
Jack and Khomey Peng

This topic is on our to-do list. I'll update you guys as soon as we've decided on a course of action.

Automatic deactivation also occurs when it is unwanted in other situations. An example in particular is if you take a country, wish to keep it, but also have a need to defend it. You send units to do so but the game decides to disband the units and deactivate the weapons because of the country's economics, regardless of the cash you sent it to finance rebuilding it.

I still experience this as well as a situation where I am told I lacked workers for soldiers a month removed where the country decided to auto-build a corporation (despite this automation setting being turned to off).

Yep @aries comment

Deactivation due to ammo shortage is relatively new but not going anywhere. Weapons consume ammo on a monthly basis, even during peacetime. This is not something we want players to be able to avoid by simply not buying ammo.
A lot of players were purposefully not buying ammo and letting their stocks run negative. This caused a lot of problems so we solved it in this way. If you can't login for a few days this is not going to cause your units to deactivate due to ammo shortages IF you set up automatic ammo purchases.
In the past weapons did not use ammo in peacetime. This caused serious fluctuations in the numbers of ammo factories on each world. Players did not ever build ammo corps due to this and C3 countries were full of them.

As for deactivation due to lack of available workers.. In any normal situation the army gets priority over everything else when "hiring" people so deactivation due to lack of people should not happen unless your army requires more people than the country has to offer.

Reactivation is still up for a possible change but we haven't made a decision on this yet.

Jonni, the worker situation is related to the auto-build corporations function happening when it is unwanted (and turned off). This is an issue that has been brought up before, most recently here:

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/16295/24148.html?1425645013

Any updates on this?

Also, deactivations seem to occur due to the economic situation in the country.. The issue players have with this is that it occurs regardless of a cash infusion from the player's account that guarantees the country can meet its expenses. Can this be looked at too?

thanks!

Again, agreed with Aries. I understand ammo use though I'd rather the units just run out of ammo and then the country start placing orders to fill them before deactivating.

The auto build corporation feature plus economic difficulty despite having cash is one I have run into often since I started playing again. Doesn't make sense and should be examined.

Army always has higher priority than any other employment option. The automatic creation of corps can not cause units to be dismantled.

As for the unwanted automation.
If you have disabled automatic corp building and newbie protection, there is only 1 situation where corps will be automatically built. This is when the country is deemed very near to bankruptcy.
If this is happening, dismantled units are the least of your worries.
In any case, I'll ask an engineer to look into if there is any errors in this bankruptcy failsafe mechanic to make sure it never happens when it isn't necessary.

@Casual Industries - What you're suggesting would mean that units run out of ammo, and when they do, the country starts ordering ammo. This is similar to what automatic ammo purchasing is at the moment, except it would leave a gap where your units do not have or consume ammo.
This would cause practical problems. It is fine the way it is.

I will be more specific. The countries that I have that have auto-built corporations all had over 5 trillion in the bank. An example is this message on Fearless Blue:

From: GameMaster
To: Camp Echo
Real Date: 07-04-2015 01:48:37
World Date: November 03 3591
Subject: Government Salary Reduction
Message: Camp Alpha has high debt and is making losses. The salaries of all government workers have been reduced.
E-mail

At the time of this message, Camp Alpha had about $10.9 Trillion in cash (It currently has 10,943.13B), up from $9.6 Trillion the previous month. It had no debt and is losing less than $3 Billion/month according to profit/loss. Conservatively, if I make no changes, this country has cash reserves to fund its spending for the next 3300 game months or about until Halloween of 2016.

This country has experienced unwanted disbanding of units, deactivation of weapons, and auto-building of corporations despite being in no greater economic peril than it is right now. The most recent corporation built without my approval happened the same game month as this message, November 3591.

Lastly, perhaps this thread is on the wrong forum. It is easy to say the way things work is that the army should have priority. However, I have indeed experienced where a corporation is built one month and the country receives the message that weapons were deactivated due to the lack of available workers, despite the new corp being very close at at full employment. Perhaps this thread should be moved to the "problems" forum since this is not how it is supposed to work?

Aries, could it be that this auto-building is linked to a low emplyment rate or a negative amount in a product in the countries storage?
Afaik there had been issues before which made the game think you are 'in debt/bancrupt' when there is a negative amount in storage. So this may be a derived problem?!

I honestly don't know. Any just conquered country has negative construction. "Low" employment is tough to gauge. What is low?

I just know ,if the auto setting is turned off and my country is in no trouble of being bankrupt, it shouldn't happen.

@Aries, you are correct. As far as I can see, it shouldn't be happening in this instance. I'll ask an engineer to look into what caused this.
Thanks for the specifics. I'll post again when I have an update.

I just got the same message in the "The Commonwealth of Indira bella" on WG. It is losing about $600 million/month but has $22.84 Trillion in the bank.

This business of deactivating military units needs to end. I signed in this morning. Had all my naval fleets in all of my countries. Checked the trade dropdown and found nothing unusual - no ammo purchases that had not been made. Nothing in the newspaper. Plenty of available workers. I have auto purchases set up for ammo. All is good. Come back this afternoon and find 2 naval fleets deactivated. And if that isn't bad enough because of the low limit on reactivating weapons it will take 20 game months if I could be online for every game month to get them all reactivated. Then there is all the time and ammo quality upgrades I lost upgrading all that ammunition. In my first message in this thread I said just how asinine this deactivation is.

You need to either stop the deactivation or allow us to reactivate 100 percent of our weapons anytime we want to - preferably do both. There is no reason to not allow us to reactivate as many weapons we own anytime we want to do so. We do own them after all. And if we want to have military units without ammo or fuel or anything else that should be our decision. It doesn't matter whether it is a good decision or not. I don't recommend it but after all WE are paying you to play this game. And whether we play it good or bad is up to us and NOT YOU. It is obvious that YOU could care less about what we think as customers. YOU are going to do what you want. Just remember every day we premium members are making a decision about whether we continue paying YOU.

I had two units deactivated after a C3 war. The owning country had plenty of cash, but now I have to waste it so I can reform the units now. (the weapons are in reserve and therefore usesless unless I spend 2 days activating weapons.) I completely understand deactivation, but why doesnt the country immediate order ammo before doing so? especially if there is plenty of cash? This is a waste of player time and just gets on our nerves.

Late to the party, but since I once ran into the problem of forced deactivation when I went dark for a week or two (still working on reactivating weapons), here's my two cents:

Could we at least have a "Mobilization" command feature that automatically reactivates weapons for us--even if it's based on the 10% restriction? This would solve the problem of logging in constantly to fix the weapon situation without any downside that I can see. Other than the trouble in how it's coded, obviously. It would be nice and realistic to be able to "go on the war path" from a more peaceful state by government command.

Speaking of which, if we're keeping the proportions that should really be a fixed percentage of the total weapons rather than remaining deactivated weapons. How does it make sense that a military can activate 100 weapons the first month but only about ten right before getting to 100% active?