Temporal Anomalies (a glitch perhaps?)

Multiple Simultaneous Timelines in Multiplayer LAN

I don't even know where to begin with descibing this glitch. Take the most bizarre Sci-Fi movie/episode dealing with time paradoxes, and that's what a recent game turned into for my wife and I.

A four player map with 4 stars. My wife as Vasari, myself as TEC, and two Unfair-AI set as Advent (Advent-1 and Advent-2 for the sake of clarity). Most of the game went without issue. We both turtled, and the Advent factions decided to duke it out with each other (reforms don't come easy you know).

It was when we launched our co-op invasion of Advent-1's star system that things got wierd. I took planets on one side of the the system, she headed towards the other side. After we had both "colonized" 2 or 3 planets each we realized something was amiss. One planet was owned by both of us. On her computer she had a lovely volcanic planet with lots of refineries; on my computer I had a lovely volcanic planet pricking with defence structures. Same planet

Having too much fun at this point we decide to keep playing, hey we did both get a planet out of it. Then we noticed other phenomenon, such as I watched her fleet attack, colonize, and move away from a planet before she even decided issued the movement orders towards it. The ultimate outcome was the same she did take the planet, but my computer seemed to predict the future by over five minutes (maybe I should go invest in some stocks online).

During all this Advent-1 surrendered, and I got bored. Leaving the rest of Advent-1's planets to my wife, I move on to Advent-2. At Advent-2's star I had previously placed 4 starbases. In my timeline my ships arrive, and duke it out with Advent-2's fleet along side the starbases. I win the fight with my fleet and starbases all intact (didn't even lose a single frigate). In my wife's timeline, my fleets arrive at the same time, but 2 of my 4 starbases get destroyed, and my fleet suffers over 60% losses at the same battle (including all but 4 of my Caps).

There were many other discrepencies between our computers during the game, but there were also many things occuring the same. Our fleet-sizes didn't match up, but fleet movements did. Bounty didn't add up correctly, but pirates always went after the same target. The best way I can describe it is we were playing two different timelines of the same game, with the same basic outcomes.

So... Has anyone else had this happen in online play? I understand that a time-delay between computers is normal, but we had more than just that occuring. (there were no connection or lagging issues reported by either computer)

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I think you saw some strange deformed version of a desync. If you did this online then that's definitely what happened. Essentially, at some point, you might've had a brief "jump" or "freeze" of the screen, perhaps for less than a second, that essentially took the same game that you were both playing and separated them into two. You saw one version. Your wife saw the other.

Your wife saw your starbases die because I don't think her game was picking up on your orders. It sounds like she kept the real version of the game with the AI intact, and you got the version with the desync. You say you beat the comp without losing a frigate. I think that's because the AI was gone (could be wrong here).

Desync's happen all the time online. Random "hop" during the game, and all of a sudden, 7 people are playing a game that's still happening, you're playing a game where 7 people's ships all of a sudden aren't moving.

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While playing the game across a LAN connection, my brother and I also came across this glitch. As the game went on, things became more and more different in each 'alternate reality' the computers were creating. We called it the Fringe Glitch, but it's the same thing you're describing here.

To be frank, we can't keep a game from doing it any more. It's always a factor, it's just a matter of how long it takes the butterfly effect to make a noticeable change between the games, at which point we usually quit because it's really annoying. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to keep it from doing this? It makes multiplayer games significantly less enjoyable.

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