Experimenter home system stole my fleet :-)

[cseraphi]

Just finished a long game in 0.45; I beat the Experimenters on turn 440, but intended to continue playing a bit because some of the other empires were strong enough to be challenging. When I conquered the Experimenter system with ground troops, 2 of the 3 neighboring connections became permanently stable but the third one did not. Unfortunately, the missing starlane was the critical one that connected the Experimenter system (and it's neighboring empty sectors) to the galaxy at large, rendering my large conquering fleet stranded on an unreachable 'island' of a few systems.

I played another 10 turns or so but the starlanes did not move (as expected, since the Experimenters were dead), so this appears to be a permanent problem. I know the game is technically over at this point, but this looks like a bug-- my understanding was that all the warp lines should become accessible in this situation.

[MatGB]

They don't, no, if a lane is removed the game doesn't 'remember' it was there, it's simply not there, so they can't be returned.

It has however been changed since 0.4.5 was released and now you'll get 5 lanes built, if possible, starting at the closest next system and moving out from there.

It is a vast improvement on when we first started trying to make them work properly, you used to just lose the fleet entirely unless you had a monster in your fleet (that had survived the fight) but due to the way they're positioned semi randomly in outlying areas it's always a risk that there aren't many systems close enough to them.

The other option in current test is to build a Starlane Bore, which was where the code came from to give them a better chance of relinking properly, but that won't be an option for you due to savegame incompatibility.

Scrap the entire fleet, the upkeep reduction'll give your currently half built ships a fairly nice boost

[defaultuser]

Should be able to build a stargate as well. As I have usually researched that tech by then, it would only hold the fleets up for 10 turns while one or two stargates were built.

[toolforger]

Building a stargate in the Experimentor system can take time. If the fleet is large enough to be worth it, scrapping it will reduce your upkeep enough to be also worth it - remember, every ship you have increases construction cost for new ships by 1%, scrapping a ship will recoup that. If your empire fleet is 500 ships and you scrap them all, your construction costs will go down from 500% to 100%, so your income will suddenly allow you to construct fivefold the number of ships.