Tow bug? Cloaked Transfer bug?

Game 23 - turn 25 - 26.

I'm playing the Privs and for a few turns I have been attempting to lay a trap for the Feds, Each time it has failed. To start with I think it was me making errors, but the last turn I cant see anything wrong and I think it was bugged. There are a number of potential issues, listed below in order on confusion!

At planet 377 I had a cloaked MBR. Also at the planet were a number of allied ships (MCM) and 3 enemy ships (Feds).

Issue 1.  My MBR (ID 95) was set to TOW the Diplomacy Cruiser (ID 96). It towed at warp 9, had plenty of fuel etc.. In the same turn the Diplomacy tried to tow a MCM ships away from the planet. The MBR TOW did not take and I can see no reason why the MBR tow could be broken in this situation.

Issue 2. Same location as above. Planet 377. The cloaked MBR set the same FC as the empty (allied) MCM ships. The MBR transfered 1 fuel on to each MCM ship. The fuel transfer did not work. We had expected the MCM ships (patriot 155 and patriot 164) to have fuel and therefore to fight having been towed away. They did not get any fuel. Is this a bug or am I missing something with a cloaked ship being unable to transfer cargo to an allied ship?

Issue 3. in previous turns at the same location Planet ID 377 I had attempted to have clans transfered from the allied MCM ships to my cloaked MBR. Is it possible to transfer to a cloaked ship. i thought it was but found it never worked over 2 different turns. Please check if this is working correctly.

Thanks. 

Pobs.

P.S. Happy to try this again on the incoming NOVA class if the fed does not see this message ;-)

Can you look at these situations. What was going to be a bit of fun to bloody the nose of the rampaging Feds turned into a major disappointment :-(

Sorry your attack did not work out. I took a look into the turn to make sure that there was no bug. It looks to me like everything functioned correctly.  Here's an explanation for some of your questions.

Issue 1) This one is tough for me to know for sure, but if your MBR was set to tow a diplomacy with a higher ID the only thing that could prevent you from succeeding is if the ship was towed away by another lower id number ship before you got it.  This doesn't give a tow lock broken message, but I'm going to add one.  

Issue 2) It is only possible to transfer to one allied or enemy ship from one ship on one turn. So your MBR can only transfer to one of the Patriots. So whichever one you setup second should have worked.  You should see a little warning on the transfer screen if you try to change your transfer to another ship. 

Issue 3) Your ally can NOT transfer to you if you are cloaked or cloaking this turn.  

Sorry, those are a lot of little tricky detail rules that are not necessarily clear. We're trying to put some more messages in so that its clear why some things fail. The original game didn't have them, so we didn't introduce them yet, but I think it will just make things a lot more clear.

BTW, this post is from Joshua.  I was signed in under the wrong account.

Issue 1.

The tow issue still cant be explained. If you look where the diplomacy is right now it can't have been towed by another ship. In the previous turn everyone was sat on the planet. The 3 feds ships each towed away one MCM ship. That means the Diplomacy was definitely towing a patriot or the gemini, it could not possibly have been towed itself.

The ID of the MBR was lower  (ID 95) than the ID of the Diplomacy (ID 96).

I still think this is bugged somehow. I definitely set to tow, as when I reached my destination my mission was set to "try to tow" [no target defined].

Any ideas? Makes life impossible for the Privs if this is not 100% secure.

Issue 2.

Thanks for the other explanations. I was definitely trying to do multiple transfers, and that also explains why previous attempts had failed :-(

There are no error messages when you attempt to do this, you can setup as many transfers as you want, and if you do I think that none of them occur. I had multiple setup on the same turn, none happened, so setting up multiple must confuse it and none happen.

Issue 3. Suspected this after the first failure, but could not confirm it on Donovans from my search, thanks for clarifying. 

Just to clarify. Tranfer will fail if the target is cloaked the turn before the transfer OR if it is cloaking in the turn when the transfer will happen. Right?

Cloak is before ship to ship transfer right? Why not in both cases? 

Example: 

Turn 5: Ships A and B from allied races are in same location. Ship A is ordered to transfer to B.

A and B can always 'see' each other no matter who is cloaked in turn 5. To my understanding you are saying the transfer should fail if the receiving ship B is cloaked in turn 6. Right? 

What's the 'reason' for it not to work? I can see that this scenario should fail if and only if ship B is not allied. So it cloaks and cannot be 'seen' anymore and the transfer fails. But an allied ship is always 'visible'...

What about ship A being cloaked?