1 or two things are going on, the race does not have range to make it back, or move the ships. Or the one planet they have is FULL. Or it might be a combination of both.

I had the same thing happen. From the location on the star map I donated the ships from I can only assume that they were WELL out of range.

Maybe it's a general problem when donating ships.

I tried donating ships to one of my neighbour empires. They were perfectly within range of their nearest base and yet they didn't move exept to form a fleet.

Pokerface, I read somewhere that that doesn't happen in GC2. The receiving empire gets full use of the ship no matter what you have on it.

Ive had same thig happen donated ships sit there doing nothing.
Definately not right im sure the minor race was within range too.
When ai has given me ships i can always move them back to my part of the galaxy no matter how far away.

I too have had ships in and out of range of the receiving civilization not utilize ships I gave them. I've given to major, and minor civs, and play with the AI on normal, and the ships just sit there half the time.


I don't know if it's a bug in the AI, but I had a minor race, that wasn't even under attack from a major power, (but might have been at war.. I destroyed the attacking fleet since the minor race was right next to one of my planets), About every 10 or so turns, the damn squirrel would come back begging for more tech and ships, claiming they were on the verge of elimination, with nary an enemy ship in sight. I got annoyed, and took them down myself. Hey, a class 15 planet is a class 15 planet. (Besides, I didn't want the attacking civ to capture any of the techs I gave to the squirrels when they finally went under.)

I have had the same problem. I gifted the ship right next to their planet, and they still did nothing with it. (What sucked was that I could have used it the next turn, but oh well...)

Weird thing happened yesterday. It was me vs Drengin, and there was a minor race sitting around (I think it was the Carinoids.) caught up in the crossfire. Well, I had a significant tech lead over the Drengin, but my economy wasn't doing very well (It was negative, in fact.), so I built a hugely powerful ship, one which could handle itself against pretty much anything they had, and traded it to the minor race. Now, they did make use of it, but at first they just had it going along a couple of tiles on my border. It was almost like they had a destination, but couldn't figure out the pathing and got stuck in a loop. I suspect, though, that they were patrolling, because a few turns later they stuck the thing in a fleet and proceeded to kick the crap out of half the Drengin navy.

I've had the thing where they don't move the ships happen a few times, too, which I would figure is to do with range. Hopefully that'll get fixed so they can head back into usable range.

Ditto - saw this in my last game as well. Had donated with hopes that the minor would have a chance against a major they were at war with that I wanted to destroy but was gearing up for war against, and wasn't quite ready to attack myself. This definitely seems to be some type of bug.

On that note, I also see the majors often having large stacks of ships (I saw one stack that was probably 20+ ships, some in fleets, some not) that just sit there even when they are at war. Perhaps they are 'defending' or 'projecting power' to the AI they are at war with, but it seems like this might be a related bug of ship underutilization by the AI.

Both of these were on the 'Tough' setting, so AI should be fully enabled.

The game says it all... the crew goes into cyrogenic storage