hallusk wrote:They just mill around by the ship. I've actually figured it out. If you have the max number of Darwinians the spawns won't create more, and as they are the only ones that seem to get on the ship it's impossible to complete unless you start blowing your Darwinians up ! Which I did.
...what's probably happening (for anyone who is curious) is that your excess of DGs is saturating the AI.
Before I explain that, if you decide to replay the level again and end up in the same situation, try exiting and re-entering the level... Can you do that with the Demo2 game? I can't remember. But re-entering the level will reconstitute all the DGs but wipe their memories of what they were trying to do before you saved.
Just out of curiosity, how did you end up with an overpop at the end? Did you capture the rocket island *before* you went out to start all the fuel pumps? Most people play it the other way around, so the rocket is already fueled up when you capture the spawners...
DGs pick building AI targets and then "tell" the buildings about their interest. The buildings keep track of how many DGs are headed towards them. For control ports (the places DGs stand), there is an upper limit of about 40 interested DGs, and if that many are already headed to a single port, no more DGs can pick that port as their AI target.
So something similar may have been happening with your DGs excess population: the DGs saturated the entrance doors' AI limits, then the DGs got distracted by fighting and never returned to their original commitments to the doors. Normally DGs will remember what they were first doing and return to it when safe, but there may be something weird about the way you were playing the level that exposed a bug in the game.
Newly created DGs have clean AI minds and will be able to pick new AI targets like the entrance doors. Your overpop shut down all the spawners because most levels limit total populations to prevent chugging on slow machines.
So your solution to nuke your own was the right one!