I recently attacked an enemy planet in a system where we owned 4 of 5 planets (80%). Yet I amazingly had 1/3 my fleet destroyed by an enemy DS. Either the 25% ownership requirement is bugged, or I was extremely unlucky and launched that attack on the same tick a random DS was moving through the system. Which is it?
To quote the IC FAQ:
The Defense Station is an AI-controlled warship that can be moved only by the family leader to a system that has at least 70% of its planets occupied by said family.
Think of the Defense Station as a Death Star… it will destroy one third of an attacking force per attack! It is very durable, and will only be destroyed if your family is reduced to less than 25% of the planets in a system one is covering.
If this is still the case, then that DS could not be there from the family I was attacking. If it belonged to another family and was just there for the tick during its journey to another location, that is an entirely different matter.
If that was indeed the case, then was it destroyed by my attack since that random family had zero planets in the system when it activated? If not, then why isn’t the DS rendered inert until it gets to its final destination?
It should not work that way, at least not by the way the FAQ is written. Once we possessed the other 4 planets, the enemy family owned less than 25% of the planets, in which case the DS should self destruct…
1 planet is occupied
100% of the occupied planets are owned by said family
100%>70%
As such said family owns more than 70% of the occupied planets and can move in the ds.
And yes I agree you can have different interpretations. If you have a better text suggest it to pie.
There’s another possibility: a DS was sent to a system while a family met the ownership threshold, but then they lost planets before the DS got there.
In that situation, the DS will still arrive and be active.
It’s not clear if that is by design, so we can’t say for sure that it’s a bug. We can say though if we think it should work differently.
As it stands though, I don’t think there is a bug here, just a lack of clarity in the docs.
a system that has at least 70% of its planets occupied by said family
This part definitely feels wrong, or at least confusing. It seems that it’s “70% of occupied planets” or “70% of planets occupied” depending on your interpretation.
I’m definitely open to suggestions for better wording.
Will agree with that @I_like_pie . However, there is the secondary line of questioning too.
If a family was moving a DS to a new destination and it just happened to be crossing through that system when I attacked, would it function as a DS then? If so, would it be destroyed since the family had 0 planets in the system, or would it still calculate the 25% threshold based on its final destination?
Actually, this is one of those type of questions that the top Alpha and Beta players would obsess over and run multiple tests on their own to see what happened.
At this point, may just be best to run the various scenarios in a custom galaxy and then rewrite that section for the FAQ once we fully understand how the DS operates.
I would not change the wording nor test how it actually works.
I would make changes into programming of DS:
Family must have 70% of system occupied (of all planets) before a DS can be sent.
DS would travel to the destination until there is no family owned planets in the system.
If DS arrives to system which has less than 70% fam occupied planets (but minimum of one planet), next attack on fam destroys the DS.
If family loses all planets before DS arrives, DS would head to home system. This would prevent DS to sneak into system where it can not be destroyed and where it can wait to be used nearby.
I would also disable DS until it is in the final destination.
Course alterations during travel would of course be ok, if there just would be any suitable target systems. HS would always be suitable target for DS.
I think those guidelines would be simple enough and not too hard to implement.
As much as I agree with that, I don’t expect a Pie in the Sky solution here.
From the very early rounds of this game, there was buggy code. It is a tall order to imagine that a new owner can easily decipher nearly 20-year-old code that was less than perfect from the get go.
I think the suggestions are reasonable. The only one I might suggest differently is this:
If DS arrives to system which has less than 70% fam occupied planets (but minimum of one planet), next attack on fam destroys the DS.
I’d combine this with the “head to home system” rule, which would make it so that 70% is required for it to even be present. So there’s no additional 1 planet minimum to consider, just a feature-wide 70% minimum.
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