I had an issue with the Antaran Doomstar. I played until I managed to trigger an attack with the Doomstar (on my homeworld, eek) and after some frantic preparations I entered tactical combat and had the ships I'd assembled and the fixed defenses concentrate all fire on it. It teleported away (I noticed it had a subspace teleporter) when it's hull integrity got too low and as the battle progressed all my ships and the few other Antaran ships were all destroyed leaving the Doomstar facing the fixed defenses. Then the strange thing started happening.

The Doomstar was out of range of my fixed defenses and slowly started moving towards them, but it would start teleporting back again. I suspect it was the subspace teleporter at work again, but it didn't have a cooldown I could see. I ended up auto-resolving the battle since it did this multiple times and fortunately won.

So not sure if it's a bug or glitch in tactical combat. If I remove the "ANTARAN_ATTACK_MAX_DOOMSTARS: 1" from AntaranSettings.yaml on UCP's files will that make the game revert to the bugged settings that prevents it from adding Doomstars to the list? Or should I change the blueprint to not use the teleporter somehow? (That and on the other game I tried, it looks like the AI is terrible at dealing with the Doomstar attacks.)

Hm... UCP's settings for Blueprints *doesn't* have the teleporter, but the 5X compatibility patch's file does so maybe this is the wrong spot?

The subspace teleporter specials trigger whenever a target hulls is too low. So it probably just keep casting it as fast as it could. The AI always uses them in an attempt to move away from harm. This is default game logic, I have not adjusted it.

ANTARAN_ATTACK_MAX_DOOMSTARS: 1 setting to 0 will just remove the possibility of a doomstar showing up. I set it cause without the number of doomstars would be unlimited in the attack fleet.

I am going to try going into 5X's ship blueprints and replace the subspace teleporter with something else. I'll see how it goes with that. (Though admittedly even without a Doomstar late-game Antaran raids were pretty painful pre-5.9 so removing them will still be a challenge.)

Thanks for your reply.

Not sure if it's an issue, but when I play pre-Warp cluster galaxy, the Space Pirates seem to be utter death for the computer players. As in by turn 500 half of them are gone. I can deal with pirates pretty easily, by setting up sensors in every system w/o a monster or minor race, but the AI seems to not do that.

Going to try post-Warp and see what happens.

Pre-warp has always been murder for the AI with Pirates

Yeah, I just played a bit of Post-Warp and I didn't get a single death report after nearly 500 turns. Ah well, going to stick to Post-Warp then. :D

One last thing. More of a question. What counts as increasing the Antaran grudge factor? Destroying the raiding party seems obvious, but do they get irritated if you build a planetary shield that easily repulses those two frigate raids? Does partially destroying a raid also cause the grudge factor to increase?

Defeating the entire attacking fleet

Oooo... so I think I'll just rush build a radiation shield when one of those two-frigate raids show up and snicker when the Herald of Antares gloats about the great victory the Antaran Forces have won against me. The shield didn't even get down to 50% Herald.

Yeah for an advanced race that wants to exterminate you they are pretty silly in their actions.

I almost made them hang around a planet with a shield for a few turns. Who knows maybe I will in a later version, but for now I just left the logic for that the same as the base game has it.

Well, it is a bit of an inconvenience and when they start coming out in force not even a planetary barrier shield stops all the damage. Before I get radiation shields I end up getting a planet crippled and have to rebuild some buildings. It's worse when it's my homeworld and I lose my star base *and* my capitol.

Okay, your setting that has rebuilt planets use their original size instead of Large or Huge is working. I think I have to adjust the 5X patch for UCP since I had an Antaran raid with *two* Doom Stars. Your files say max of 1, but 5X's UCP patch says -1, which I guess means infinite. Fortunately, I destroyed them, though I'm running around the galaxy stellar converting worlds as I research to the end of the tech tree.

Bug.0.0.6.0: Antaran settings ANTARAN_ATTACK_MAX_blueprint_template has an off by one issue, causing it to only stop after the limit + 1 is reached
Fix.0.0.6.0: Corrected issue, also added the functionality of 0 which will just disable that blueprint_template from showing up if desired by a MOD

So it is an old bug (since last official patch) - just not found cause who cares about 24 vs 25 frigates, but 1 vs 2 doomstars is an in your face issue

I suspect 5X's "-1" flag on it's patch for this mod is definitely affecting it since the Antarans just sent a huge force at one of my newest colonies with a LOT of Doomstars. As in nearly 20.

Ah well, evacuating the colony, prepping a hyper advanced colony ship and *not* sending any forces to defend so the grudge level will reset. I probably could send my obsolescent ships to defend it but I fear they might be successful and I need to get them to reset their grudge a bit. (I'm researching the "Hyper Advanced IV" techs 5X provides, going for the research full tech tree achievement.)

Unrelated question: Do you know how the achievements are recorded? I was trying for the Collector achievement and I'm wondering if "every possible biome" means I need to have a match with every race w/their own Uber world, wait for them to create them and then flatten the colonies on those worlds and colonize them myself.

Yes the -1 setting I have already told Spud about cause that is infinite number. Setting it to 1 will result in a max of 2 showing up.

I would recommend not playing with 5X for a game to get the Collector achievement since you do have to colonize every single biome type in a single game.