Enemy ships come through warp point but no battle starts?

[Iron Giant]

I'm playing Gold with no mod (other than the "mod" of using the startrek shipset from Atrocitys).

The Crystal race and I are at war. There is only one warp point in to my systems from the outside. That warp point has 100+ defence satellites, 2 starbases and 25+ fighters.

My turn I notice that my system with that one warp point is a triangle (enemys!) but it did not trigger a battle.

I sent a ship to that square on my turn and a battle with all those units started, but if I had not noticed that, his fleet could have breached my defences and rampaged in my systems.

Why didn't a battle start automatically?

[dogscoff]

Wierd. The only non-bug answer I can think of (although it's highly unlikely) is that the enemy ship came through the wp cloaked, thus avoiding combat, and then either decloaked (maybe ran out of supplies) or that you happened to build a ship in that system on the same turn with scanners capable of penetrating his cloak.

Like I say, possibly possible, but highly unlikely.

If you can remember what class of ship it was, have a look at it's design (designs / enemy designs) and see if it had stealth armour or a cloaking device.

[Baron Munchausen]

What about the design of your defense units? Do the satellites or the fighters have stealth? I've seen a bug where a stack of units at a warp point is automatically assumed to be cloaked when an enemy unit comes through just because ONE of the units has the cloak ability. It was quite annoying to put 100+ satellites on a warp point and have battleships sail right by them & go for the colonies in the system... I thought it had been fixed, but maybe not. I've gotten in the habit of not putting units with cloak ability on warp points. You might want to play with 'autosave' turned on so that if you see this again you can send the save games to MM.

[ 19 March 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]