"No retreat" bug in Invasion-Expansion can now be voted in issue tracker

[Martind Forlon]

Greetings, Cmdrs,

for those which had an unpleasant experience with BGS bug where invading faction (PMF in worse case) entered "full" system and remained there even if they lost the war: this issue can now be voted in the issues tracker - https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/203

Bug description: When a faction expands by invasion to a system with 7 factions already, it starts a conflict. However, on the ending of that conflict the losing faction should immediately retreat from the system (as happened pre-3.3) - at the moment, regardless of the result of the conflict, both factions remain in the system.

 

[Kissamies]

I'm such a noob in this I didn't even know this was supposed to happen. No wonder the 8 faction systems are increasing.

 

[Riverside]

Voted, thanks for highlighting it.

 

[Jmanis]

Is this actually a bug?

If a faction "invaded" a system, and the other side is a domestic faction, and they lose, retreating them would break the rule that domestic factions cannot be retreated from their home system.

Maybe I'm losing something in the detail, but this:

However, on the ending of that conflict the losing faction should immediately retreat from the system...

... seems to imply a domestic faction should be retreated in those circumstances, which would be incorrect behaviour.

Edit: I'm happy for someone to provide more info... I'd certainly admit I don't know the full details, but it seems to me in an invader vs domestic war, if the domestic faction lost, the correct behaviour would still be for them to not leave the system. Or can invasions only happen between two foreign factions?

 

[Riverside]

In my home system an 8th faction recently expanded into it & immediately went to war with another non-native faction (present only since just after 3.3 where expansions went a bit nuts). Neither faction had any assets, the pre-existing non-native faction won the war & the new invading faction went into retreat (there was a day pending IIRC). Unsurprisingly the retreat failed, leaving 8 factions in the system.

 

[Deareim]

It has been there for years... It would have been good for FD to solve it a long time ago....would have avoid some mess.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Or can invasions only happen between two foreign factions?

This is the case.

It can make the target faction or even system of an invasion somewhat unpredictable, as many systems have few foreign factions, which may already be pending/active/recovering a conflict at the time of an expansion.

 

[Jmanis]

This is the case.

It can make the target faction or even system of an invasion somewhat unpredictable, as many systems have few foreign factions, which may already be pending/active/recovering a conflict at the time of an expansion.

Wow. So in a system with six domestic factions, and the 7th foreign faction being the controlling faction, you could invade and instantly seize control?

That feels somewhat broken... granted I don't have a better solution other than FD making it easier to retreat factions, but a little part of me is kinda glad that's not a thing right now... working as intended or not.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Wow. So in a system with six domestic factions, and the 7th foreign faction being the controlling faction, you could invade and instantly seize control?

Yes, though there aren't many systems with more than five domestic. I have seen it happen twice, though the original controller won the conflicts in both cases, due to the other foreign faction being locked in a conflict already.

That is not affected by this bug - though it does mean that a losing controller in that situation would at least still be in the system and able to fight back later.

That feels somewhat broken... granted I don't have a better solution other than FD making it easier to retreat factions, but a little part of me is kinda glad that's not a thing right now... working as intended or not.

If it was working as it did pre-3.3 with the losing faction retreating, it would provide a bit of a safety valve versus stagnation when everywhere filled up to seven, by allowing movement to continue.

What's happened in Colonia since 3.3 introduced the bug - and appears to be starting to happen in various bits of the bubble too - is that it gives a very short-lived reprieve and then the same issue with everywhere stuck on 8 rather than 7.

(Even after they fix, we're still going to have a considerable number of systems stuck on 8 as a result)

 

[Kissamies]

Wow. So in a system with six domestic factions, and the 7th foreign faction being the controlling faction, you could invade and instantly seize control?

That feels somewhat broken... granted I don't have a better solution other than FD making it easier to retreat factions, but a little part of me is kinda glad that's not a thing right now... working as intended or not.

Feels a bit extreme to me too. I'd make it something like first foreign faction in an 8 faction system to lose any sort of conflict getting instantly retreated and/or normal retreat being much faster when it's a 8 faction system.

 

[Azzbo27]

Our analysis shows there are currently 19 systems with 9 factions and 1 system (Kokojina) with 10, all 10 were present in January 2018, so it seems there has been a bug(?) with retreats following invasion for some time!
Additionally, we have discovered that following a failed invasion war, the loser is prevented from retreating for 10 days, regardless of if they are < 2.5% inf or not.

 

[Riverside]

I think there would be a great deal of upset at wasted effort by those that have benefited from this bug if those incorrectly remaining factions were to be retroactively removed from the systems they entered & should have retreated immediately from, assuming it is unintended behaviour that they remain after the initial war is lost.

However if those that had been invaded lose out (by the invading faction remaining) I think that would be the worse outcome of the two.
Hopefully they will be dealt with on a case by case basis.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Our analysis shows there are currently 19 systems with 9 factions and 1 system (Kokojina) with 10, all 10 were present in January 2018, so it seems there has been a bug(?) with retreats following invasion for some time!

The 9 or 10 faction systems are leftovers from a very old version of the BGS where factions which expanded could "pull" factions out of the system they expanded into back into their own system - a few factions expanded a lot during that time. Invasion can't enter a system which already has 8 factions, so they weren't caused that way.

Additionally, we have discovered that following a failed invasion war, the loser is prevented from retreating for 10 days, regardless of if they are < 2.5% inf or not.

Good spot! Specifically the Retreat pending can't start for the first four days after the war, for no obvious reason. Does this also happen to losers of normal conflicts, I wonder?

Example with Colonia Cooperative's invasion of Hamlet's Harmony here

Hamlet's Harmony (Eol Prou RS-T d3-45) - History

cdb.sotl.org.uk

I think there would be a great deal of upset at wasted effort by those that have benefited from this bug if those incorrectly remaining factions were to be retroactively removed from the systems they entered & should have retreated immediately from, assuming it is unintended behaviour that they remain after the initial war is lost.

However if those that had been invaded lose out (by the invading faction remaining) I think that would be the worse outcome of the two.
Hopefully they will be dealt with on a case by case basis.

Frontier's approach in the past to this sort of thing has always been "play on from here" - we've had 29 invasions in the Colonia region in 3305 affected by this bug, some of them months ago, so there's no possible fair way to unpick it.

What they may well need to do is figure out a way to make it easier to Retreat factions from an 8-faction system (beyond the existing minor bonus of having an extra faction to absorb influence) to try to correct the general issue and get most of these systems back down to 7 again over time.

 

[Riverside]

Frontier's approach in the past to this sort of thing has always been "play on from here" - we've had 29 invasions in the Colonia region in 3305 affected by this bug, some of them months ago, so there's no possible fair way to unpick it.

What they may well need to do is figure out a way to make it easier to Retreat factions from an 8-faction system (beyond the existing minor bonus of having an extra faction to absorb influence) to try to correct the general issue and get most of these systems back down to 7 again over time.

Quite. That's why I wrote what I did

Hopefully they will deal with this on a case by case basis. Not all situations are complicated, the invading faction can simply be removed (if the behaviour is unintended). The longer this is left the more complex any given situation will be to unpick, and I believe that in situations where one side or another potentially loses out, the ones taking advantage of the bug (if it is unintended) should defer to those that are not.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Hopefully they will deal with this on a case by case basis. Not all situations are complicated, the invading faction can simply be removed (if the behaviour is unintended). The longer this is left the more complex any given situation will be to unpick, and I believe that in situations where one side or another potentially loses out, the ones taking advantage of the bug (if it is unintended) should defer to those that are not.

Certainly the bug should be fixed sooner rather than later, because of its potential to completely jam up regions of space if nothing else.

But anything older than maybe a week after the end of the war (and this has been going on since 3.3 so it's been six months in many cases) is going to be a nightmare to unpick. Working out exactly who was advantaged or disadvantaged in all of this will depend more on what the players backing the factions wanted to happen rather than the raw BGS percentages. There's no practical way for Frontier to investigate that, and by the time they've fixed the bug and it's been confirmed working in live, it'll be far too late to unpick any of the previous ones.

The best they can do is make retreat easier in 8-faction systems so most of these will sort themselves out over time: maybe have it so that if there are 8 factions present, the retreat threshold is 5% rather than 2.5%, or retreats last fewer ticks with 8 factions present, or something. (Or maybe just make retreat easier in general if the faction isn't receiving active support)

 

[Riverside]

But anything older than maybe a week after the end of the war (and this has been going on since 3.3 so it's been six months in many cases) is going to be a nightmare to unpick.

Someone loses out whether corrective action is taken or not. Not all situations are complicated. In those cases the invading faction can be removed to correct the error, assuming it is unintended behaviour.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Someone loses out whether corrective action is taken or not.

Certainly.

Not all situations are complicated. In those cases the invading faction can be removed to correct the error, assuming it is unintended behaviour.

I assume you mean the "losing" rather than "invading" faction here? The bug happens regardless of who wins the invasion conflict.

Frontier shouldn't, I believe, be making value judgements about whether the situation is "complicated" or "simple". As you say, someone loses out regardless of the correction made or not. Some situations are certainly too complex to correct now - any invasion more than a few weeks before the fix date will certainly be too complicated to unpick, and that's almost all of them - so rather than messing around trying to find a place to draw the line the usual "play on" rule is fairest.

 

[Kissamies]

The system that I proposed earlier would work for gradually cleaning up the mess: Losing any sort of conflict in 8+ system would boot a foreign faction out, and retreats should be harsher too. Really harsh retreat rule might be having to keep it above 2.5% on every tick after the first instead just the 6th. Perhaps make it a little more lenient for a faction that has one or more squadrons backing it to incentivise that a little bit.

 

[Riverside]

Certainly.


I assume you mean the "losing" rather than "invading" faction here? The bug happens regardless of who wins the invasion conflict.

Frontier shouldn't, I believe, be making value judgements about whether the situation is "complicated" or "simple". As you say, someone loses out regardless of the correction made or not. Some situations are certainly too complex to correct now - any invasion more than a few weeks before the fix date will certainly be too complicated to unpick, and that's almost all of them - so rather than messing around trying to find a place to draw the line the usual "play on" rule is fairest.

The side that loses the initial war yes, both would be invading factions in this scenario. Frontier don't need to make that value decision, the players do. It it is raised as an issue it can be undone, if it is not there is no problem. Assuming this is acknowledged to be unintended behaviour. The undoing of the action does not need to undo the effect of every transaction, simply remove the faction from the system and the percentages can be redistributed among the smaller pot of points for the remaining factions. This would only affect the factions that expanded under this specific situation and lost the initial war, quite a specific set of circumstances.

It makes sense to me that where there is an issue it be corrected in favour of the side that did not lose that initial war. That way a faction can speculatively expand into a new system & leave the war alone to test for any resistance from incumbent players (ie knock on the door). A hostile invasion can still be achieved by doing work to win that initial war, the cynical faction that does not bother to fight it, knowing they will remain anyway would be removed on request.

If an invader fails at the first line of defence it makes sense to me that they are not allowed to continue on past that first line, otherwise why have that line of defence at all? Why have a cap on the number of factions? I am watching this one with interest