Conflict Zones that contain capital ships are fixed, and will only occur if a War or Civil war involves a Minor Faction that's allied with either the Empire or Federation.
If one of the Minor Factions involved in a war is with the Empire or Federation, there is a chance that one or more of the High Intensity Conflict Zones will contain a Capital Ship spawn. A High Intensity Conflict Zone that has a Capital Ship will always spawn a Capital Ship, and vice versa.
Spawn chance is something like 25% chance, so very rare to find one with a cap ship for both opposing factions.
Sheesh! So if I find a system as you describe and it has a HI CZ? And I keep going to it... It will spawn a capital ship in the end?
No. Each spawned conflict zone is fixed. It either with or will not spawn a Capital Ship, with something like a 25% chance that it will. So if you find an instance that spawns one, it will always spawn one. If it does not spawn, it will never spawn. This is unique to each individual High Intensity Conflict Zone that spawns in a system. So if there are 2 High Intensity Conflict Zones in a system, each one has a (roughly) 25% fixed chance of a Capital Ship spawning, as long as one of the Minor Factions involved in the War or Civil War is allied with the Empire or Federation.
I don't know the exact spawn chance, so if someone else tested the exact percent and wants to jump in, feel free.
So when you find a CZ spawning a capital ship, how long does it take until it spawns?
Pretty sure one of the devs in the BGS video they did some month ago said capitol ships have a chance to spawn when a native and non-native faction go to war. So that excludes civil war, and it exclude when two non-native factions war. As was said, one of the factions needs to be power-aligned. I also don't think two like-power factions at war will spawn a capitol ship. I've never seen two Farraguts fighting each other.
Never known population to make much difference either. I've seen every eligible war recently in a nearby system spawn capitol ships at every opportunity. That system only has 100k population.
I ran into a pair of cap ships at the high CZ nearest to Horowitz in LTT 3572 two weeks ago - might be worth a look, not sure if its still there though.
I ran into some capital ships (almost literally) last night actually! It was in a high intensity conflict zone between a federation and independent faction.
I believe (I could be wrong) it was in the system called " LHS 250" (I was bouncing between war systems at the time so it may be a system near it instead like Haokah); the federation capital supported a federation faction and an imperial capital supported the independent faction.
That said, I have no idea if those capitals would re-appear all the time in that system or if it's RNG with a low probability.
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For me it was 10-15 seconds or so and I started getting alerts that I was detecting capital class signatures. Five or ten seconds followed by well, big bangs, a lot of fear, and a lot of pew pew.
Within about 10 seconds of dropping in for me it seems
I ran into some capital ships (almost literally) last night actually! It was in a high intensity conflict zone between a federation and independent faction.
I believe (I could be wrong) it was in the system called " LHS 250" (I was bouncing between war systems at the time so it may be a system near it instead like Haokah); the federation capital supported a federation faction and an imperial capital supported the independent faction.
That said, I have no idea if those capitals would re-appear all the time in that system or if it's RNG with a low probability.
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For me it was 10-15 seconds or so and I started getting alerts that I was detecting capital class signatures. Five or ten seconds followed by well, big bangs, a lot of fear, and a lot of pew pew.
Took some digging, but I found it:Do you have a quote, and are you sure it was stated as this being the only exclusive condition? I'm 100% positive, at least in prior versions, that Civil War spawned capital ships, as I had two local factions, Imperial and Independent, in a Civil War in my home system that spawned cap ships in two separate wars that I can remember (Arjung). If the conditions changed at some point, I missed it in the patch notes.