I don't know the intention, it was written something like 2 and a half years ago, before I worked here
It is something of an advantage to start nearby to the ST, but it also makes it a more dangerous hack because you have less buffer room to defend your homeworld if it gets out of control before you kill it.
Its first wave is like 4 units. Each additional wave is 4 plus a cumulative 1% more units (so the 10th tick is 44 units).
It does not get out of control quickly, and the ST itself has almost no hit points.
It's a joke, even in the early game and with a fleet one has by the mid-game, it's a walk in the park. The last one I pestered (not counting last night) we let it run so long we were actually
increasing AIP because of the AIP floor, and even then the waves it was throwing at us weren't all that significant (yeah, we brought the AIP floor up to like 200).
Not like the first ST I ever ticked off, where it ran for maybe 3 minutes before overwhelming a late-game two-player fleet, killing the command station, and an adjacent world before getting brought under control.