Vanishing Force Field?

[Elestan]

I had put a FF over the only wormhole out of the AI home system and started hacking (sensors+sabotage) to take out a couple of its Fortresses.  The hack response ships charged the wormhole...and then as the sensor hack triggered, the FF vanished.  The FF generator was still there at 100%, but there was no FF bubble.  The charging ships killed some of the engineers that should have been protected, and then flew out the wormhole (into an killzone, but still...)

Why would jamming the enemy sensors take down my FF?

[Traveller]

The AI has some nasty hack-defense tricks up its sleeves, and I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of EMP-type thing that disables forcefields is among them.  I would expect you to get a message if that happened though, and its tricks are pretty limited unless you start playing around in negative hacking progress.

[Elestan]

The AI has some nasty hack-defense tricks up its sleeves, and I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of EMP-type thing that disables forcefields is among them.  I would expect you to get a message if that happened though, and its tricks are pretty limited unless you start playing around in negative hacking progress.

I still had over 100 HAP left, and it seems too coincidental that the FF dropped just as the sensor hack completed.  I'm guessing it's a bug related to the "cloaking" effect granted by the hack.  The FF generator never recovered, btw; even after the sensor hack effect ended, the FF generator never generated another bubble.

[Toranth]

Hmm.  If there wasn't some sort of supply interruption, I'm short on ideas.  I can't remember every seeing Forcefields turn off for no good reason.
Can you post a copy of the save file?  That'd be really useful in maybe figuring out what was going on.

[Elestan]

Can you post a copy of the save file?  That'd be really useful in maybe figuring out what was going on.

Sure; attached.  It's the intermediate tutorial, a tiny 10-system galaxy.  Pause, go to the enemy homeworld system, unpause, and watch the hack finish.  A second or two later, the forcefield goes down.

[Toranth]

Oh, that is interesting.  I understand what is happening, though.
You are performing a Sensor Hack, which as a result gives cloaking to all human units.
Cloaked things that produce forcefields normally suppress the forcefield when cloaked, so as to avoid giving away the location.  This normally isn't a problem, because only a few units can both be cloaked and produce forcefields (Riot Starships, Champions, etc), and if they shoot (enter combat) they uncloak and the Forcefield comes back. 
However, in this case you are granting cloaking to a normal Force Field generator.  It can't enter combat, so it can't uncloak until the hack is over.

You seem to have found an odd edge case in the cloaking/Forcefield rules.  It isn't a bug, per se, but it probably isn't the way most people would want Forcefield Generators to behave.

[Aklyon]

Sounds like something worth adding to mantis for later.

[Elestan]

It isn't a bug, per se, but it probably isn't the way most people would want Forcefield Generators to behave.

I think the issue is that it breaks verisimilitude (the game making sense, by its own rules).  Logically, what I'm doing (hacking AI sensors) should have no effect on my units.  But because this feature was implemented by giving the human units cloaking, we get a nonsensical corner case.  I could guess at more corner cases waiting to be discovered...for example, a smart AI, upon detecting a bunch of "cloaked" ships, might reasonably call in an EMP strike.  Which would probably work to decloak the ships, despite this making no sense based on the in-game-world explanation of what happened.

To do this in a way that doesn't create a bunch of illogical side effects, one could instead give the AI units a "blinded" property, which makes them ignore other ships without triggering the responses and side effects of cloaking.  I don't know if applying the existing "Blind" property would do this, but perhaps it should.