CPA Spawns

[Kahuna]

How does the game decide where the CPA ships spawn?
Those idiots spawned right next to my homeworld. Why did they magically teleport there out of nowhere?

[Toranth]

How does the game decide where the CPA ships spawn?
Those idiots spawned right next to my homeworld. Why did they magically teleport there out of nowhere?

From what I've seen, I think the part of a CPA that comes from the Strategic Reserve can spawn (all together) anywhere there is a Warp Gate.
The rest of it seems to come from freeing the usual, already-existing ships.

[Kahuna]

Ok thanks. So it is the warp gate then.

[tadrinth]

"The CPA deployment logic will no longer drop carriers on planets with no "wave" warp gates (so a non-home command station isn't enough, but a warp gate is)." http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/05/ai-war-beta-6033-bonus-tricks-released.html

"Also, to avoid cases where CPA ships were being put into a carrier containing only two ships or something silly like that, if a planet doesn't have enough ships to justify a carrier of its own those are "rolled over" on to the next planet that's launching CPA ships, and it will keep doing this until it has enough for an at least decently-sized carrier load." http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/05/ai-war-beta-6028-so-i-rewired-it.html

It looks like CPAs used to always deploy carriers to the AI homeworlds, but that was changed.  Or, possibly, the behavior is different depending on how much of the CPA is taken from the strategic reserve. 

They definitely don't spawn on the homeworlds at this point, because I had scouting on a chokepoint next to one of the homeworlds, and a CPA showed up having never gone through that system.

[Toranth]

"Also, to avoid cases where CPA ships were being put into a carrier containing only two ships or something silly like that, if a planet doesn't have enough ships to justify a carrier of its own those are "rolled over" on to the next planet that's launching CPA ships, and it will keep doing this until it has enough for an at least decently-sized carrier load." http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/05/ai-war-beta-6028-so-i-rewired-it.html

Ah, there's the other part of this.  Good find.  The carriers all seem to spawn together, and they're usually larger than just the Reserve portion, but it was always hard to be sure why... This does explain it.

But yeah, I generally Gate Raid as an anti-CPA measure these days.  I also beachhead Core Turrets a lot - that can hold up or at least delay an attack outside your systems long enough for reinforcements to arrive.