Threat level

[Misery]

Okay, so I'm wondering just how this Threat mechanic works... it's been one thing I've constantly had trouble figuring out.

I *think* that waking up ships on enemy systems by attacking them, the darkened out ones, adds them to that count, but other than that I dont really know.... and something about some giant horrible blob of wandering doom that'll occaisionally form, which I'll spot moving around random locations, tends to have those horrible buzzsaw carrier things.

But beyond those couple of things, I still dont really know how it works, or specifically what causes it to go up, or ships to be added to it.  Obviously it's a number that I'd like to know how to avoid inflating too much... 

I had a battle just now in my current game where I'd engaged a large fleet in an empty system, after they'd crashed through a couple of mine without me entirely noticing (sigh), and during that fight, the threat count kept jumping up and down seemingly at random, though the armada in that system didn't seem to be getting any reinforcements.  When I'd popped it all finally, the number had more or less not actually changed much, but simply stopped randomly shifting.  Very.... confusing.

So any info on that would be appreciated...

[Aklyon]

Threat ships as far as I know, are composed of three five things:
A. Ships you freed when attacking a planet (the ones who are still alive, anyway), or all AI ships remaining on the planet when you killed the command station.
2. Ships that retreated from an attack (alive) that are not part of something else, like the SF.
3. Ships from ??? waves
D. Ships auto-released from defensive reinforcements from the Preemption plot.
5. Ships from triggered Threatening Eyes or deepstrikes.

[tadrinth]

Yeah, per Aklyon, Threat isn't so much a mechanic as a particular behavior-set for AI ships.  Lots of different things can put AI ships into threat mode.

The sleeping defensive reinforcements are one AI behavior mode.  Waking them up puts them into Threat mode.

Most mechanics other than reinforcements create ships in Threat mode.  That's kind of the default 'go kill the player' behavior.  Threat ships will try to attack your systems, but only if they think they have a decent chance of success; sufficient defending firepower will deter them, including your fleet if it's within a few hops. 

Threat ships that survive for more than 30 mins will switch to Threatfleet behavior.  Not sure exactly what the difference is there, but they'll hang out deep in AI territory and wait for an opportunity to hit you. 

AI ships can also be in Special Forces, which acts as a roaming defensive fleet.  The SF gets it's own set of reinforcements, and nothing else really puts ships in that mode to my knowledge.  It is possible for SF ships to be converted to Threat behavior, but that's pretty rare, it only happens if the AI tries to fill out a Cross Planet Attack and runs out of other ships. 

Zombie ships will just suicide at enemy ships with no coordination.  These aren't too common now; hacking response ships used to be zombies but are now just threat instead.

Strategic reserve ships will never leave the planet they're on.  They're spawned by the AI to defend planets it cares about (mostly the core and homeworlds).

The other behavior mode is used by Exogalactic Strike Forces.  You'll usually get a warning about these well in advance in the alerts box.  Each strike force gets a target and goes for it regardless of human defenses in the way.   They can pick fabs and other irreplaceables as targets, depending on the exo source; other exo sources always pick a human homeworld. This can be particularly bad if a strike force crashes into your defenses and ties them up sufficiently that threat ships decide to join the party.

So, defensive reinforcements go into sleeping guard mode, SF reinforcements act as SF, exo ships go into strike force mode, and basically everything else goes into Threat mode when it spawns.  That includes ships spawned by hacking responses.

[Aklyon]

Hunter plot will add to the SF based on timed intervals (and plot intensity) and whether or not you've killed what it adds in or not, but otherwise I don't think anything else adds to it.

[tadrinth]

Ah, yeah, Hunter does add to the SF, but nothing causes non-SF ships to switch to SF, is what I meant.