Wave Help Question

[SenorPez]

Question about waves: What causes the light green wave that heads to "".

I've seen the announced (tower defense) waves, which are usually orange, have a countdown timer, and a destination.
Raid Engine and Counterattack waves always say "Raid Engine" or "Counterattack," respectively.
And the one time I actually made it deep enough into a game for a cross-planet attack, there was a "massing" warning, and then the ships were released.

This, however, I don't remember seeing before:


After the wave unfortunately crushed me, I checked the map out, since dying reveals all. I didn't see any structures that, like the alarm posts and such, would have seemed to spawn this.

I'm running 5.011. Is this something normal on higher difficulties? I just stepped up to 7 after finding 5 way too easy. Can someone explain what's happening to me here, what I might have done to trigger it, and how to tiptoe around it, especially in the early game?

Thanks!

[dotjd]

Those look like normal tower defense waves.  If they aren't showing a destination then here's the shortlist of what could've happened.

1. You killed all the warp gates adjacent to your territory.  If the AIs have no warp gates to use to warp directly into one of your systems, they'll warp the waves onto their planets instead.  The wave ships will get added to the threat counter and will begin stalking you, looking for good places to attack, etc.  This is why you want to leave at least one warp gate alive -- so they'll predictably come in and get slaughtered, instead of running around the map being nuisances.
2. You turned on the cross planet waves option during game creation.  It automatically makes the above happen for all normal waves.

There may be a couple other edge cases that trigger this too -- like the target planet getting destroyed before the waves spawn?  I'm not sure.  The above two are the big ones.

The size of the waves doesn't look that abnormal.  They're a bit early and big, but you could have some aggressive AIs and it's random.  Getting viral shredders is terrible luck though.  Welcome to difficulty 7.

[Commiesalami]

Viral shredders can be solved easily with gravity turrets .  All melee units when on the attack can be handled with ease that way. 

[SenorPez]

Those look like normal tower defense waves.  If they aren't showing a destination then here's the shortlist of what could've happened.

1. You killed all the warp gates adjacent to your territory.  If the AIs have no warp gates to use to warp directly into one of your systems, they'll warp the waves onto their planets instead.  The wave ships will get added to the threat counter and will begin stalking you, looking for good places to attack, etc.  This is why you want to leave at least one warp gate alive -- so they'll predictably come in and get slaughtered, instead of running around the map being nuisances.
2. You turned on the cross planet waves option during game creation.  It automatically makes the above happen for all normal waves.

There may be a couple other edge cases that trigger this too -- like the target planet getting destroyed before the waves spawn?  I'm not sure.  The above two are the big ones.

The size of the waves doesn't look that abnormal.  They're a bit early and big, but you could have some aggressive AIs and it's random.  Getting viral shredders is terrible luck though.  Welcome to difficulty 7.

If anything, it would have to be #2, since the screenshot is while I'm still taking my very first planet, so I'd just killed my very first warpgate. From previous games, I thought I remember normal waves having the timer, destination, and orange coloring with cross-planet waves enabled, but perhaps I'm misremembering!

And really, despite this wiping me out, it's nowhere near as bad as the previous game... which had a Mark IV planet with a raid engine next to one of the system adjacent to my starting planet. Due to my laziness in not cross-scouting, that was a really nasty surprise.