behaving very oddly spoilers

[Adamfostas (OP)]

In my latest game (v5. 30, conventional start), the Invaders are doing some very odd things.  They've got jump point survey ships now, so they don't have to rely on a wormhole opening up to access a system.  Of course, this means that when I discovered a wormhole in the third system I encountered, they immediately started sending enormous numbers of ships to earth.

However, once they arrive, they do nothing.  They just sit in orbit and eventually disappear.  It's rather frustrating as they cause lots of additional intervals, which take forever to process, and I can't blast them out of the sky yet as I haven't researched meson cannons.  The only aggressive action I've seen them take is that occasionally one of their survey ships will ram a freighter to destruction.  That's it.

I'm unsure whether this is a bug or intentional, to prevent the Invaders from killing off early empires too quickly.

[ZimRathbone]

The ability is not new - I had some of them do that to my home system several versions ago  (I eventually found the wormhole four systems away) - they also sent successive waves of "tourists" against my very substantial defences until I eventually lost the campaign due to data corruption.  Each wave had more and bigger ships while the others wandered around the system much a s you would expect.  I did eventually capture a couple and put them into service but they were actually rather poor for the role due to needing refuelling far too frequently - I suspect that is something that NPRs are exempt from.

[Nathan_]

I'm seeing a similar situation playing a small game(nebula start). if the invaders can't find anyone to kill they just jump back and forth between a JP every 5 minutes, and it either really slows down the game, or if you have deepspace tracking of the event stops the game every 2 minutes.  This would also be an issue with starting on a secondary star far away from the jumppoints(and thus their search pattern). Maybe they should retreat to the wormhole when they can't find anyone, waiting until the next wormhole move to try searching again. Deadspace does a similar thing of having necromorphs immediately retreat to the nearest vent if they cannot path clearly towards you.