It results in all of the defenders getting killed before the mission, as well as massive wreck pileups.
Also, the reinforcements for the player's side should be gated in rather than left waiting around - they often get killed before the mission themselves by patrolling enemies.
Can confirm this is still an issue in 1.7A2a. Very easy to gate into the system and get spammed with plasma.
Fixed in 1.7 Beta 5. HQ (and other stations) no longer spawn close to stargates.
As of Beta 6, this glitch still occurs. It appears to be hard - coded to spawn next to the inbound stargate - I've never not seen it there.
Derakon was griping about CCHQ placement on IRC last night, too.
I think an easy fix is to add *void to the Cyclops HQ location criteria.
Currently it is *outerSystem, and the stargate should already avoid that because its a coreward stargate. But the system is a volcanic system with lots of inner system asteroids, so the stargate can get pushed to an outer system planet pretty easily.
The CCHQ is unusual in a couple of respects: (1) it can only spawn in Anaxas and requires outerSystem
, which limits the places where it can spawn, (2) it is a required station, meaning that it gets placed no matter what.
If the engine can't find a defined system location to place it, the engine picks a random spot around some planet/moon. This "fallback" option happens a lot for CCHQ because it is so hard to place.
Unfortunately, there were a few bugs with the fallback options, all of which I've fixed in 1.7 RC 1:
- The fallback placement used an exclusion zone of 50 light-seconds instead of the exclusion zone defined by the station. For CCHQ, the exclusion zone is 150 light-seconds. That meant that the CCHQ could get placed within 50 light-seconds of a stargate (or any other station).
- The fallback placement never picked an orbit more than 50 light-seconds away from a planet/moon. This is a problem because if we can't find a suitable place within a certain number of tries, we ignore the exclusion zone and just place it anywhere. I've fixed it so that if we can't find a suitable spot within 50 light-seconds of a planet/moon, we start looking further out (up to 250 light-seconds away).
- There was a bug in the fallback placement so we didn't consider all angles around the planet/moon. In fact, we never considered any angle other than 0 degrees for placement. This drastically reduced the places for CCHQ.
With all of the above fixed, we're much more likely to find good spots for CCHQ. Note, however, that when we go to fallback placement (which still happens a lot) we ignore all attribute requirements, so it is possible for CCHQ to spawn in the inner system. But the exclusion zone is still honored, so it should all be OK.
Lastly, this fix is in the engine and does not require a new version of Corporate Command to work.