The Ares can attack before you even dock, let alone go to Central Command.

Personally, I think this is an opportunity to redo Point Juno altogether. It's presently using the old mission system, completely lacking in procedural generation(except for the enemies guarding the Terra), and somewhat flawed due to the AI's poor handling of the four big gunship formations, which largely just sit there. Might be a better use of devtime to rewrite the system using the newer techniques than to patch it every version or so to hold together around a decade's worth of backwards compatibility.

@johnbwatson 1.8a3 does include a complete rewrite of the PJ mission using the new techniques which is one of the reasons why it is showing more bugs than usual this time!

In particular there will be problems if:

• player leaves system before accepting mission
• mission starts before player accepts it (mission starts ~1 minute after you first enter the system)
• player has fleet rank < 4

The mission is created when you enter the system, but due to a bug it will keep on being created on each visit until the player accepts. So expect very odd results if you leave & return to PJ before accepting the mission (you could have multiple instances of the mission running at once).

Northern enemy attack group began its attack run instantly upon my entering the system

The first attack wave should start about a minute after you first enter the PJ system. I can't reproduce the issue with the first attack group starting as soon as you enter the system (had you already visited the system before?)

After gating in, docking at Pt Juno and entering Central Command gives the <Text id="textBusy"> screen desc.
The two waves of Ares come in and attack. Until both are defeated Central Command shows the textBusy scr desc.

That was my mistake - dealing with the mission starting before the player docks was on the to-do list, but I did not do it!

In other games the Pilgrim briefing comes up as normal but the Ares fleet is a marker not a ship as it usually is. See image. The fleet is elsewhere.

This was intentional to address: https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=69506

The attacking Ares fleets also show unusual behavior. They come in to attack and then fly backwards away from Pt Juno. Weird.

I don't _think_ this has anything to do with the mission rewrite, but is an AI issue

The strange "backwards retreat" Ares fleet behaviour for the Tundra-led fleets could be it retreating when it's shields go down, taking all the Sandstorms with it. The Tundra does have ignoreShieldsDown= "true" so it is more likely as follows for the Chasm and the timing of the shields down is coincidental.

With the Chasm-led fleets, the Chasm appears to be making repeated attack runs at Point Juno. Once it has attacked to within a certain distance it retreats and does it all again. It has combatStyle= "advanced" same as the Tundra.

Or a combination of the two.
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This was intentional to address: https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=69506

That makes sense. Possibly change the marker text to "last known location" or similar.
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Looking at the code the Ares attack missions will start automatically regardless of docking at Pt Juno. I preferred it when accepting the mission from Verner started them.

Often there isnt a fleet ops CSC before Pt Juno so this meant you could go ahead and find one and get fleet rank, then come back and get the missions. But, from the code, this will be handled, plus the Cometfalls don't start until you dock and the Sandstorm swarms don't seem to have the firepower to destroy Pt Juno.

See PR 74

Merged into 1.8 Beta 2. Thanks!