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In my current game I play as a pirate for the first time and have my ships heavily outfitted with assault shuttles, but am encountering a bug, I guess.

Relatively at the beginning I managed to get enough boarding troops on an enemy pirate factions construction ship. Since I was sure to get it, I went on to manage some other fleets and ignored the ongoing fight. Sure enough a couple seconds later I get the message, that we boarded and captured the construction ship, but afterwards checking for it - it was heavily damaged during the fight and I wanted to get my constructor to repair it, it was nowhere to be found. I had no messages indicating it got into a fight or was scrapped, and my policy is to not scrap anything except high tech ships at my base for the technologies. I couldn't find it via the ships management screen either. I wrote it off as being lost in the fight, probably destroyed by a remaining enemy ship.
But now again I have the same issue. A cruiser tried to attack a colony where the AI stationed ~20 ships and got himself drowned in boarding troops. Well above 700 of mine against the 100 still left when I last checked on it.
During the fight I got another message indicating one of my fleets was being attacked, so I went to check on them, but again, when I got the message that the cruiser was boarded and captured it disappeared. Not in my ships screen, clicking the message reveals nothing and it's the latest message in the message screen. It was also still mostly intact and no other enemy ships were in the system during the fight, so destruction after boarding is not possible.

This has only happened with these two ships, although these were the only ships I captured which are also from types I can't build yet, since I'm still under 300 construction size and have no colonies of my own. Maybe it's related to this?
I captured a lot of frigates and escorts with no problems.

Game is updated to the latest version, all expansions installed.



Thie following gamesave should be close to the time the bug with the cruiser happened, it will arrive in the Anseun system in sector G2. I had to manually order all ships to capture it as they scattered instead of fighting.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/197 ... aiders.dwg

file is currently uploading as of 07:00 UTC and should be available in ~5 minutes.

There is a policy option as to what to do with captured ships. This may say that they should be retired for money. Have a look in the empire options screen as to what it says to do with them.

I have seen this happen, maybe when the Pirate captures ships or designs they cannot normally use? Colony Ships vanish for sure, as seemingly do Construction Ships, yet freighters, mining, military just change ownership and continue as normal.

ORIGINAL: CyclopsSlayer

I have seen this happen, maybe when the Pirate captures ships or designs they cannot normally use? Colony Ships vanish for sure, as seemingly do Construction Ships, yet freighters, mining, military just change ownership and continue as normal.

I tried capturing pirate's Constructor and Colony ships as a normal empire and had them always explode on me when the defenders were finally overwhelmed. After the last such incident I tinkered some with Empire Policy regarding captured ships, but didn't bother any more trying to capture these kinds of ship, so I am not certain this can be influenced at all through Policy.

Note, that pirates may gain Colonizers while they explore abandoned ships. This is a bit sad because these Colony ships are essentially lost or at least very hard to get a hold on. I think they'll become abandoned again when the pirate faction is destroyed. I suspect that a "Pirate faction joins your empire" event won't give any Colonizers to you, but rather expect them to just become abandoned, same as Constructors.

ORIGINAL: Cheet4h
But now again I have the same issue. A cruiser tried to attack a colony where the AI stationed ~20 ships and got himself drowned in boarding troops. Well above 700 of mine against the 100 still left when I last checked on it.
During the fight I got another message indicating one of my fleets was being attacked, so I went to check on them, but again, when I got the message that the cruiser was boarded and captured it disappeared.

I have managed to successfully capture ships with a size over my construction limit. I am pretty certain this can be influenced through Empire Policy. Just look at your settings at the very bottom of the list.

It is still possible, though very unlikely once you have the received the "We Captured" message, that the boarded ship was destroyed by your forces in the last instance. Your ships will continue to fire on the capture target whenever the shields rise again over a certain level. When I use the "We Captured" popup to navigate to the site of the event, I can often see the last exchanges of fire involving the captured ship.

When I tried to capture Colonizers and Constructors, I actually stayed to watch and actually saw them explode after the capture and in a still mostly undamaged state. But in those cases there was still a possible loophole in my Policy settings as well.

hm, my policy is at no place set to "scrap immediately". It still happens sometimes, I guess this is with ships without hyperdrives in empty space or in empty systems. Although these cases never produced such a message :/ I guess I need to check more closely on cruisers and constructors under capture ...

Regarding Constructors, I do not think the ability to capture has to do with policy. With combat ships (and Mining Stations) is certainly does.

I again tried to capture a Constructor last evening, after making sure all policies regarding boarding were as liberal as possible. The thing exploded just a moment after the "Ship captured" message was played.

I conclude that we are not supposed to get Constructors (or Colony ships) through boarding.