[BERT] Station Quests - Hostile Takeover

[vorlon_mi]

I had an unusual experience last night, and wanted to see if the community has more information about it.

In nearly every game, I get the "Hostile Takeover" quest - station A asks me to destroy station B, in return for more yields in my trade with them. Nothing unusual there; it may even happen every game. In every game, around turn 30 or so, I get a quest where I get a choice to approve a station landing near my territory: station X or station Y. I approve one of them and usually trade with it the whole game. It's close enough that I can include it in my orbital coverage and park a Station Sentinel satellite over it.

Last night, I approved "Far Base One" as my nearby, "pet" station. Later I started trading with Stet Mining as well, for the production yield. Along comes the "Hostile Takeover" quest, where Stet Mining asks me to destroy Far Base One. What? Destroy my pet? No way. I ignore the quest for 20 turns or so. My trade convoy to FB1 gets pillaged during a war. After that war ends, I build another convoy and resume trading with FB1, thus "failing" the quest.

Here's the unusual part: about 8-10 turns after I resume trading with Far Base One, a single Polystralian cruiser/gunboat sails up and takes a shot at it. No melee ships (yet), just softening it up. Hutama has been a pain the whole game, DOWing me earlier and trying to start a dogpile of DOWs against me. I declare on Polystralia, destroy his cruiser threatening FB1, and start sinking more of his fleet. I had sent a submarine up towards the northern ice cap, to sail under the ice and pick up any stray resource pods up there. On its way, my submarine spotted a sizeable Polystralian strike force (2 cruisers, 3 cutters) laying siege to ... yes, Stet Mining.

Questions:

• Does anyone know if the AI players receive the same quests that the human player does, such as Hostile Takeover?
• Are certain stations targeted? Maybe a subset of stations? If each AI faction received a different "victim" for destruction by Hostile Takeover, then I would expect that most stations would end up destroyed during the course of a game, and that is *not* what my experience shows.
• I have not paid attention to whether some leaders/sponsors are more prone to trading with stations than others. I would have expected Hutama to be all about the trades. What's your experience?

I expect that the "mirror image" I observed -- Stet Mining asks for FB1 to be destroyed, ends up getting destroyed -- is just a coincidence. But I don't know enough about quests to be sure.

 

[Tiberiu]

From what I know from reading about affinity quests some time ago (found this thread - https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/fixing-quests.538131/), AI might not even get quests. This seems to be the case as otherwise Apollo AIs would be more quick to level up their affinities than they are. I can't say I am bothered by this since they get a lot of bonuses already. I learned a few things about how quests work by reading the thread I linked so if you want maybe take a look to see if you find something interesting too.

In vanilla Civ Be I think AIs were trying to take out Stations in the early game most of the time. In Rising Tide, from what I noticed, they like to trade with Stations more. I don't really deal with Stations in the early game so I don't know what AIs do with them at that time but I think it is common that Station get taken out by aliens when they are tier 1...

 

[legalizefreedom]

I can't confirm the AI gets the same quests, but they are known to take shots at the stations involved in your quests, presumably to intentionally act against your interests to spice things up.

The Awesome Pods and Ruins mod fixes a bunch of quests in the game that don't work properly otherwise, so I highly recommend all players use it, but esp if you're being frustrated by weirdness with quests.