17 May 2026: NPC tuning & mission-target fix
All faction NPCs now sit at rank 100 · Destroy missions spawn the correct ship class · Backfill applied to active destroy missions
Faction NPCs at rank 100
- HCG, GTA, Church, The Lost, Sharne High Council, Trade Alliance, House Veliro are now seeded at rank 100 in every galaxy. They were sitting at rank 1 like a freshly-incorporated player, which let small empires read the world incorrectly: a faction is an established power, not a rookie. The rule is enforced by a trigger on the player table so it survives future seed-code changes and applies automatically to new galaxies.
Destroy missions: spawn the actual class the mission asks for
- "Destroy 3 × Medium Cruiser belonging to Trade Alliance in Xi Gate" had no ships to fight. The mission generator was correctly recording the target ship class on the objective, but the spawner only looked at the unit-type id (which is left blank for class-based objectives) and fell back to "the most common ship the faction already owns": usually a Trade Ship, not a Medium Cruiser. Two failure modes followed: either the wrong class spawned (and killing them didn't tick the objective, because the engine matches on class), or nothing spawned at all (if the faction had no fleet at the moment of accept). Both cases left the player walking into an empty system.
- The spawner now respects the requested combat class. When the mission says "Medium Cruiser," the spawner now picks a Medium Cruiser the faction already owns; if they have none, it spawns a Medium Cruiser of the faction's own race (Kain Class Cruiser for the Derulons, etc.). Only when the mission has no class restriction does it fall back to the old "any hull" logic. Existing in-flight destroy missions on every running galaxy had their fleets topped up by the migration, so the broken ones are completable as of this patch.