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1) If your over a L6 and have a safe place to be podded to arn't you supposed to be podded into a retreat sector?
2) If your over SD and you have a safe place to pod to and you get podded arn't you supposed to live to fight saying you dont hit a fig?
3) Does online flee off affect podded ships?
4) Can someone MAC a attack fast enough to overcome the podding and get your pod also?
Pod flee is tricky. It's not really about retreat sectors, but how you've gotten podded.
There's "passive podding" and "aggressive podding" algos. "Passive podding" is like getting hit by cannons and blowing yourself up on a planet and stuff. "Aggressive podding" is when someone attacks you and pods you.
In the first case you'll generally flee back to the last sector you had a sector entry event in. There's actually a field in tedit in the player profile that holds this info, so it's critical to know what updates it. Exit enter, or lifting to space if you've slept on the planet, or zdy, or moving, or a handful of other things triggers an entry event. That's why it's important to "touch space" if you have a habit of sleeping on a planet (find a safe sector w/ corp limps and armids, lift and reland) so your "last sector" has an update. I've seen pods flee across the universe, lines of figs, mines, whatever, in these circumstances. I don't think there's any limiting factor there, the only thing that matters is you have a last sector in your profile.
In "aggressive podding" you don't flee back to a safe sector like you'd think. The game actually plots various random courses out from your podding sector and tries to find a safe route. It'll take you along that safe route as far as it can, and leave you there. But here-in is the rub, not all sectors are equal and not all courses are equal, and not all sectors are considered safe. Enemy figs are clearly not safe. Sectors w/ enemy mines are also, usually, not considered safe... altho I've seen ppl flee into mines if the flee sector is just 1 sector back (seems single hop courses aren't quite handled the same way when it calculates safe routes). If the enemy has a lot of the universe gridded when the game goes hunting for a course it might not find one, even if you have a sector nearby that's clear. In that case, you're toast.
This actually has a lot of practical applications that few ppl have developed. Not only is it possible, in a lot of circumstances, to predict a person's pod course... but it's also possible to grid out patterns around your base in order to keep ppl from podding out. I routinely do the latter when I setup a base, I run a traffic analysis from the base and passive grid the higher traffic sectors (and active grid any that are figged by the enemy) in hopes that if we're ever attacked ppl won't pod out.
If you're over stardock it will depend on a few circumstances. First, are you warping in or out or sitting there? If you're warping out, and podded, the pod will actually twarp out if the move command has already been sent. Kindof strange, but I've seen it happen a lot. On the other hand if you've not gotten the twarp started and you get podded out by someone attacking I think you can figure out now that there are times where you won't pod out.
Does online flee effect podding? Not that I know of. Can a macro overcome podding? I've actually seen it happen, but it's under special circumstances. You know how I said the game has to search for a pod course? Well it seems that there are times when the game is a bit slow on this... whether it's a CPU thing, a timing thing, something particular to the universe, I don't quite know. But if the game is a bit slow on it's calculations and if the enemy bursts enough attacks all at once... the attacks will get buffered in before your pod is sent on it's merry way... and yea, you'll be #SD#. This doesn't always happen, so you can't count on it, but most ppl that play in aggressive games send 2 bursts at once just in case it happens. I've got my attack macros all coded that way, except in games where a single shot from an enemy would pod me after my 2nd wave... in which case I prefer safety and switch to single shots.