Does this mean the planet is about to self-destruct or something?

We're getting this message about one (or more) of my corpmate's planets, and naturally, it gives away his sector...

That message is generated at extern , when planets in sector are overloaded.

Type V from the command prompt , and it will tell you the
max planets per sector.
Anything over that value is considered overloaded , and stand a chance of collision ..
and WILL make it to the dailies and give up the base sector.


Hope this answers your question.

Is there a way to prevent this? I am just getting back into TW, and I used to have my awesome super defended planet destroyed by someone just overloading the planets in my sector before I get a planet twarp... One time it happened before I could off load all of my stuff (before I even noticed actually, as it was done to me right before extern, and I was unlucky that my main planet collided) If a Sysop sets the max planets to 255 will that lower the probability of it hapening, or is this a strategy that I just have to live with... :-p

That would be new. just don't put 256 planet in that sector.

It only happens if you're over the planet limit per sector.

2 planets collide. So your odds of being one of them is...
1/X + 1/(X-1)

Where X is the number of planets in the sector. The
number over the limit doesn't matter, it just matters
that you're over or not.

So...
If you've got 10 planets, then you've got 1/10 + 1/9, or a 21.1% chance.

So if you've got 255 planets...
1/255 + 1/254 is about 0.79% of a chance (less than 1%).

How do you prevent it if you can't up the planet limit? Simple.
Blow planets back down to the limit.

This means, also, that the more planets you have per sector
the less chance any one planet is to collide. So if you can't
det the planets down, then pop a bunch of them so you lower
your odds.

lol.. Thanks for the TIP.. The game I was in (if I remember) had 5 planets as the max, and while I was asleep I got attacked. I had a huge planet with tons of fighters, etc. He generated 1 extra planet, and when I woke up, bang.. my entire planet was gone, me included... He took out hundreds of thousands of fighters, millions of credits, tons of shields and ore with one lousy torpedo... lol... Ever since then, I have not been big on putting a lot of time and resources into my planets.

Instead of creating a new thread, I may as well ask here. What are some things I need to know about photon torpedos. Seems like they could ruin my day and a lot of hard work as well.

Get hit and you lose your turns.

Fired @ a sector with a planet and the unshielded cannons cant fire and Military reaction on planet is off during "wave"

That's about all there is to it.