Ran into an interesting situation in a game the other day. After photoning an opponent I hop in an IC and proceed to surround the sector. I'm evil and this is a stock edit so I have the choice of flying an IC or a CFS. My opponent is in an ISS and has created several planets in the sector and is periodically lifting and landing on them so being in a slow ship I can't get a shot at him (ship delay is 1/4). So I deploy some fighters planning on hopping in my CFS and bringing a planet in to finish him off. At this point my interdictor was on and he tried moving from the sector - which triggered a sector entry event putting him at the fighter prompt where he was able to retreat to an adjacent sector. This seems like a double bug because he should not have been able to retreat since he had no turns and since I had my interdictor on. (I did confirm with him later that he had no turns.)

Ship IG's won't hold a trader from retreating. A planet IG will however. Also you can retreat with 0 turns.

Nod. But he still should've only been adj, lol. Why not go kill him? (Note: In an unlim game the retreat would also restore his ability to move again.)

As for the lift/land thing, adets are a wonderful thing. Macro move in, land, abort, retreat. Then build a 2nd macro to move in, pop em all, then holoscan and retreat. You should be able to survive all that in a CFS as long as you've got full figs going in, worst case he gets a single hit on ya, best case he's in a pod.

I agree with Scrat and think this is a bug, as opposed to just being an interesting oddity in the game that should be worked around and/or manipulated. Just to add an opinion in support of the first post, I think that if a player has no turns remaining (due to photon or otherwise) he/she should not be allowed to retreat, flee, auto-flee, or do anything besides being a sitting duck, so I would favor an adjustment to the game to change this behavior. As far as the shipboard IG not holding a trader from fleeing, but a planetary IG doing so, I would favor a change to the shipboard IG behavior to make it hold traders in position. The intent of the IG is to hold someone in the sector, and I don't believe the documentation makes a distinction between shipboard or planetary IG's, so in my opinion this would be an undesirable discrepancy (i.e. bug), not just an interesting quirk.

Here's an interesting question to pose, though: At what point does something that started out as an accidental, unintended functionality of the game become a proper, accepted part of the game? For example, MegaRob is unquestionably a "bug" and is even referred to as such by the software itself, but no one would dream of "patching" it. It adds a whole branch of interesting Red strategy that I think has a valuable place in the game. I sort of feel like a lot of things that have been mentioned here on this forum have been quickly dismissed with explanations of the workaround or further elaboration of the aberration, but the author did ask for bug reports, so why not accept them for what they are?

Maybe the discussion should center around whether the bug being reported adds an interesting dimension to the game that needs to be left intact so as to avoid damaging strategies the community wants to preserve. All of us are used to working around the bugs we know of in the game, but we wouldn't have reported them as bugs unless we saw them as something to be corrected instead of an important, undocumented aspect of how you play the game. Does anyone have any strong feelings about the Retreat Bug / IG Bug described here being an important quirk of gameplay that needs to be preserved? I'd be interested to hear why if so - you already know my opinion.

Shrug. I use turnless retreats all the time, to moth IGs, to flee when torped, whatever. I script it into practically every moth macro I use, so if I pod out and go flying... it retreats me off enemy figs and calls saveme. Doesn't matter if I get torped or not, it'll still retreat. Comes in handy.

I like it, but I don't think really it matters one way or another. Stay or go, it's an easy adaptation. Of course that's just assuming JP would bother to "fix" something that players use... which I don't think he would. I mean we can't even get fixes to bugs that matter, like the various ones that kill a server.