Can anyone explain how Unbidden works?

[Red Purger]

This is the second time I've been hit with an unbidden event. The first time, I lost badly, since they spawn inside my territory. This time I am more prepared. Not only did they spawn on the other side of the galaxy inside of a huge AI empire, but I have all chokepoints locked down with Citadels and maxed out kinetic defense platforms as well as 4 fleets of ships each with over 100k fleet power. I already took down a fallen empire, too, and have access to their darkmatter tech.

Unfortunately I don't seem to understand how the Unbidden work. They pretty much came right for me. Despite spawning inside of an AI empire, they don't really seem to care about them much. All of their fleets charged directly towards my empire, cutting a swath through the other guy's territory in what is essentially a straight line. I can hold them off on my front line pretty easily, but then I ran into a problem.

The unbidden seem to be spawning small fleets 1 to 2 systems behind my chokepoints. If I hadn't caught this in time, I would have lost a lot of territory. Can someone explain how they are doing this? I thought Unbidden could only spawn inside their own territory? I thought maybe they were using jump drives, but this happened three times now in the total absence of any Unbidden fleets anywhere near the front line. These systems where they are spawning these smaller fleets are always within 2 star systems to my front line outposts, are not near the edge of the galaxy, and are not near any unclaimed systems.

I'm really at a loss. Can anyone explain what is happening?

[Seaghauwn]

do you have wormholes in your turf?

[Red Purger]

Originally posted by Seaghauwn:

do you have wormholes in your turf?

No wormholes. I do have a single gate, but it's nowhere near where they are spawning, and the other side of it isn't even controlled by the unbidden.

[Seaghauwn]

I cannot think of anything other than them using their psi jump drives, they might be getting through a wormhole close to you and then jumping or a L gate in your system may be the cause.

when I tested the unbidden and they did use their jump drives on me when they got close enough, they jumped a fleet straight into one of my blackhole systems and my capital was closer, so it looks like they might leave the capital for last because they jumped right over it for a blackhole system.

[Druitt]

I'm a little puzzled as well. The first time I saw them, they seemingly spawned their portal and anchors in adjacent systems a couple of hops from my capital and I had a couple of 100K+ fleets on them instantly and destroyed them quickly. They cropped back up briefly -- I didn't realize the while portal/anchor thing and I think it was the anchors.

Anyhow, another invasion it seemed like the anchors were distributed across the galaxy. If this is true, perhaps you have an anchor in your system, but the portal is on the other side of the galaxy?

[Mennan]

Unbidden ships have jump drives installed so they can teleport around if they want, they also ignore normal FTL inhibitors. So if a Unbidden finds a system that has 2 much defense they will just teleport around it and go for lesser defended targets.
As they destroy their construction ships will install anchors which render the original unbidden portal unkillable.
The anchors also buff the unbidden reinforcements, the more anchors the faster they spawn in more fleets.

[Abvale]

The contingency can be countered with choke points. The unbidden can cause a mess thats why you keep 2-3 fleets nearby with jump drives and hit those portals asap

[Sabaithal]

There is a silver lining: Fleets that use jump drives suffer a bit of a debuff temporarily, last I checked anyway (which granted, its been a while).

[Druitt]

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

There is a silver lining: Fleets that use jump drives suffer a bit of a debuff temporarily, last I checked anyway (which granted, its been a while).

I thought it was something like a 50% debuff for six months or something pretty strong. It's made me not jump unless there's a serious weakness at the other end. But I might be totally misreading it.

I can agree with the ASAP. The first time I ever encountered them was a disappointment: the portal appeared two hops from my core systems where I had several 100K+ fleets sitting. Within about a minute (real time), I'd single-handedly totally destroyed them. I think some of them emergency jumped out and then because they had no friendly territory they appeared in an adjacent system and another minute and they too were gone. I don't think they created any anchors at all -- and I didn't realize that it could happen -- and it was too easy.

(For that matter, the same game had a similar thing happen when I later opened the L-gate. Went in with Unbidden technology and the Grey weren't really a challenge either. In fact, the biggest challenge was that I was naive and had established open borders and so pretty much every empire immediately jumped into the L-cluster and it was a crazy race to build the starbase and cut everyone else off. Hasn't been that easy since.)

[Elitewrecker PT]

Originally posted by Mennan:

Unbidden ships have jump drives installed so they can teleport around if they want, they also ignore normal FTL inhibitors. So if a Unbidden finds a system that has 2 much defense they will just teleport around it and go for lesser defended targets.
As they destroy their construction ships will install anchors which render the original unbidden portal unkillable.
The anchors also buff the unbidden reinforcements, the more anchors the faster they spawn in more fleets.

I think it's the Contingency that can ignore inhibitors.

[Mennan]

Apparently the crisis factions are set to choose a rival and kill that person first. This is why you see the crisis beeline for the player or some other random empire in the galaxy instead of just attacking everyone nearby. It seems likely that Unbidden choose Psionic empires as their rivals while Contingency choose empires that went Synthetic (or possibly cyborgs now to).

The problem was FTL inhibitors would block their pathing and the Crisis would just sit in their spawn point waiting for the path to open up.

Apparently the Devs solution to this was to re-script them to ignore FTL inhibitors.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-contigency-ignores-planetary-ftl-inhibitors.1491040/#post-27793530

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-unbidden-ignore-ftl-inhibitors-and-gateway-ownership-lem-v3-1-1-22a5.1491881/?prdxDevPosts=1
From what i can tell this is still the case. Unbidden and Contingency both ignore FTL inhibitors while the Scourge do not.

[Sabaithal]

Not sure why, lore wise, unbidden would hate psionics enough to go after them. The condition for getting them to appear is ANY jump drives, not just psi-jump drives.

[flintfakeer]

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

Not sure why, lore wise, unbidden would hate psionics enough to go after them. The condition for getting them to appear is ANY jump drives, not just psi-jump drives.

Probably find them tasty. They are hunting after all.