[bug]: Border wars can end immediately after starting due to some sort of neutral zone violation

[quaris628]

What version of Artemis Cosmos?

v1.2.x

What happened?

One time, when I started a border war, there was an immediate NEUTRAL ZONE VIOLATION message broadcast, and the game was over immediately. I didn't even ready up on any consoles, much less move any player or npc ships. (Unfortunately this also means I didn't ever see the map, so I don't know what it was that was in the neutral zone.)

I don't know for certain, but my guess is that this was caused by a player ship spawning inside the neutral zone. During a subsequent border war test, my ship spawned incredibly close to the border, and if it was offset from DS2 in a different direction it could have easily spawned inside the neutral zone:

Increasing the number of player ships might help you reproduce at a higher frequency.

Other details what mission, setup, etc.

Legendary Missions with Eastern Front mod. (But the mod doesn't change anything about the border war scenarios, nor does it change spawn positions of anything, so I'm fairly confident you can reproduce in vanilla legendary missions.)

I had 8 player ships and difficulty level 2. Map settings were left at their default.

[quaris628]

Because of #246 if this happens then you have to reconfigure your server settings and ship configurations all over again. Which is going to be a fair bit of effort in the case of Eastern Front's scramble events where we randomize each of the 8 available ship types (and in which we'll probably be playing border wars frequently).