Just set up and finished our first game of Twilight. Six player game with none of us having played before seemed to go fairly smoothly. However an issue arose during a Distant Sun event that came up. A player moved two Dreadnoughts carrying 2 ground forces each (because of appropriate tech) into a system and landed them on a planet with the Automated Defense token. Reads as follows:

AUTOMATED DEFENSE SYSTEM
Roll 2 dice. For each 6+ lose 1 ship in
this system and one landing Ground
Force. If no Ground Forces remain on
this planet, it remains uncontrolled. The
first player to successfully invade this
planet removes this counter and may
place one free PDS unit on the planet.

The dice were rolled and scored a single hit. We removed the ground force but were conflicted about the fact that Dreadnoughts can take two hits. Literalists felt that the card says "lose a ship" but others felt that it should simply damage a Dreadnought in the same manner as a PDS.

Has there been an official comment on this? The FAQ seemed devoid of details on this instance.

RustedCorpse said:

The ADS is not a PDS unit. It's a token with special rules all its own. One of those rules happens to be that you get a free PDS when you take the planet, but that's incidental. The Dreadnought should've been destroyed flat out. PDS units shooting at invading GFs don't usually damage ships in orbit at all, so the fact that ships are affected in any way is already proof that the ADS varies from a regular PDS.

If the designers had wanted it to be treated like a PDS, they could've written the rules as "there's a PDS on this planet that shoots at eveything that tries to land."

Thanks, just seemed excessive if someone's poor warsun tried to land.

RustedCorpse said:

Indeed. The possibility of tokens like this showing up on planets adjacent to your homesworld and ruining your initial fleet is one of the reasons why people who don't like Distant Suns don't like Distant Suns.

I kind of enjoy the randomness, but there are a couple variant rules to look at if you want to tweak the experience (I'm thinking in particular about the one where you make sure "hard" tokens stay away from initial systems.) Or you could just remove the ones you don't like, but that's a slippery slope. =)

I enjoy the randomness there, especially given a proper fighter escort can avoid most of the worse catastrophes. While I have you though, on the Muaat card the racial advantage is the ability (for a command token) to produce 2 fighters anywhere where there is a War Sun or a Space dock, assuming you did this at a space dock would it stack with Sareen Tools, and not activate the system?

RustedCorpse said:

It wouldn't stack with Sarween Tools because that tech only applies to the Build phase of a Tactical or Transfer action, however, I don't think that racial actually costs resources in the first place. You pay a CC and two fighters appear, that is all.

Edit: Yep, checked the Muaat race sheet and it says "two free fighters or one free destroyer" so there's no resource cost for Sarween to influence anyway. Paying a CC and an action to make it happen isn't exactly small potatoes, either.