1(a). Do Abysmal Rift Traps always trigger on the first attack click, or are they like Krionus Virus Traps, tripping after 1 or more attacks?
1(b). Do other offensive actions like (i)artifacts and (ii)sabbing trip Rift Traps?

2(a). Can Quantum Bio Vaporizers be used to drop the population of a planet below 10 (I am aware of the number of Vaporizers required to do this for various population sizes if it is possible)?
2(b). If so, can the planet then be invaded without ever being attacked?

questions id love the answer to but never wanted to ask as i dont think alot of people would think of doing that.

id guess yes for both parts of 2, but no idea on one.

If the answer to 2a and 2b is yes and the answer to 1b is no, then a planet would need a Rift Trap and a Warp Inhibitor in order to stay safe, but if artifacts or abilities do trip the Rift, then only the trap is required to essentially protect it completely for a month (assuming you'll sign on before the effect of the trap wears off).

unless 1a is just a chance from each attack which would mean you would need a good bit of pop too just to be safe.

You can use bio vaporizers to drop population enough to where you can invade.

From the abysmal rift traps I have seen set off, they look like it was first attack..

Is it safe to assume there were artifacts used before the first attack that didn't trigger the trap?

I believe the 2 debuffs were used before bio vaps.

traps are set off in the order they were placed
so no they dont go off on the first attack if you have other traps set

if you have 3 traps then a rift trap it will take 4 attacks to set the rift trap off



no. artifacts do not set off traps

i know all this cause i recently had multiple planet attacks happen where these scenarios were played out.

But if no other trap is set are you saying it will go off with one attack?

as far as i can tell. yes

every click will set off a trap

1a. yes. it will get triggered on first attack.
1b. most likely not.

2b. yes. ive seen it done.
2b. yes.

bio-vaps. seems a bit OP to me.

bio vaporizers aren't that common. on a planet with 600 population you would need 6 of these. you can only set the trap if the planet hasn't been attacked in the last week giving you two options. you could either risk the possibilty if someone attacked it but has left it alone for a week(they could now take it) or you could temp flux it. scan your best planets and check to see if they have been scanned. p.s. vaporizers are meant to be used(in my opinion) when a planet has been taken from you but you alert it and only have 12 hours to take it since they fluxed it. dropping the population while they're on is hard and a coordinated attack should take less than a minute.

Common enough that most decent legions could scrape together enough vaporizers to make a planet with 10K pop invadeable without attacking. Seems overpowered to me. It would be like having a Krionite Torpedo equivalent for hull that would always cut hull in half.


I have to disagree about the use of a month long trap. It seems to me that it is clearly there to allow you to protect yourself from the scans that happen between your probings. What I do when a planet has been scanned is separate from what I do to protect a planet in case it gets scanned (or, when cloaking, to prevent it from being scanned). It operates in a similar role to the Xecti Pathway Detector for me.

It seems like the game design took this into account. Just as an experiment, I tried to lower a planet to invasion level population with QBV. When the population hit 14, I received a message that the population was too low to use another. There doesn't appear to be a way to get the population from 20 to 10 without actually attacking.

That is good to hear. I wonder if that was a recent update, as I have heard anecdotally from a number of players that they can drop the population below 10.