[SOLVED] Boarding crew not cloned when enemy ship warped out

[amdreallyfast]

I had two Lanius that I used as boarding crew for automated scout vessels (they have no atmosphere, so Lanius are rather nice), but I didn't manage to stop it from warping out. I thought that my cloning vats would resurrect them, but no dice. They simply went "poof" and disappeared. My cloning vats were powered and not disabled in any way at the time that the scout ship warped out.

I didn't find another instance of this, so perhaps it is a corner case in which boarding crew to the atmosphereless scout vessels are not tagged as having died if the ship warps out.

Bummer too. They were a good boarding party pair.

[5thHorseman]

Clone bays work oddly in the FTL universe. I think they're akin to an emergency teleport/medbay system. When your guys die, it kicks off and teleports them into the clone bay which uses their atoms to reconstruct them exactly as they were right before they died except with full health.

So, if your people don't die, they can't be teleported back. If they die at a beacon you're not at (which I assume eventually happened to your Laniuses) then they can't be teleported back.

Why can't you teleport them back to the clone bay when they're not dead as an emergency measure? I assume it's for the same reason that you can't attach the bomb teleporters (or boarding drone engines) to more powerful missiles: Gameplay balance

[bobthe]

I suspect 5thHorseman is correct. The unit has to actually die on your screen. I even got an event once where one of my crew stayed behind on some planet to help with a viral outbreak, and there was even a custom message to me stating that he would not be cloned because he was still alive out there somewhere in the universe, just not on my ship. I assume the same applies to units that are alive on an enemy ship when it jumps away. Teleport them back quickly or you lose em!

[KrYpton]

I'm not sure if I remember correctly but when my boarding crew was jumped away a couple time on the mantis cruiser.

[amdreallyfast]

So not a bug. Alright. I'll have to be more careful about that in the future. Thanks!

[Jai]

Actually, the reason for this is Federation protocol. Federation law prohibits simultaneous copies of an individual. This regulation is mentioned in several events when a crewmember is lost but not killed. It is presumed that when the enemy ship warps out with your crew on board, your crew may have surrendered and been taken prisoner, so cloning them would be a violation.

In short, despite the fact that the fate of the galaxy/universe/local star cluster/whatever hinges on your mission, you play by the rules instead of massacring every enemy ship with an army of clones of Robert the Confused Mantis.

The good news is, everyone else out there with a clone bay is surprisingly obedient of this rule as well.