I think I know what happened to Gryfalcon here.

When you have a pirate encounter 2 events happen:

- you get a diplomacy window
- you get an unresolved encounter

Both events must be resolved and they must be resolved in this order. If you close or dismiss the diplomacy window and then click "Attack" on the encounter event informatio screen (the stripe at the bottom of the screen) the encounter will be resolved. Since you are the attacker, you have better chances of getting away.

Lets say our scout survived the battle. It can now be ordered to move to another star system. The little ships will visually leave the system (I know that they are still there but thats what you see on screen) If you dismissed the diplomacy window, you have no more open events and click on "Next turn". Since the diplo-window was not resolved but dismissed it will get auto resolved, resultung in *another* encounter (the pirates deciding to attack) and *another* battle and since its auto, you will lose. (I don't think the auto-scout will ty to flee)

I just tested this sequence, the events happen exactly as described. Only difference was I did not dismiss the diplomacy window so it hung around a bit obscuring my view. I will upload the gane now for you to look at. (Its a Yoral game after 9 turns)

Regards, Stephan

Dinkelsen wrote: I just tested this sequence, the events happen exactly as described. Only difference was I did not dismiss the diplomacy window so it hung around a bit obscuring my view. I will upload the gane now for you to look at. (Its a Yoral game after 9 turns)

Thanks for the upload. I believe you're entirely correct about what's going on here. Attacking the NPCs before finishing the interaction ought to be illegal, but, as of r12039, it was still sometimes possible.

There's a patch on dev (r12058) that should prevent you from attacking before resolving the diplomacy window -- which I believe will make these sorts of situations considerably less confusing.