I've been playing this game for a long time now, and the situation I've ran into only happened to me once, so it already doesn't look like a serious issue, but it's so bizarre that I've decided I'd share it.
Also, I'm not sure whether or not should I post it in this section or the modded section instead, but I doubt it's caused by the mods I'm using, since the only ones I'm running are Nexerelin, Dynasector and a bunch of cosmetic mods, like Audio Plus. None of these seems to have any impact on in-battle behavior.
Alright, to the point. I've started a battle, and at the beginning, just for *** and giggles, I've been shining Ion Beams at my own allied Heron's shield (it was shielding itself from collision, as it was flying in close proximity to my flagship). I know, people do weird things out of boredom, and it's easy to get bored when you're piloting an Astral, which moves at the velocity of a one-legged man driving a monocycle with a square tire.
Suddenly, something weird happened.
Literally all of the ships (equipped with shields) on the screen activated their shields. Yes, that includes fighters. Didn't capture that in the screenshot below, but all of the bombers behind my Astral had active shields as well.
As you can see, there were no enemies yet to shield themselves from.
But it doesn't end here. When enemies appeared, it turns out the other fleet had perpetually active shields as well. Unfortunately, I didn't think of capturing any further screenshots... The battle turned out pretty hilarious, as it became apparent that all of the ships are stuck with their shields on - they would never drop them, even when on high flux and/or facing a swarm of sabots flying their way. Things went pretty haywire when everyone all over the place started rapidly overloading.
Overloads however seemed to knock them back into normal mode of operation. I regret I didn't have any phase ships - I'm curious if they would be stuck as well.
Has anyone else witnessed this phenomenon?