Floating Eye?

Someone is spying on the world....probably using a TEC scout or something and left a remote drone on one of your worlds.  One of the Advent caps also has the ability to spy on worlds. 

AFAIK the floating eye is the Advent ship's abiilty. I don't think the scout probes leave any visible effects.

The Advent's ability allows the ship to peek at any planet for a while without having to fly there.

Thanks Cykur, that's what I thought, but I wasn't sure.  This game has a high learning curve for me since I've only played FPS for years.

Welcome to the world of RTS then! 

Annatar is probably right about the drones not leaving a visible marker...will have to check next time.  I get foggy on some of the minutia of the game if it doesn't directly involve killing my opponent.

That is the calling card of Clairvoyance, an ability of the Revelation Battlecruiser. It allows the viewing of any gravity well temporarily except for stars.

If you watch an Arcova deploy a sensor probe, all you see is a small black object heading to the planet and landing. Otherwise, it leaves no visible trace that it has deployed a probe. Seeker Vessels with Lingering Presence researched leave no mark either.

I've played my first four games as Vasari, just to familiarize myself with that specie's technology. Had I started with Advent, I probably would have discovered this ability.  Thanks again everyone for all the info and clarification. At this stage every little bit helps! 

It's a great game isn't it?    The Advent are my favorite, but lots and lots of people like the TEC and the Vasari. Something for everyone. 

Have fun,

-Teal

True that. The game does have something for everyone. I play as Vasari and my favorite cap ship is the Jarrasul Evacuator AKA The Great Space Egg, that is because of its ability to colonize, the nanodissasembler it eats anything in its path, and because of the kick ass drain planet ability. Also just some advice or build order these are the very first steps that you should do when the game starts.

1) Build a Capitol Ship factory to get advantage of the free Capitol Ship.

2) Build all the Extractors on your planet preferably the crystal onefirst.

3) Go to the black market buy 100 crystal (Click once) and then go to your planet and upgrade infrastructure, its the green button and in that menu the first button with a person.

4) Buy as many scout frigates as you have phase lanes.

5) Build a Colonizing Capitol Ship

6) Build attack frigates while your cap ship is building, stop building frigates when cap ship is done.

7) For the Capitol Ship give it the colonize ability and a squadron of fighters (always fighters)

8) Take your small fleet and attack the nearest asteroid and destroy the forces there first and then colonize.

9) After you colonize the asteroid research the infrastructure just like you did to your home planet.

10) Build extractors on the asteroid

11) That is all that I will say the rest I will let you find out for yourself.

Hope this helps and welcome to the 4x RTS Genre. Have fun with the game. 

Ps: Never build colonizing frigates waste of money.

Colonizing frigs for TEC and Advent are still useful for their ability to capture neutral extractors.

I always get one or maybe two colonising firgates at the start. Means you can capture asteroid fields and you dont need to waste the first cap ship slot with a support ship.

Takes too long to colonize asteroid or planet with a frig. The point is to explode onto the map in the shortest ammount of time possible.

except for the capture extractor ability on the colony frigs, they nearly useless.  and the Jikara navigators have that ability instead of the Jarun Migrator for the Vasari, so the Vasari have little to no reason to build them, unless it is late game and your fleet is tied up and there are neutral undefended planets nearby.

Now that colony frigates start with full antimatter reserves, they're not nearly as bad.

But they loose almost all the antimater when traveling to another planet. It just takes too long.

Yeah, considering they have no other abilities, I wouldn't mind if they regenerated AM faster while still making it so you couldn't just insta-colonize as soon as you phase into a system.

See where I'm going here.