drone launching bug?

[Puke]

so you have a planet, or a ship, or whatever. and its packing some drones, but otherwise minding its own business. Then one of your allies wanders by, and parks next to it. Then another one of you allies comes along to kick the butt of the first ally, whom he happens to be at war with.

So your two pals duke it out in the sector where your drone carying thing is. combat insues. your drones launch automatically, even though you are not fighting (the same thing happens with fighters, by the way, except that you can recover them).

Then your drones sit in space, wasting supplies, and cant be recovered. so you use them, or lose them. maybe you break a treaty and blow away one of the allies that just cost you a ship/planet load of drones.

not only is this inconvenient, but its a potential exploit if the one or both of your allies were actually plotting against you, and wanted to force you to waste your drones.

I dont know how easy this is to fix, im guessing "not very." i think it would still be nice to have fixed..

[Nebraskan]

I have seen a similar problem. I play single player games and usually use tactical combat. However sometimes when a planet with weapons platforms is attacked by just 1 ship or a fleet I know it can beat easily I use strategic combat to save time. When I do this with a planet that has drones I can see in the combat window that the first thing my planet does is launch all of its drones at the ships, even the anti-planet drones, which is an extremely stupid strategy. It wastes a planet full of drones for a minor attack. Disgusting.

[geoschmo]

What if he changed it so that drones launched during combat could be recovered at the end of combat, provided that the launching ship or planet were not destroyed of course, but that drones launched outside of combat could not be recovered as is the case now.

That would definetly fix the problem, but would it make drones too strong?

Geoschmo

[Rollo]

Great idea, Geo .

I don't think it'll make drones too strong. This way they could be used much better for defense and also a lot of AI problems with drones would be fixed with that.

Rollo

[Baron Munchausen]

Recovery of drones launched in combat would help the situation quite a bit since the AI doesn't seem to be able to gauge a threat and launch a reasonable number. BUT... it's still wasteful to launch drones against the wrong target type. Losing 50 anti-planet drones that you were planning to use in the assault on a heavily defended alien homeworld because some stupid colony or scout ship popped up in your assault fleet's way is really frustrating. The anti-planet warheads will not do damage against the wrong target type even if the drone hits and so the drone is wasted, not to mention it still gets exposed to enemy defensive fire and so could get destroyed -- again for no reason since the appropriate target was not present. If he changed drones to be recoverable after 'automatic' launch in combat AND at least made the AI check if a target of the appropriate type was present before launching then drones would be much less of a waste in fleet combat. And no, I don't think these changes would make them 'too powerful'. It would make them work correctly so the AI could be programmed to use them. As it is you're smarter to not let the AI use drones.

[ September 04, 2002, 18:15: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Puke]

you know, you could just make different stratiges for your anti planet drones, and force them not to target ships...

I like Geo's plan, that sounds like a good fix!