SE5 Demo Bug Reports & Annoyances/Requests

[dmm]

Missiles can't target drones, and drones can outrun ships. Therefore, ships with only missiles are easy prey to drones. The obvious solution is to put a few PDC or direct-fire weapons on the missile ship. Here is the design flaw: A crucial advantage of missile ships is that they can stay out of range of direct-fire ships. But if you have such weapons on your mainly-missile ship, it will use them to attack any drones EVEN IF THAT BRINGS THE SHIP WITHIN RANGE OF ENEMY MAIN GUNS (thus violating the "Maximum Range" orders). It's like bees to honey; they can't help themselves. And, to make matters worse, the drones can have few engines and lots of armor. So they quickly fall behind the main enemy fleet, causing the mainly-missile ships to run RIGHT THROUGH the line of enemy capital ships, subjecting themselves to devastating point-blank main-gun salvos in their mindless hatred of drones.

Note that you only need one drone, and that it has no purpose other than being bait, so it only needs one engine.

This exploit probably works with fighters and sats too. Sats would be particularly cost-effective.

Note that I am also assuming that the drone-launching fleet has sufficient PDC (or sufficient ships) to withstand the initial missile onslaught.

[Captain Kwok]

That can be remedied by adjusting the strategy for missile ships to target only other ships.

[MasterChiToes]

Captain Kwok said:
That can be remedied by adjusting the strategy for missile ships to target only other ships.

Wouldn't that prevent the point defense from working?

[RonGianti]

MasterChiToes said:

Wouldn't that prevent the point defense from working?

Good question. If so, how about this instead: remove the point defence entirely, create a ship with only point defence, set it to defend (picket?) the missle ships. Would that work?

[Phoenix-D]

A ship will NOT fire at anything its told not to engage, even in self-defense. So your missile ship PDCs would hold fire except at incoming missiles.

EDIT: if you stick seekers, drones, and such at the bottom of the priority list and make sure Type is one of the targeting priorities, the ship should stay away, though..

[MasterChiToes]

sounds like the targeting priorities need to be split into "targets of opportunity/in range targets" and "primary/actively pursued targets"... (not to mention different targeting priorities for different weapon types). Of course, I could be very wrong.

[Captain Kwok]

Aren't PDCs auto-fire for any valid targets - that's why I suggested removing drones from the target list. But if you're going to use direct fire weapons, then like Phoenix-D said, make sure ships are first priority.

[Phoenix-D]

No, PDCs will not fire (on fighters, at least) if the unit is set to Not Engage.