Gifted ships don't fight

[Gorgo]

In on of my PBW games, another player has gifted me several of his ships. When I tried to use them to attack an ememy colony ship and a planet, they did not attack but stayed out of combat! They are labeled as "attack ships" and my own attack ship designs fight in a normal way.

Any ideas?

[Mephisto]

I would guess he has set the designs of your gifted ships to „don’t get hurt“. Try to retrofit them to one of your designs and they should fight normally.

[Puke]

either that or he set a custom strategy where they wont fire on colony ships or civilian populations. you war-criminal, you.

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)

[dmm]

You can't change the strategy without retrofitting? If that's true, then that is hilarious! So you can trade someone a ship filled with advanced racial tech, and it is worthless to them (except for the hull and engines)?!
[edit: And they probably won't realize until they take it into battle! You could trade them a whole fleet! Would the AI EVER figure it out?]

[This message has been edited by dmm (edited 17 October 2001).]

[Puke]

its not that you cant chage the strat until you retrofit it, its that you cant change the strat until the design shows up in your ship list, and gifted ships show up as enemy designs (if at all).

considering that the AI wont figure it out if you trade them a mothballed fleet, my guess is 'no.'

on the other hand, that is a GREAT way to regulate a client state. you can give them ships, and dictate how they are used. you could generate a custom strategy for each ship class or fleet, and when you want them to attack something you let them know, and set it as a target in their strategy.

then you can stop them from turning on you or your allies by disabling their ships from remote. WOW, how slick is that?

I just thought of a billion scenario ideas based loosely on this:

-obviously a valueable tool for spaceborne / groundbased scenario games, based on Kodos' old corporations idea. This is my main insperation for finishing the PCMod, which should be done (in its first Version) sometime in november.

-a cold war game where some players play sponsor nations and others play puppet states. the sponsor nations can not fight directly but give ships to puppet states to further their interests.

-anyone play (post clan invasion) battletech? one race could control a massive stockpile of ships, and players could 'bid' for rights of conquest. whoever came in with the lowest bid to take a millitary goal would be given ships programmed specifically for that goal. or the game would start will all ships distributed to players, and a GM race would 'activate' ships for certain missions by changing their strategy

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)

[Gorgo]

I can't even retrofit or destroy the ships as I have no spaceyard in that area, so these ships are just expensive and pointless.

They even are so far apart that it will take a lot of time for them to meet so I can destroy one of them at least...

[PvK]

Well, y'know, you can put them in a fleet and then give the fleet whatever strategy orders you like.

Of course, if the fleet leader dies, they'll revert to the ship class strategy.

I question whether having the ship in your design list helps this problem, however. It looks to me like you can't even see what enemy ship classes' strategies are, and you don't get captured or gifted ship classes listed in your own ship class list (you probably should, so you could set your own strats for them).

PvK

[Puke]

maybe they will fight ships with weapons, just not planets and unarmed ships?

you could always try asking the former owner to change the strategy for you.

[PvK]

Actually, you could put each such ship in its own fleet, and thus give each one a strategy to use, without worrying about losing the command ship and reverting to the alien strategy.

PvK

[Gorgo]

Puke, you mean if the former owner changes strategies for this class, it will be applied to the ship he has gifted me?

This would be cool...