Nasty Drone Bug Reported

LGM · #1 July 30th, 2002, 06:39 PM

Changing the settings flag would prevent a drone from clearing a minefield to allow a fleet to come in. As it stands today, one drone can clear an entire minefield. The damage to the planet is not as significant as clearing every minefield the drone moves through on its path.

What does it take to get that setting changed for a PBW game? Would it just take message to the administraitor by the host? Would it not affect all games using that Mod set? I I am hosting a 1.67 Standard game.

geoschmo · #2 July 30th, 2002, 06:46 PM

This would require the use of a mod. You could make it an otherwise stock mod with only that change to the settings.txt file. If this is something you want to do, let me know for sure and I can set it up for you on PBW.

Geoschmo

capnq · #3 July 30th, 2002, 09:30 PM

Another way to avoid the problem in new games would be to turn off Drones in game Set-Up/Technology, which would be a lot easier than a mod.

LGM · #4 July 31st, 2002, 07:47 PM

Most people, I figure, want to use Drones since they are new to gold. Turning them off is kind of like going back to 1.49, minus bug fixes and the weapon mount additions. The way I see it, the purpose of buying gold was to get the fix for the combat order problem. Other than that, I see little improved value in the game. We have only seen one patch since January. I guess there are some cosmetic UI changes too. Some might debate that the weapon mount changes were good as planets can be tougher to attack now.

capnq · #5 July 31st, 2002, 09:10 PM

OK, I've done some testing. It looks like a mine that does as least twice as much damage as the drone ought to be able to take will kill the drone, otherwise the drone will shrug off the mines.

This is quite a bit worse than I expected, but I still don't think it's a game killer.

In my tests, a small mine with two Mine Warheads II (400 points damage) would kill a small drone that should have only taken 200, but not one that could take 210. A small mine with one Mine Warhead II and one Mine Warhead III (500 points) would kill the latter drone.

[Edit] BTW, IMO some of those "cosmetic UI changes" in Gold make managing my designs in my v1.49 PBW game seem tedious by comparison.

[ July 31, 2002, 20:16: Message edited by: capnq ]

Baron Munchausen · #6 July 31st, 2002, 10:05 PM

This might be a side effect of the way shields are handled with units. With ships, shields are NOT counted when you are attacked by mines. Does this drone have shields? The shields might be included in its damage totals even when it is hit by mines because of the 'short cut' inclusion of shield damage into the units damage total.

Fyron · #7 July 31st, 2002, 10:12 PM

Capnq, the warheads do damage separately, not combined. The 200 damage warheads on your mines was unable to damage the 210 drone. This is why the first mine did nothing. It wasn't comparing 400 to 210, but 200 to 210 and 200 to 210. The second mine only destroyed the drone because it's second warhead could do 300 damage by itself, which is more than the drone could take.