Auto Scout Picket question

[BobTheJanitor]

From here: http://arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2854

I should probably wait to try it in game, but I'm curious. Is this going to sort the scouts instantly and send them out grouped up, or is this going to fire them out such that you have one scout going through a wormhole per second or something similar? Mainly I'm wanting to make sure that the scouts' cloaking booster is still useful for this and my scouts aren't being fired off one at a time to get decloaked and shot down at every wormhole. Or does this design just assume that you are going to go kill the tach guardians first in order to get any use out of it?

[keith.lamothe]

It's an instantaneous order to each unit in your selection that has cloaking and scouting, exactly as if you had issued the individual orders yourself.  It's not a mode like auto-explore, etc.

So the scouts will be clumped, if they started that way.

[Buttons840]

I wasn't aware scouts had auto-explore, how does that work?

[keith.lamothe]

Select some scouts, alt+right-click empty space, click auto explore.

You can change the keybindings for all that, naturally, but that's the default.


Auto-explore puts scouts into a mode where if they don't have an order they'll automatically pick a nearby planet you don't have scout intel on and go there.  Once they're there they go somewhere else that doesn't have scout intel, etc.  It was developed mainly for the don't-show-unexplored-planets option but it also works for scouting in a "revealed" galaxy with fog-of-war.

The new auto-picket option is for when you want to actually station a scout on the planets in question instead of get a flyby.

Neither is at all efficient about moving the scouts around in maximum-survivability stacks, etc, but they're not intended to be.

[BobTheJanitor]

It's an instantaneous order to each unit in your selection that has cloaking and scouting, exactly as if you had issued the individual orders yourself.  It's not a mode like auto-explore, etc.

So the scouts will be clumped, if they started that way.

Group up scouts, hit button. Awesome, just about what I was hoping for. Follow up question then. My group of, let's say, 10 scouts gets to the next world over, where I currently have no scouts posted. Do they all evade in a clump to the outside of the world, and then leave one behind while the survivors head for the next wormhole? Or does one scout peel off the group and evade while the rest immediately beeline for the next non-scout-containing planet? If the second is the behavior, if that single scout that is headed off to post itself gets shot down immediately, does another one peel off from the group, or will this require sending another group of scouts over or micro-managing for desired results?

[keith.lamothe]

All it does is, the instant you give the order, gives each scout a move order to a specific planet (starting from the nearest one you have no current intel on, and moving out from there).  After that instant, there's nothing special about the order.  So they'll each get to their endpoint and then evade like normal.  It doesn't make any effort to concentrate scouts or double back if one of them got shot down while evading, etc.  Of course, once the "scout wave" is settled you can just send out another one and it'll try to fill in the gaps.

[BobTheJanitor]

It sounds like I'll just need to play with it later after work. I can't tell if this is going to end up with 10 scouts bunched up on the planet next door or if they're all going to try and go to different planets radiating outward from their start point, which sounds like it would result in a bunch of dead scouts.