Nasty surprise, and a possible bug....

[dgsoles]

Hey there, I'm just jumping into this game lately.  After getting my butt handed to me by attacking the command station of a IV world bordering my home planet, I started another game.  AI 7, easier type.  I had a little better starting position this time, and 3 I planets bordered my homeworld.  I proceeded to take these over, and by 2.5 hours, I had all three under my control (I was taking my sweet time).

So, I discovered a scouting strategy, and I'm sure many others here use it.  I upgraded to lvl II scouts, because my lvl I's weren't making it past lvl III worlds.  Well, my lvl II scouts didn't fare a whole lot better, they still couldn't map out the whole galaxy.  So, I built a transport, and loaded them into it.  When the transport would get into a new system, I would pilot it to a safe spot, unload the scouts to catalogue the planet, and then load the scouts back in, and then bring the transport to the next system.  Now, I still had to do this three different times before I finally mapped the entire galaxy. 

Now, here is the possible bug.  As you can imagine, having my transport and scouts go in a mapping planets kinda got the AI riled up on those planets.  So, with each planet I would "visit", the number of threat ships would increase, until I had just shy of 200 threat ships coming for me.  Whatever, I didn't care very much.  That is, until a wave of 65 CORE bombers showed up.  At that point, ALL of my ships and turrets were level I, but I did have extra laser turrets I was using for defense (I love to blow up the command center of a planet and lure the fleet into a deathtrap, and then come in with my fleet and mop the system up).  Well, needless to say, I had my fleet engaging those pesky bombers, who would take out a frigate and turrets with a single shot.

The bug, you ask?  I also place 6 tractor beam turrets at every hostile wormhole, and almost all of those bombers got stuck at the wormhole they entered on.  The 5 that didn't get stuck tried to run to my home planet, but I had a forcefield and more defenses covering that wormhole.  Now, after those bombers that had gotten stuck completely obliterated my defenses, this is where the bug comes in.  They NEVER targeted my tractor beams.  Obviously, they didn't consider them a threat, as my fleet was also engaging them.  But, if the AI was really wanting to get to my homeworld, that fleet of 65 bombers would've taken about 10 seconds to disintegrate my tractor beams, possibly another 20 seconds to destroy the forcefield covering my homeworld wormhole, and then, well, it will be a short game after that (I still had defenses on my homeworld...but these ships were brutal).  However, the bombers just stayed stuck to the tractor beams while my fleet, ever so slowly, picked them off, one by one.  Now, I sustained HEAVY losses, I think about 1/2 my fleet got wiped out in the engagement.

So, is this a bug, or is this how it's supposed to be?  Personally, I'm grateful that I was even able to defend against those suckers.

Doug

[keith.lamothe]

The bombers were shooting at something, right?  If so it's probably not a bug as the ship behavior routine really doesn't have any way of distinguishing between "I am caught in a tractor beam" and "my whole attack fleet is caught in tractor beams".  In the first case, you may just want to do as much damage as you can to other enemy ships rather than waste shots on the tractor, in the second case you *may* want to focus on the tractors first.  I say "may" because the question is "what is the goal of this attack fleet"?  Is it trying to make a beeline for your home command station, or is it just trying to destroy lots of stuff?  Basically it was pursuing the second goal, and apparently doing a pretty good job of it

Of course, the "fleet" as a whole was not pursuing any particular goal, just the individual ships deciding to shoot at stuff.

[Fleet]

I too have used this method to scout, and currently it does seem to provide very cheap, far reaching scouting.

As much as I hate to suggest...perhaps scouts should not be able to be put in transports?

[Nightchill]

After reading about this scouting method, I tried it in my current game.
It does allow cheap early scouting, bur requires a lot of management.

The only other way I have been able to fully scout is using the scout drone mark IV.

The scout IV requires knowledge, access to a factory IV, is slow, but is very easy to manage as there is an audio notification when a scout gets to a new system.

[raptor331]

I've recently discovered that method as well, I'm relieved that I'm not the only one just now figureing it out as well.

I do believe that scouts should be aloud to do this, after all, its what happens in the real world, you protect the scouts with a small task force or with a carrier until you reach the insertion point, of course as you get further into the game, this gets harder because of the ever increasing power of the AI, but I don't think this would count as a cheap way of scouting.