How do I convince my dread pilots they are flying a stand-off weapon?

[AdamK]

Playing on 100 planet map in my second major game, set at Easy for now (astonishing game btw, deserves to be a spiritual sequal to Total Ahnihilation more than SupCom ever did) with my economy more or less solid and the first AI cleaned up in a 7 x Raid Starship attack down a 3 system long chain.

So far so good. Learning a lot and enjoying myself. But there's a ton of cleaning up to do between the IV and the V systems, and the second AI is getting aggressive now and I'm spread out, so most of my fleet is needed elsewhere and money is tight keeping up with rebuilding ships after waves. I may have taken the system ninja style, but I don't really have the ships to blow up clearing that much high end defensive gear the brute force way.

I'd still like to use these AI home systems, but there's no huge urgency in that area. So I've sent in my half-dozen dreads on system cleanup duty at stand-off range to gradually clean up all those evil turret clusters, while I'm doing more important things elsewhere.

My problem is that about halfway through the cleanup job I dropped a command station to start taking the resources, and all of a sudden my dreads have decided that they aren't stand-off weapons after all, and clearly using their weapons at a range of a bazillion just isn't manly. Instead, they seem to take being "mobile" (which I need to have the node for to have any chance keeping on top of the waves) as license to fly their dreads into the range of the turrets and get themselves killed.

I have the dreads set to prefer laser turrets (which the AI has a ton of) but does "prefer" actually mean "... to the point of ignoring the fact you can outrange everything else and just go get yourself blow up".

When mobile, how do I get the dreads to avoid straying into danger, and to just clear out whatever is closest?

[keith.lamothe]

By "mobile" and "node" do you mean that you've built the mobile-military-auto-frd node?

And the preferences are fairly strong though generally it shouldn't make them get any closer to their prefered target than they need to get 100% hit chance.  If none of the preferred type is around, it shouldn't have any impact.

On the other hand, you aren't the only one to suddenly start noticing idiot pilot behavior of this variety, so if you could post a save where the dreads are clearly doing this, I should be able to track down the issue and either fix the problem or explain why it's doing what it should.

Glad you're liking the game
Keith

[Trezamere]

I notice Forts like to do this as well, is that intended?  It's incredibly annoying to have my tractor beams holding off a wave of bombers only to have my fort move from a mile away where it's firing to right on top of the wing of bombers.  Needless to say it doesn't end well unless I notice and intervene.

[Cydonia]

I don't know the targeting behavior, but maybe..

your dreads were targeting a turret far away, and to reach this turret they moved closer. unfortunately they passed a turret cluster on their way but they didn't care because they were focues on that far-away laser turret.

Yes a proper savegame would be great to solve this I think 

[Doddler]

I notice that AI starships, fortresses, etc tend to instead of using their maximum range they try to move directly on top of the opponent and just kind of fly back and forth at point blank.  It seems kind of counter productive behavior since it usually gets them killed really fast.  I know player fortresses do it too, but I haven't used starships enough to know if they do it in FDR or not.