Poll: Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (XI)

[chemical_art]

2. Be a bit restructured such that all enemy ships will pick the same one to attack.

This is easily achieved with a little micromanagement: just start with them on stand-by mode and bring them online one by one.

I'm curious - how many people have actually tried putting Decoy Drones underneath a huge stack of force fields, not only saving their fleet tens of millions of damage but also annulling most enemy ships' hull bonuses?

But you see, AI Wars isn't built on micromanagement for the most part. Secondly, the drones will only absorb shots if the enemy is in range from what I remember, they won't seek out the targets if out of range. Putting the drones under some shields won't matter much unless your own fleet is under the shields as well, which isn't much different from putting the ships under the shield unless you micro a lot to first get the enemy under the shield by following your fleet somehow, then moving your fleet under the shield, then inching your fleet off the shields without moving much of the enemy. It simply isn't ideal.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Yeah the point of AI War is strategy, and not micromanagement. That's why you can do crazy stuff like have your ships automatically fire at the best targets, and repeat build queues.

[Aeson]

The wiki page for Decoy Drones says that the AI might only target one drone at a time, so the buff where the AI only targets one decoy drone at a time might be a current feature of Decoy Drones. I don't think I have any current games with which I could quickly check this, though, so I cannot confirm this.

Regardless, I still think Decoy Drones need a buff, because they don't seem to provide that much benefit to a player fleet.

[Bognor]

Fair call on micromanagement.

I'm not sure whether people understand me about the force fields.  What I mean is something like this:

  fff
fffffff
fffffff
fffDfff
  fff
   W

 BBBBB
 BBBBB
 BBBBB
 BBBBB


where
f = region covered by force field stack
D = Decoy drone
W = hostile wormhole
B = fleet blob

As I understand it, a wave of ships with at least moderate range that emerge from the wormhole should all try to target the Decoy Drone.  Their shots should ineffectually slam into the forcefield stack while your fleet pummels them without damage penalty.  Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself, but based on this post from Faulty Logic I can't imagine why it shouldn't work.

(Edit: I realise there's consensus these things are underpowered, and I'm not saying everyone's wrong - just trying to understand the apparent discrepancy between how useful they sound, and how useless people find them.  I've only experimented with them a tiny bit in-game.)

[chemical_art]

What you describe is building an entire defense against a fabricator unit. Not a bonus unit but a fabricator unit. Given how most shields have a diameter greater then fleet ships ranges it is hard to take advantage of even that gap, since anything sans frigate range will still be under shield for half the big blob.

[Bognor]

*scratches head*

Sorry chemical_art but I think we're talking about different things.  I'm not talking about defending against Decoy Drones, I'm talking about using one player-controlled Decoy Drone to greatly augment defense against an incoming wave.  Force field size doesn't matter as the Decoy Drone is sitting just inside the edge of the force field stack. 

Edit: The wormhole itself is not underneath the force fields.  The wave of ships emerges in between the fleet blob and the [force field stack + Decoy drone] combo.

[Diazo]

Going by what I think the numbers in the data files mean, the Decoy Drone's effective radius is a little under half twice the radius of a FF Mk III, so pretty big.

@Bognor: What would work better is splitting your fleet to each side of the FF stack I think, but I get what you are talking about.

The issue of course being that the Decoy Drone is supposed to be embedded in your mobile fleet for offensive use, at least how I want to use it.

D.

edit: That's a big typo.

[TechSY730]

Hmm, how can the Decoy Drone be buffed for human use but not AI use? Change the mechanics so that it doesn't reward over ship cap usage more so than just the sheer ratio overcap would imply (aka, change up the mechanic such the utility for using them is closer to linear with number rather than strongly superlinear like we have now)? Split the unit into two versions like what is being done with raid starships? Some of both?

[chemical_art]

Hmm, how can the Decoy Drone be buffed for human use but not AI use? Change the mechanics so that it doesn't reward over ship cap usage more so than just the sheer ratio overcap would imply (aka, change up the mechanic such the utility for using them is closer to linear with number rather than strongly superlinear like we have now)? Split the unit into two versions like what is being done with raid starships? Some of both?

Considering Keith explicitly put in the poll the buff is for player and not AI hands, I think he has idea already.

It could be as simple as the ship cap goes up by 4, the cost for AI in terms of waves increased by 4, among other changes.

[KDR_11k]

Wow, this is a hard poll. I went for deflector drone (why is it specialized on lasers of all weapons? Laser weapons are given out pretty much randomly so there's no greater type of threat that these act against), spire starship (the beam lance just isn't as good in regular combat, the ship used to be pretty good at gunning down missile frigates before they got into range) and tachyon drone (don't use it unless you absolutely cannot afford anything else with tachyon and I think even scouts are better at tachyon coverage, usually the decloaker is a must unlock for me).

[TechSY730]

Even though I didn't vote for it, there is a mantis issue I put up about Spire beam weaponry:
9397: Change how Spire Beam weaponry works some to make them worthwhile in the average case
The wording on that issue is a tad too strong (spire beam weaponry can actually get decent performance in average cases), but the idea still holds. The disparity between Spire beam weaponry's effectiveness of best cases and average cases is too high due to their nature (aka, merely messing around with the damage and range stats won't fix it, it will require a mechanics change, though that may be as simple as making the beam last longer or shorter or something).
Also not helping is that Spire beam weaponry doesn't always extend to full length when no longer hitting something for whatever reason. It's sporadic when it happens, but it really hurts when it does.

[Hearteater]

I just want to mention that Raid Starships, probably the largest single killer of human command stations and other goodies under shields, use lasers.  So Deflector Drones are useful on the defense against waves/Exos that are hitting systems you can't afford to lose key goodies.  And Deflector Drones have a pretty massive range.  And they absorb EMP.  Just saying.

[Ragnarok]

I see Microfighters got no votes. I have yet to find a good use for them. Can someone post maybe one or two examples where they come in handy ?

[keith.lamothe]

I see Microfighters got no votes. I have yet to find a good use for them. Can someone post maybe one or two examples where they come in handy ?

1) Shooting things.  More effectively than the base fighter.
2) Decloaking cloaked waves when you know what wormhole they're coming through.  The beams are short range, but the microfighters can effectively saturate the entry point (providing durability that a single tachyon emitter wouldn't) and free up shipcap of other tachyon units for situations which need wider coverage.

They're not the most imaginative unit, but they're far from the worst.

[snelg]

I voted for AI guard posts. Maybe it will help them get a little more personality if they're tougher to handle. It might be more than those damn missile guardposts that always tends to reach my ships as soon as they enter a system.

Also the missile silo. I'm not sure I've ever actually fired a missile since I started playing the game years ago. Something about the "you have so much ai progress that there's too much of the ai to handle so lets bomb them and have it get even worse" is keeping me back. Not sure if there's anything to do about it though.

I see Microfighters got no votes. I have yet to find a good use for them. Can someone post maybe one or two examples where they come in handy ?

Microfighters can decloak right? And I think you get a lot of them. But I haven't really had them for a long time now so I can't really judge.