Boy the Ai is Duuuumb.

[Randallw]

Right, I have my little colony. The big bad enemy attacks with about 60 ships but instead of the Planet being captured or glassed it is blockaded. I check the replay to see how the hell my colony survived. Things start normally. My drones launch, to be destroyed as usual. The armed vessels withdraw to allow the troop ship to move in.
now as shown there is a planet with 4 moons, and my colony is on the 4th moon.

planet
moon1
moon2 moon4
moon3.

Can you guess what happened?
The Ai moves the troop ship between the planet and moons but because 2 of the moons are next to each other it can't fit through. So the troop ship just sits there while the rest of his fleet backs off to let it do its job, which it can't do.
Perhaps in SE5 we could at least have ships that, if they can't fit, will at least take another route.

Edit: Obviouslly it ignores my spacing in the diagram.

[ May 11, 2004, 07:51: Message edited by: Randallw ]

[Q]

That is not an AI problem. You may have the same situation if you are the invader in strategic combat. The placement of the planets/moons and the inability of the hard coded SE IV movement program to calculate a ship route around an obstacle is the real cause, and sometimes quite annoying. But if the AI (or you) attack again the placement of the planets will be different and the invasion might succeed.

[parabolize]

Ships in seiv do take another route if they can. What stops them is they only move in 3 directions: forward, forward right and forward left. If they are in front of a planet they can not do any of those movements. I have lost 30 DD to 2 weapons platforms this way.

[Kamog]

Sometimes I have a defense ship orbiting my planet to protect it, but when an enemy ship comes into the sector, my defense ship is stuck behind a moon and doesn't intercept the enemy. Then the attacking ship is able to come close enough to fire at my planet while my ship just sits there.

[Randallw]

Another problem.

I put a 4xmultitargeter on a base design. It manages to disable 4 ships. Problem is there were 5 ships. So the base having disabled its 4 ships stops doing anything because it only has the device to taget 4 ships at a time, even though those 4 ships are now useless.

[Randallw]

My colony with no defenses has been holding up a large enemy fleet for like 4 or 5 turns. every turn a planet gets in the way of his troop ship. If there was a narrative thread for this game I'd write a story about the brave defenders holding off the invasion for half a year with no weapons.

[freduk]

There IS a narrative thread somewhere, so go ahead

[Phoenix-D]

Originally posted by Randallw:
Another problem.

I put a 4xmultitargeter on a base design. It manages to disable 4 ships. Problem is there were 5 ships. So the base having disabled its 4 ships stops doing anything because it only has the device to taget 4 ships at a time, even though those 4 ships are now useless.

Umm, what is the problem here? You didn't give the base enough fire control to attack 5 targets, only four. Not surprisingly, it only attacked four targets. And if they're useless, you can't even really complain about it not finishing them off..