Stupid AI, drop the damned troops!!

[CW]

This is a hair-pulling problem that I want solved, and I want it solved fast, before I get so mad that I literally throw the computer out the window.

I'm preparing my first planetary assualt for my first PBW game, and I'm having huge difficulties trying to get the damned troop ship to drop the damned troops. Due to my really restricting resources (and the fact that the damned AI is too stupid to do anything other than a head-first charge), I "cheated" a bit by making use of the fact that the AI almost always shoot at the ship with the most shields first. I planned to assualt this homeworld with 3 ships - the troop transport, a gunnery dreadnouhgt and a decoy shield ship (a dreadnought with nothing but a small gun and 7000+ shield points). The fleet had primary orders to capture the planet and secondary orders to fire at optimum range, and they are ordered NOT to shoot at the planet - I want to take it intact. The gunnery DN is there to take out the 8 satellites in orbit around the planet, which carry a big wave motion gun each.

In real life, the best way to take out a prepared defender is to drop troops right on top of him rather than winning the firefight first, and this is exactly what I plan to do since my ships probably can't win the firefight against the WPs anyway. I want the three ships to move in as a group, while the gunnery DN shoots down the sats and the decoy ship takes hits, I want the troop ship to land the troops and silences the WPs. The plan worked perfectly when I personally took control and tried it in one of my solo games against an even more heavily defended planet, but when I handed it over to the idiotic AI it screwed up big. Actually it worked perfectly against a lightly defended planet, but when I tried it on a heavily defended homeworld, the &@$!*$* troop ship kept running to the corner while the other two ships got chopped into tiny little bits by the WPs. THEN the bastard would turn around, head for the planet kamakazi style and get itself killed. Originally I thought it was because the troop ship didn't have any weapons other than a PDC, so I added a meason bLaster and tried again - same result. I've checked that the troop ship was not ordered to break formation in "strategies", and none of the ships had anything to do with "don't get hurt". I need a solution NOW! This attack is strategically VERY important because of the extra resources on this planet, and I have to launch the attack flawlessly within the next day or two, since this is a PBW game.

I thank you for your suggestions in advance!


[This message has been edited by CW (edited 15 August 2001).]