Stupid AI, drop the damned troops!!

[dogscoff]

OK, here's where I think you might be going wrong:

"making use of the fact that the AI almost always shoot at the ship with the most shields first."

In my experience the AI prefers to go for the ships with the most weapons, but no matter...

"The fleet had primary orders to capture the planet and secondary orders to fire at optimum range, "

As far as I know this is the right way to go about it.


"and they are ordered NOT to shoot at the planet"

This is your problem. Ships will not move in to drop troops in simultaneous while there are weapons platforms present. Sorry, it's hard-coded that way. You'll have to destroy the weapons platforms out from orbit.


"- I want to take it intact."

Naturally. Try setting the strategies to "fire until all weapons destroyed." This seems to work quite well, you should experience very little collateral damage. As soon as the WPs are gone, your gunships should stop firing and your troopship will move in.


"my ships probably can't win the firefight against the WPs anyway. "

Oh dear. If you can't get some more/ better ships in there, you could be stuffed. The only other possibility is to attack the weapons platforms using the "cargo maintenence problems" intel project. Unless you're playing a non-intel V1.41 game that is. Oh dear...

"kept running to the corner ... head for the planet ... get itself killed ... so I added a meason bLaster and tried again"

Interesting. Can't help with this problem I'm afraid. I'm quite surprised actually, I wouldn't have expected it to behave that way once you had the weapon fitted. Perhaps someone else could help... Atraikus? Rollo? You guys have worked in this area.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain but, if you replace the P with an O, my name would be Oinky, wouldn't it?"