ship-to-ship in VGA planets From: wws@sunray.att.com (Bill Stoll) Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1993 21:55:45 +0000 I remember reading awhile back some info about the order in which ships fight each other in VGA planets. Also, I had never been able to get the Intercept ship order to work the way I wanted (move to where enemy ship is going, and attack it). So I did some experimentation. Maybe everybody already knows this stuff, but maybe not, so here it is. 1) Ships move in increasing order of ID #. So, if ship #6 has set "Intercept ship #3" as its Mission, ship #6 will successfully intercept ship #3. If ship #3 has set "Intercept ship #6", it is wasting its time unless it knows or suspects that ship #6 will not move this turn. If ship #6 moves, ship #3 will move to where ship #6 was, then ship #6 will move. No battles take place until all ships have moved. 2) Intercept alone is not enough to force battle. The intercepting ship must also set Primary Enemy to the race of the ship being intercepted. If this is not done, the two ships will simply travel together peacefully (unless the enemy happens to be in KILL mode, or to have HIS Primary Enemy set to YOU). 3) Ships fight in increasing order of IDs. I used to think that the biggest (or highest tech) ship fought first. Wrong. This means that if you are escorting a freighter with a capital ship, you had better make sure that the ID# of the capital ship is LOWER than the ID# of the freighter. You could still get lucky and run across an enemy ship with a higher ID# than your capital ship. In that case, if your capital ship is in KILL mode or has Primary Enemy set to the race of the enemy ship, your capital ship will fight it before it gets a shot at your freighter. 4) It's a handicap to have a freighter with a low ID#. It is easily intercepted, and will be attacked first in battles. Since this is purely luck of the draw (ID# is recycled when a ship is destroyed), it seems that things would be more fair if ships moved and fought in some order other than ID#. Perhaps user-designated orders for movement, and separate orders for fighting. Then host.exe could randomly determine a race order for the current turn, and handle one ship from each race in turn. I seem to remember reading that something would change in version 3.0 to help this, or at least to allow the user to determine which ship fights first, but I don't remember. -- Bill Stoll wws@cblpd.att.com Up