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Equendil -> Idle ships & patrolling. (8/5/2010 11:36:15 AM)
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I tend not to let the AI automate anything in my games, so I use (or would like to use) the feature that lets you cycle through idle ships (as I don't always catch all the notifications).
However, since my military ships are not automated, pretty much all my home defense ships will be marked as "idle" *unless* I order them on patrol. Now this would work fine if not for the following two issues:
1) "Patrolling" wastes fuel needlessly. "Patrolling" ships circle whatever they are ordered to patrol, meaning they consume fuel for motion *and* since they do not get energy from collectors while moving, also consume fuel for their components. The "circling", however, does not seem to serve any useful purpose. Static ships do just as good a job. Fuel costs and worst, ships being low on fuel when they actually need it to repel the pirates/creatures/AI makes this behaviour undesirable.
2) While "patrolling" a space port or a mining station goes on forever (well almost, repairs and other automatic actions will make them "forget"), patrolling a planet or system does not. Ships will circle a planet/star once and go idle.
Because of 1) "patrolling" currently makes no tactical sense (that I can see) in the game. Ships are best left idle near whatever it is you'd like to keep protected. Now, because of *that* and 2) the "next idle ship" cycling feature does not really help managing your ships manually.
Now, what I'm really trying to do is to put my ships on "standby", but there's no such thing. Unfortunately, "patrol" doesn't really do the trick either. Did I miss something?
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