In the rles, you say that attack nano randomly lands on an outside edge.

How exactly is an outside edge defined? Say I filled the edges of the ship building hexagon, making the center hollow but completely enclosed, would the internal edge of the circle be attacked by attack nano?

It chooses a coord on the outside of the grid and then marches towards the center until it hits something.

If it destroys a unit, and has no connection to follow (ie all surrounding units are destroyed) then it again marches towards the center.

If the center is destroyed it randomly finds an active unit and lands there.

So having an outer shell is one approach.....

Jonathan

Ah, thank you. I think I just might try it out... though, from what you tell me, the outer shell should be repaired A.S.A.P. for the design to work.

Yep. And some of you might notice from this that the center of the ship is actually one of the most dangerous places to put vital units.

Placing habitat on the edge is actually a valid design because of the path alg of attack nano.

But it looks scarey.

Jonathan

Lol, come to think of it, your right. Pretty much all attack nano ends up in the center doesn't it? Whereas if it passes by a habitat on the edge, there's almost no chance for the attack nano to travel to it.

I must remember this in future designs while doing a little rediesigning, and it would probably be best to have units on the inside and outside.

Thanks for the tip.

So, once the nano gets to the center, what happens? If my ship is a ring and the nano enters, passes through, does it stop in the center or keep going out the other side? Which leads to the question, what happens if it does pass out the othe side, does it start over again at a new point?

I could see a single circle as a ship, only taking a single hit no matter how strong the drone was if it does stop in the center.

No, once at the center it does a complete grid scan, and always finds an alive unit to land on.

Basically, I've yet to see a viable ship when this damaged. i.e you jump out very soon after.

Hmmm... I wonder what would happen precisely if a ship was made like a small fleet of ships? In other words, it was seperated into fragments scattered among the build hex, and each one had a few habs to sustain it, as well as spreading the ships functions around.

I suppose it would depend on the grid scan, so what exactly is a grid scan?

It checks every unit on a ship, to see if any are alive, and the first one it finds will become the target. Thats what a grid scan is - the way attack nano is allocated if the center of the ship is dead.

Jonathan

I see... that gives me a few more ideas.

Okay, now I got hit today for 6 nano, which is fine. Except it started on a hex that already had 6 antibodies on it. I still lost that cell.

I wanted a bit of man-of-steel type action there, with bullets bouncing off of me and no harm done to my ship. Alas, twas not to be.

Umm it does say in the rules that attack nano will destroy the location it strikes first, then after that the antibody nano will attempt to destroy the remaining attack nano.

Which is why lots of small hits are better than one large one, much more guarenteed damage.

Yep, I know. And the odds of you having sufficient anti-bodies on the cell that got hit is slim to none. But it happened and I was curious as to the consequences and thought people should know.

And I disagree with you on the lots of small hits thing. Sure, you can whittle down an opponent with a sustained bombardment of them. Or you can over-load the opponents generators in one hit and watch the nano spread like wild-fire. Thats my preferred strategy as you might of guessed.

I'd have said that was way less efficient. If you hit me with the max attack nano 9, with most of my designs you'd likely only do 2 locations worth of damage, the original hit and then the second location moved to before all the rest of the attack nano was neutralised.

Being hit by a 4 and a 5 would be much worse. Two chances of explosions on the initial impact for starters, plus most likely 3 points of damage minimum rather than 2.

The only pluses about high power drones are their increased speed which makes them very difficult to evade and the higher armour which makes them more difficult to stop.

Right, and that can be imitated with DL. It all always comes back to the DL, lol.

If the ships that launched the 4 and the 5 at Nova were sitting in grav wells, or perhaps have colonies on nearby planets, that 4 and 5 could become 8 and 9 very easily-thus agreeing with Mappie a bit more. Of course, if the firing ships expected mines they would probably focus more on drone armour.

Personally though, my preferred method is to fire a steady stream of power 6 attack drones from 2 or 3 ships at a single one. They all close in very quickly, have a decent amount of armour, and they quickly overload the factories as well as the swarm generators.

Mappie should have a ship getting ready to experience this right now actually, and unfortunately for it, it's stuck in a gravwell with no way to replenish its supply of combat mass. :twisted: Of course, it could escape very quickly, but to do so it would lose most if not all of its DL-Mappie's favorite resource lol. No big drones for you! For a little while anyway....

It all always comes back to the DL, lol.