Ships on autopilot do not stop when sensing enemy ships.

IMO, ships shouldn't automatically drop out of autopilot to attack something, unless perhaps it already has attack orders against another ship of the same race.

I can't count the number of times I lost ships enroute to something more important (like a different war entirely) just because it decided it wanted to attack something else.

That having been said, I think the change is a known issue. (And it seems possible that the prior behavior was a concequence of one of the older pathfinding quirks.)

Arturus Magi,

I guess I don't understand how your point relates to the problem I reported. Or perhaps it was to bolster my point.

My point is quite simple. When a ship on autopilot gets within sensor range of an enemy ship it should drop out of autopilot. Period. It should not attack automaticallly. It should call attention to itself by becoming selected, whether it has moves left or not. It should not end up in a tile adjacent to the enemy ship because it can always spot another ship before it enteres a tile adjacent to the other ship (the minimum sensor range on all of the ships in the definition files is 3). This worked when the code was first put in to cause a ship to drop out of autopilot on detection of an enemy ship in the early Alpha. It has since quit working the way it should.

Well, the code that did that was originally something of a bug, because any ship whose path was crossed by an alien ship (whether it was an alien or not) just cancelled its destination because they used to get stuck, trying to figure out a path around the ship. Then I modified the pathfinding code, and so I was able to fix the bug. However, I could easily put in an option where a ship whose path would intersect an enemy ship (one who was really an enemy) that was not the ship's target, would drop out of autopilot (or maybe have a pop up come up that could ask you, that could be disabled).

Cari,

Yes. Please. At the time the code (or bug) became available for this feature there was a standing request for this behavior, so what may have been a bug was interpreted by myself (and others?) as a request fulfillment.

Having complete control of a ship as soon as it knows it is in peril is very important in turms of playability. Having a ship get blown away just because it happens to intersect and attack another ship is just plain bad.

'My point is quite simple. When a ship on autopilot gets within sensor range of an enemy ship it should drop out of autopilot. Period. It should not attack automaticallly'

The old code dropped out and attacked (if it was a combat capable ship). You didn't mention in your post that that wasn't what you had wanted to happen, but did concur that it was what used to happen.

To quote, 'and distroyed the Torian ship and then dropped out of autopilot.'

Arturus Magi

Ah. Another suposition of mine. I think that if it had not tried to move onto the tile occupied by the enemy ship that it would not have tried to attack (attacking is trying to move onto the other ship's tile). Does it not seem logicall that had it dropped out of autopilot before attacking it would not have attacked?

Also, I think the original request for ships to drop out of autopilot when sensing enemy ships occured during the early Alpha. You might not have been with us at that time and, hence, would not have seen the request.

Well, not to mention that there's a veritable sea of posts to read at any given time, so it's easy to miss something.

I started initial work on the option on Friday, but have had to work on bug hunting since then.