Lots of errors

1. Your starbase probably needs some supply on it.

2. In stock, Drones will not engage targets unless they have warheads.

3. You can disable auto-launching by editing the empire's strategies

4. What do you mean by re-dock?

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

4 is a pain unless I've misunderstood, if you tell fighters to re-enter the carrier during battle, to resupply, the game will crash out(or the fighers will ignore you), so I assume sattelites will behave similarly.

The rest are exactly like kwok has suggested, it's easy to forget to put supply on a starbase, too easy.

I play stock with my own mod that makes no changes to how combat works.

There is no multi-target components, but a similar function is already built into SE5.

If I understand correctly, (and based on tests with PD heavy ships vs. fighter swarms), how many targets a ship will shoot is based on the total damage a shot does, how many weapons there are, and the target(s) total structure.

By default, the game is set to only attack a target with a set amount of damage.
In the stock strategies, iirc, it is set to 150% damage (can be changed by editing/creating strategies), 150% due to the chance that some shorts will miss.

Also, all weapons of the same max range will fire at a single target.
If a ship has 10 guns, each does 50 damage.
1-5 has a range of 120, 6-10 has a range of 100.
Enemy ships have a total of 100 structure (including armor, shields and all components)
Guns 1-5 fire at ship A as it comes into range of 120 (likely blasting it to bits)
Guns 6-10 fire at ship B as it comes into range 100 as guns 1-5 cannot fire again yet.
Guns 1-3 fire at ship B if shots from 6-10 have not hit/destroyed the target yet, it likely gets blown to bits.
All other ships now within 100 range as guns are able to fire again
Guns 1-3 fire at ship C
Guns 4-6 fire at ship D
Guns 7-9 fire at ship E
Gun 10 fires at ship F.
Rinse and repeat, with the 150% being of the 'remaining' structure. So if a ship got hit by one shot, reducing it to 50 structure, the next time it was shot it, only 2 guns would fire at it (damage =/>150% target structure).

If there are 'unfired' weapons due to there not being many targets, say only three ships remaining, then gun 10 would fire at one of the other ships, and if only two ships remained, the firepower might be devided evenly or it might have the 'leftover' shots all dumped on one target. (not sure how it handles 'leftover' damage when allocating targets for weapons)

It might be similar for the drones.
Perhaps there was far more drones than they could possibly need, so it only sent enough drons to do a 1.5 times the damage to destroy each target.

@ Dorjan
I don't think you got nailed by a troll.
They don't mean n00b.
You must have missed what they were getting at.
Double check the post you said n00b in, the second to last sentance.
You did say 'ship' with a 't' instead of a 'p'.

No, that's one of the significant changes between SEIV and SEV. Starbases no longer have unlimited supplies, but Resupply Depot facilities will transfer supplies automatically to ships and bases in the same system, up to the depot's capacity per turn.

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

I'm guilty of starbase supply problems myself...
and I know they don't have supplies by default...

It's kind of funny, in some ways...

"Yay! Two Massive Mount Wave Motion guns and 16 torpedoes are crammed on this thing with lots of shields and armor and other guns with 0kt leftover! Wait... why is it saying there is 0 supply?"
*looks at 4 quantum generators and 4 solar collectors*
*notices no supply storage*
*facepalms*

I'm thinking you are making mistakes in your designs;
I have the latest version (1.71) and all those things work fine for me.

1. Make sure your Starbase has weapons that can target the type of vehicle that it is fighting. Also, make sure you have enough Ordnance and Supplies; StarBases use tons of that.

2. You probably don't have warheads on your drones. If you don't that will explain why they aren't working for you.

3. I don't your third problem is a bug. That is just how drones and sattelites work for me.

A ship can shoot at as many targets as its sensors or another component with similar properties will allow it to. I only play mods, so I don't know at what level in the stock game you get the ability to aim for more than one target.

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See my PBW game stories on http://users.pandora.be/banzaiboy/sevpbw/.