Confused about pacifism & air units (BUG?)

[Mistweave]

I've been working my way through Vel's guide, and the many useful threads on this forum, and learning a lot! But I've run into a situation that confuses me, and I want to know if I've hit a bug, or I'm just misunderstanding something.

For the record, I have legally-owned copies of SMAC and SMACX, but the particular copy that I'm running was not registered at installation time (I registered a copy on a machine that died & never bothered to register the second time I installed). I have patched SMACX to v2.0.

In my current SP game, I'm running with standard SMAC factions, playing UoP at Transcend. I decided to try Vel's Doctrine: Defense idea, which led me to use the FM SE choice, which I have not done up 'til now, being much more accustomed to dealing with drones using police.

Everything was going swimmingly - lots of money and tech - until I started building air units. Suddenly I had drone riots all over the place. When I checked into it, I discovered that I had 2 drones for every air unit that I've built - even the ones that have never moved from their home base!

So the question is simple: Is this right? As I understood the -5 Police rating, I should only have drones for military units that are outside any of my base radii. What am I missing?

[Flubber]

The simple answer is that what you are experiencing is CORRECT. All offensive air units are considered out of territory no matter where they are. BUT this does not apply to defensive air units like interceptors (planes/choppers with the air superiority ability). There are ways to deal with this drone problem and I think they are enumerated in a "FM and Drones" thread on this page.

[Mistweave]

Drat. Well, that helps, but it means that I'm going to have to seriously rethink my defensive strategy. Once I get the tech, I usually keep a bunch of clean, best-weapon ground-pounding choppers handy to repel attacks on the homeland. Makes quick work of anyone who even gets close.

Ah, well. At least it's not all air units.

[Fitz]

There is a simple solution to the problem:

1) Build a punishment sphere in a base and rehome all of you (hopefully clean) bombers and invasion forces there.

2) Crawl lots of nutrients into a base, make all the workers specialists, and rehome all of your (hopefully clean) bombers and invasion forces there.

I am playing a Doctrine : Defense game right now, and I went for option 2. The problem I ran into was growth. If the base grows, the new pop is a worker, and a drone, and you get drone riots (all homed units get a morale hit from this). Of course, by carefully calculating nuts or not building a Hab Complex, you solve this problem.

Of course, as the spartans (+1 Police) with the Aesthetic Virtues (+2 Police) and a Brood Pit (+2 Police at that base) I had a Police rating of 0 later on while running free market, so I started using workers again. Add in Power (+2 Support) and the SP that gives +2 Support, and I can support up to base size in units while not running Democracy (which admittidly I am mostly) so I can stop using clean units.

Works well. I'm very impressed with Doctrine : Defense, even if it did take me forever to get it set up.

[Drago Sinio]

Even easier than that is to make a colony pod and build a size one base. Make your one worker in that base a specialist, that way you cant possibly get any drone riots. Then you can home as many clean air units as you like to that base with no drones whatsoever. If you dont have clean units yet you can boost the size one bases mineral count with crawlers on mines so that it will support as many units as you happen to have, or you can simply build some more size one bases.

[Yxklyx]

Are you all sure that bombers always cause drones. In my last aborted game I wasn't getting any drones from the bombers.

[Flubber]

While in FM, yes they always "cause" drones unless you raise your police rating sufficiently in the manner that Fitz outlined. IF not in FM, well no problem and go clobbering with ease.

or it could be that either the punishment sphere or specialist approach (size one or otherwise) meant that all the extra drones being "caused" could not appear due to the features of those approaches.

[Fitz]

Bombers are always considered out of your territory for purposes of pacification drones. That is different from always causing drones.

Pacification drones are drones caused by having a negative POLICE rating. For example, if you are running Free Market (-5 Police), each military unit out of your territory causes two extra drones. Since Bombers are always considered to be out of your territory, they always give two extra drones to their home base.

[RedFred]

Mistweave, see King Stone's thread for more thoughts on this.

[johndmuller]

Regarding the disruption caused by pop growth in a "specialist base" used to home pacifist drone generating units, I would think (although I have never tried it) that if all the tiles in the base area were either being crawled or were being worked by an neighboring base, the new citizen would start off as a specialist.

[RedFred]

True enough. You get the specialist that gives you the most psych. I wish I could change the default to the max econ or max research guy.

[Fitz]

Originally posted by johndmuller
Regarding the disruption caused by pop growth in a "specialist base" used to home pacifist drone generating units, I would think (although I have never tried it) that if all the tiles in the base area were either being crawled or were being worked by an neighboring base, the new citizen would start off as a specialist.

Whoever said I was intelligent enough to crawl all of them.

It was a coastal base, and I never got around to crawling the sea squares. I set it up by taking crawlers that were coming off of coastal defense (preventing coastal invasions) and rehoming them to the base in question. Then I crawled all the land squares. I was building sea crawlers to crawl the sea squares, but I never got the 10+ needed before I got the Aethetic Virtues and decided to build a Brood Pit instead.

[knowhow2]

IIRC, Ascentic Virtue only gives +1 police. Just a small nitpick.