Anti-aircraft artillery

[Helium Pond]

Well, you learn something new every day! I went and put SAM on an artillery unit, and whaddaya know? It works! My <(6)>-4-1*2 garrison shot the heck out of the Pirates' 8-1-10 needlejet. I'm not sure if you can completely kill the buggers, but you can get 'em down to around 90% health. I wonder if it works on stacked planes, too. That'd be incredibly useful. Anyone know?

[WhiteElephants]

Does the unit still fire on ground units without the negative modifier for ground attacks? I think that rovers with the SAM ability fight as normal against ground units, but it has been so long...

[Fitz]

Can you do long range fire on needlejets that are hanging for a turn before they rtb? Or did you only use it by trying to move into the opponents square?

[Helium Pond]

I don't know about penalties for land attacks, but I assume that they take no such penalty.

Yes, you can make ranged attacks.

[PrinceBimz]

Important to note that ANY unit with the SAM ability takes a 50% penalty when fireing on ANYTHING other then an air unit. I sometimes create SAM infantry garrisons and counter attack aircraft that attack my bases. Also I put SAM on ships as well. If I don't have a carrier and I need protection from planes far away from my mainland out of my aircrafts flight range, then I find SAM ships work well for this. This is particually useful to help protect my supply ships that are convoying in boku resources.

Once from having lack of air defense, the AI had sank 5 of my supply ships with their needle jets. Those ships were VERY important and were bringing in loads of nutrients! So after they were sank my base population started to starve. All of this trouble from not having AAA or SAM escorts for those supply ships. So as you can see I learned from this mistake Oh another thing too, I never was able to get that convoy running again either

[WhiteElephants]

I could swear that the SAM rovers had no penalty for land attacks. Hmmm... I guess I'll have to break down and try that damn scenario editor thing. Wish me luck. I'll try to check the AAA artillery land attack too.

[WhiteElephants]

Well the test are conclusive, both the SAM Missle Rover and the SAM Missle Rover Battery DID NOT suffer the -50% penalty for attacking ground units nor did my SAM Missle Skimship. I imagine that the skimship wouldn't suffer the penalty from attacking another sea vessel though I didn't test it because I didn't think of it until just now.

So, to answer my own question: No the SAM artillery does not suffer the -50% for attacking ground units (and probably any other unit for that matter).

Edit: It might be important to note that this was tried with the Alien Crossfires Expansion Pack version 2.0.
[This message has been edited by WhiteElephants (edited December 18, 2000).]

[Helium Pond]

Just played a SMAC Vanilla game and happened to notice that SAM rovers have no attack penalty against ground troops in this version, either. Patch 4.0 (or whatever the last one was).

[Goit]

Forgive my stupidty, but will a ground unit, with SAM, ability defend with it's weapon when attacked?

If so, does that mean it's better to put SAM on warships than AAA (since they typically have a higher weapon score and tend to get few denfensive modifiers for terrain, sensors etc.)?

[Helium Pond]

Yeah, I confirm this. Only aircraft with SAM defend with their weapon.

I'm not so excited about SAM artillery anymore, though. Sometimes they don't do a darn thing. I wonder if it's reactor level that makes all the difference.
[This message has been edited by Helium Pond (edited January 06, 2001).]

[Sindai]

Goit - No. As far as I know, the SAM ability only allows land units to attack air units.