Do you armor your probe teams?

[The Mad Monk]

I name those "spyhunters"

*old video game theme song starts playing*

[Starfarer]

I prefer armoring probe teams under only two circumstances, myself.

First circumstance, foil probe teams that have to move into territory where there will be any enemy resistance. It's so freaking annoying to send five foil Probe Teams across the map, certain they're going to be fully capable of using your 5000 energy to capture five bases, only to lose all five to a pair of enemy units.

Second, as a "blocker". I occasionally use armored probes set in strategic places around my bases to blunt enemy assaults. They won't stop a truly determined assault, but they'll slow it down, weaken a unit or two, and give me enough warning to mount a defense. And, if the enemy's actually brainless enough that their unit stops within movement rate of the Probe, I get a second defender at a bargain price.

Unforutnately, I don't always have the economy to make this feasible. In fact, most of the time, if I've got Effiency penalties, I'm barely treading water on my economy. Although scaring three or four enemies into Pacts can fix that... Ahem. I didn't say that.

Ta!

[Barinthus]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
I name those "spyhunters"

*old video game theme song starts playing*

Oh yes, ahh fond memories coming back to me... *rocks on a rocking chair, reminiscing*

[johndmuller]

The main problem I have with armored probes is that business of going bye-bye when their stacked combat brethren get killed, which means that the armor is only worth it if the armored probe is alone. Even if they are stacked with other probes, if any of them die in a conventional (non-probe) attack, they all do; the only time a stack of probes is any good is if you are being probed by multiple probes.

One thing I wish I knew was how the game determines which of a stack of non-combatants will be the defender - for example, if you had an armored probe and an unarmored former stacked, would it pick the former to defend anyway, or would it pick the best defender?

As long as you are content with just one unit defending your base and were not into using Police, they are a decent choice, the extra cost being balanced out by their being clean and doing double duty as a defense against an enemy probe. OTOH, once you get the 'Clean' attribute and once the arms race has escalated to the point where 1 unit does not provide a comfortable level of defense, or if you want the AAA, Non-lethal and whatever other probe-forbidden attributes there are, then armored probes are no longer adequate.

BTW, as most of you probably know, if you try to probe an aircraft, you get a message to the effect that you need the SAM attribute on your probe team to do that (but the workshop will not let you put SAM on your probes). Well I experimented with changing the probe ability flags in the Alpha(x).txt and it turns out that enabling SAM probes also enables other things that don't make much sense (like SAM crawlers) - probably the designers noticed that too late in the game to make the proper adjustments and disabled the SAM probes so as not to have to explain the other stuff (but overlooked that message).