Matrix Games Forums

So I bought a location of an independent colony from pirates for 5000 credits, it was a quamino colony quite far from my empire. I built and sent a colony ship there since the population would be likely to join my empire. Turns out, there's a pirate base right next to the colony orbiting a gas giant (the colony was a moon orbiting the giant). The colony ship could reach the moon with maybe 40 fuel left over. It got attacked and it successfully retreated. Once it dropped out of warp, it wanted to refuel and the closest location to do that was the independent quamino colony... I tried to stop the ship from doing that several times since the place was crawling with pirates, but the ship always restarted the refuel mission after my stop orders. "Fine, go kill yourself.", I thought. And it did just that. From then on, I always patrol the colony system first with a fleet.

Edit: Implementation of a sort of "short term memory" for ships would solve this. Maybe a pop-up to go with it. "Ship couldn't complete mission due to dangerous surroundings.", perhaps. Also, I'm starting to get ticked off with exploration ships that do not escape if attacked by space creatures. I guess it's due to the fact that the standard exploration ship design doesn't have a proximity array, so the ships can't really see the darned things. Shouldn't all ships have a small visual spotting range?

I just slap a heavy armor plate or two onto the colony ship and tell them to never retreat. They make their landings safely just fine 99% of the time, even when a vast pirate armada is pelting it with their stupid lazor blasters that can't penetrate UDA. Once the colony is safely planted, the pirates tend to lose interest. Although once I managed to shoot them all down by landing the colony ship, building a spaceport with the first component as a UDA, and having it complete the armor plate so that the rest of them couldn't actually damage the thing no matter how they shot at it, and it eventually went online and killed them all.