Not quite, the way the auto-casting works for planet sieging abilities is that they only trigger when the ship begins to auto-bomb a planet.  In general, the scripting for capital ships tells them to blast all combat capable enemy ships in orbit first(to include silly ships like colony frigates), then tactical structures in orbit.  Once those are taken care of the capital ships will auto-bomb the planet.  When they begin bombing they'll trigger any techs set to auto-cast.  E.g. a Marza Dreadnought will fire a missile at the planet, then trigger Raze Planet.  A Kortul Desolator will shoot a planet bombing beam, then drop a Siege Platform.  The Advent... Revelation IIRC, will use the 'Screamer' ability when it fires a bolt at the planet. Not to leave out the Evacuator and Drain Planet. 

Back to the Desolator, it will fire a beam at the planet when the auto-behaviors tell it to bomb, then move closer to the planet to drop the platform.  It will then bomb the planet side by side with any and all platforms that it deploys. 

When it comes to dealing with auto-cast abilities you have two approaches.  One, target abilities yourself.  This is the most preferred method if you have time to do it(remember that the QWERT keys are shortcuts for abilities).  The other, toggle auto-cast on and off as the situation dictates.  This can be preferable at times too.  For example, your Radiance is attacking an enemy Skirantra Carrier.  You know the Carrier needs 50 antimatter(with the new 1.2 version) to use Scramble Bombers.  When the enemy antimatter hits 40 you right click the Detonate Antimatter ability to auto-cast it. 

That's pretty interesting , I didn't know the scripting of ships was so well made. Looks like it's made pretty well with some exception as you mentioned (that Ryat denied). I play SOASE sins (joke) it's out and I still learn a lot about it Definitely the most amazing Strategy game around.

And about mines? Would it run throuh them to deploy the platform as soon as the attack command is given?

Is it useful to micro-manage smaller ships abilities ? I can understand for the capital ships though.

I remapped QWERT to something else (since I'm playing on a laptop) but I should use more shortcuts because I hate my touchpad, lol.

That is because the devs did not implement the AIUseTargetCondition for AntimatterExceedsAmount command for that ability. You can easily modify it if you wish.

So I guess it's only a file we can open with a text editor and modify a line?

Why wasn't it implemented? Is it not working well, is it a memory eater or something else ?

So I didn't see it mentioned... but I'm playing on Maelstrom against a bunch of AI's. I'm trying to sweep up Vasari Explosive Mines with the Advent Seeker Vessel... and it isn't working. It appears that the Seeker Vessel's "Detect Mines" autocast range was indeed increased to 6,000, however the actual revealing effectiveness range wasn't increased, so you have to manually micro the ships to minesweep. If you leave them idle, they'll close to within 6,000 meters, spamming Detect Mines but not actually revealing the mine.

You are correct. It appears there are still some problems with the last 1.2 release like this. The auto cast range is 6000 but the buff's reveal range is 5125 still is what I'm seeing.

There's another one too, but I'm having fun with it right now, maybe someone else will report it

The AI... doesn't respond to mine fields.  It will happily plow through a field of mines if that is the shortest path to its target.  Usually you sidestep this with a series of shift commands.  I.e. "move here first, stupid, then turn and bomb the planet."  Enabling a fleet while in that gravity well and assigning a series of orders to the flagship will ensure that all over ships don't have much opportunity to meander about and into a mine field. 

Scouts generally target mines first, since they have the ability to decloak them.  But on their own scouts take a long time to clear mines, even if you have 10 to 20 of them working on it.  The scripting for revealing mines isn't tweaked to differentiate when one scout is already targeting a mine.  This means all 20 might go for the same mine, then all stall out once the first one gets there, only to repeat the process for each mine.  To prevent this you have to manually spread them around the mine field so they can begin 'eating' it from the edges. 

  The developers mentioned bringing flak along and assigning to a mini-fleet with a scout as the flagship to force mine clearing duties(set to tight cohesion for best results).  But auto-join fleet behaviors are turned on by default for many ships, and this can cause its own headache. I'd have programmed a flag that would allow you to select whether or not ships could auto-join an existing fleet.  Call it CanJoinFleet or something, and put a putting on the fleet management tab.  That way you can turn it on or off to override the auto-join fleet behavior without wasting micro time on all of the ships that you make.  Then if you want to add more scouts or flak you can still do it manually, since only the auto-join behavior would look at the CanJoinFleet variable.  The scout/flak mini-fleet is still good a mop up though, say when you have a siege frigate finishing off a planet and your main force in the area has moved on.

Well I'm aware of the tactics surrounding mines, my post was to point out that the range at scouts start attempting to reveal mines is actually larger than the range at which they reveal mines, so now in 1,2, if you leave a scout alone, it can not sweep a minefield by itself, it must be micro-managed to actually clear out the mines.

And my post was in response to Souls-Stream. 

I guess I'll look at that range glitch.  If so, it is the old Desolator bug all over again. 

Haha, not paying attention ftw. Sorry <_<.

But yeah, I already tossed together a mini-mod that fixed it. It's the self detection buff files out of Entrenchment that need mods, if anyone is curious.

I laughed when you explained the shift key

So what I thought was right, if there is a minefield and the desolator just start bombing a planet, it will move towards the planet automatically, stupidely go through the mines, deploy the platform (eventually in the mines) and continue if it's still in one piece (doubtful) so micro-managing is still very important at that point (I guess Starcraft and C&C didn't teach me well AKA build 3000 tank, BLITZKRIEEEEEEG !!! ooh I won ! And who cares if there were some casualties?)

Ya, I noticed for the scouts, but it's not always easy because you would have to send the scout before or after or in the middle of the battle, before is a problem since there's 103.4% chance that the scout will be destroyed by other ships, platforms, defence and whatever can make him go boom.

Then you can send it after, but then again your stupid fleet might just start harvesting mines (it's the season, they're in full bloom and they look so ripe, how can you resist to pick one? :karma: ) while trying to move towards platforms and other ships.

Finally, you can send your scout in the middle of the fight, which is probably the most effective way to do it but you'll probably go crazy to micro-manage the battle, the skills of your capital ship(s), preventing your fleet going in the minefield and your scouts to destroy the mines... 

Well, I just love mines but fighting against them is really hellish

The mini-fleet can just be destroyed if there's a fleet stationning in the planet so it could end being a waste too, isn't it? Your mod Idea though, sounds totally great for that case

I read better texture blah, blah, and I don't see new memory limit.  Is mem limit still 2GB or now 3, 4, 8, 32... what's the scoop?

Total ram that the game can use: 2GB

They just reduced the max amount the game will use down to 1.3GB, which will give them and modders room to add more units, etc into the game.

I personally think thats a mistaken approach on how to use the memory.  most pcs these days have 4 gigs of ram.  they should alow the game to use that memory and not hinder it.  Im still getting laggy games after 3 plus hours.  doesnt feel like they fixed anything.  The game does feel smoother to start but after that 3 hours mark, nothing but pauses and pauses. 

*eye roll*

have you bothered to pull up task manager and see exactly how much memory is being used in the gam at that 3 hour mark?  nuuuu. 

sins will NEVER use more than 2 gigs of ram, or be multithreaded and the devs HATE it when people remind them.

I second that, the way it's been improved is amazing

Its been made more efficient. Same result as if they increase the RAM limit, you can fit more stuff.

Guys, 32-bit Operating Systems only allow you to allocate 2GB RAM total to a process. Sins is a 32-bit game, so there's nothing we can do about the process limit.  It's not like we can flip a switch and make it 64-bit.

Yet according to the denizens of the 'net you can.

According to the denizens of the internet? Would you really trust them on anything?

Sorry about that

fixed it

I'm actually happy they made game's memory usage more efficient.

I'm running a very old WinXP PC with 1 GB system memory and 1 GB video memory. I installed the DS mod a week or so ago, and have been pleasantly surprised that I'm able to play it with the nice effects.

Is anyone else seeing a problem where mines can't be cleared?

This happened to me in almost every game since I put in 1.2, I throw a couple of cleanup scouts into a mined planet where the battle is over, and 20 minutes later I wonder why there are still mines, and I see the scouts all clustered around a mine, their mine detect ability is on auto, but nothing happens.

I try manually detecting mines and the mine detect fires but the mines remain cloaked/invulnerable.  Every once in a while, if I move off all the scouts somewhere else and send one back manually at the mines, I can uncloak one or two, and then it will hang again.  The rest of the game works great, it's just the mine clearing that doesn't happen.

I'm running Vista 64, no mods... after the 4th or 5th game where this happened I wondered what was going on.

Its a known bug, just manually move your scouts closer to the mines and use the ability yourself and they should get "unstuck", for a bit at least. Fortunately the AI builds fewer mines so they aren't needed as much.

i cant dl the patch:(

as soon as it reaches 98% it says "download verification checks failed - press resume to try again" but it still doesnt get past 98% even though i press on resume:( 

can some1 help me?