Posted by: sloanjh
« on: April 02, 2011, 09:30:17 AM »Whether dummy targets are exploits or not I'm not entirely certain. There have been times that the navy might have commandeered a few commercial vessels to fill out a fleet. I'm not above doing that either, not if I need to do it to win a war.
It sure does feel exploity with the tractor beams though. I'm still not clear why tractor beaming civilian ships makes them yours... but still earn money for them...
That one did form the basis of a no-mining challenge mode.
It's a bug. The code for tractoring a ship moves the tow into the tug's TG. This moves it from a civie TG into one of your TGs, even though it's still a civie ship. I don't know the details, but this is an unexpected state of the system that Steve forgot to protect against happening (i.e. he should be filtering the possible tug targets so that civie ships don't appear).
If you want to interpret the bug as a house rule of commandeering ships, that's up to you - it's your game of solitaire. I would strongly recommend against logging any bugs having anything remotely related to TG movement, wealth generation civies, etc. in a game where you've done this - you'll have intentionally corrupted the state of the DB, and Steve has repeatedly stated that he does not want to waste his time chasing down bug reports that are due to such corruptions.
I'm not sure if there is a way to get rid of a civie TG/ship using game mechanics/SM mode (I can't think of one). If there is, then I would recommend using SM mode and instant OOB to implement this house rule - eliminate the civie ship using the intended mechanism, then instant-OOB a new one of the same class into your fleet. You could also put in a suggestion for "commandeering" into the official suggestions thread - Steve might like the idea and give you a button to do it (and also to sell surplus ships back to the civies - hmmm this one might already be there).
John