Placing a unit on alert?

[wesley32]

What does "placing a unit on alert" do? I've been placing my missiles on "alert". Does it attack any enemy entering your border, in your border, attacking you or what? What causes it to activate? Thanks.

[RedFred]

Can't ever say that I am an expert on the "alert" feature, but I'd hate to see your thread sink out of sight without some replies...

The reason I am not an expert on missile alerts is that I like to have control over when and where my missiles fire. Alerted missiles will happily hit anything in range without being able to discriminate between a good target and a silly one.

I much prefer reusable units whenever possible over missiles anyway. But when I do invest the resources to build missiles, I want to make sure that they are not going to get wasted on a former when the enemy rovers are in range.

This can particularly be a problem if you share a landmass with another faction that you suddenly go to war with. Not so bad if you are on an island or have a continent to yourself.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Putting a missile on alert status by default turns the control of that missile over to the computer. Now as Red points out that is inherently a bad thing as the AI is almost inevitably a pathetic general.

The only time I ever heard of a missile gaining you something in alert stauts was to take advantage of the now defunct infinite range bug. In the prepatch days you could set your missile (conventional or planet busting variety) on alert and the computer could launch them to destination far outside your normal range. Aah for the good old days. Hey wait a sec. we've got incoming bogie missiles. Where in the heck did they come fro................

[gnome]

Alert status on Missiles causes them to launch to the nearest known opponent within range. Similarly, interceptors and bombers will fly out to attack enemies within range also.

However, the most useful purpose of Alert is for air cover on a city. If you build an interceptor (needlejet, high attack, no shields, air-superiority) and place it on alert, any air unit trying to attack your city (or a unit close to the city) will be attacked by your jet first /even if it isn't your turn!/

This would be an extraordinarily useful feature, except that there is a bug in the code--your interceptors can't tell the difference between an enemy unit and one of your own... so let's say one interceptor flies out to blow away one of yang's jets... then just about every other needlejet in all the nearby cities will fly out to intercept /your/ jet, and if they reach it, fly home.

The same thing happens if you move a transport near a city with an alerted interceptor...

So it's a big pain in the butt... but once in a while it will save you during your opponent's turn.

[RedFred]

gnome - it is not necessary to put interceptors on alert for them to, well, intercept.

In fact, I wish I could turn them off once and a while. As in when they are running at 90% damage and they launch themselves on a suicide mission to protect a crawler that is going to die whether they intercept or not.