Sentry and Guard, less than useful

I'm finding the Sentry and Guard commands not very useful. Most of the time a ship will only stay in either state for one turn. Next turn I'm right back to telling my radar picket scout to go into sentry. Looking in the manual.

• Sentry: Orders a ship to remain idle until another ship, friendly or enemy, comes near.
• Guard: Commands the ship to sit idle until an enemy ship comes near.

My suggestion is to have only an enemy ship cancel sentry. Guard mode seems to work better but it looks like unarmed ships will cause it to cancel. Only armed enemy ships within one or two movement turns should cancel guard mode.

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I am also finding it a bit buggy, at least when combined with the fleet feature. Example: I'll have a fleet guarding, take one ship out of the fleet and move it elsewhere. It takes me a few turns to realize that the whole lfleet has also moved! Not a game-breaker but still...

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KCanute the "feature" your describing isn't really related to Sentry or Guard. However, I know exactly what your describing. Trying to work with stacks of fleets and ships together gets real irritating. I've figured out how to work around this part of the user interface but it also sometimes seems buggy.

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I actually like exactly the way it is (assuming there are no bugs). The guard should activate when I see any enemy ship is near, because I want to destroy them, especially if they are unarmed, because it is either colony or constructor ships.

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I think guard functions fine. At least when a ship is in danger and I've not noticed it, whenI click on "find" I'll go to that ship and see that there are enemies aproching.

I do agree that selecting among stacked ships and fleet is not easy, most of the times I end up moving the one I wanted to leave there. I'm getting around by clicking several times on the stack until I see the correct ship selected in the bottom of the screen (but sometimes it still is the wrong one that moves

. Will have to keep practising that

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Sentry and Guard (when working right) come in real handy at the end of a large game when you have hundreds of ships or fleets on the board. If you use them, you will have sensor arrays at the edge of your 'territory' that you won't want to have to 'pass turn' every round. You can set them to sentry so they only alert when they see somehting. Guard is the same and works great for starbase garrisons.

Not sure if the feature is buggin in GC2. I haven't gotten to a game of that magnitude yet.

Hope this is helpful.

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