posted 05-25-99 11:10 PM ET        

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If my fighters or my ships patrol outside my territory, they trigger drones depending on my police values, which tend to be bad since I use the free market economy a lot - this shouldn't happen, since historically, patrolling naval forces haven't stirred up the masses - it's always been the deployment of ground troops for unpopular wars.

Also, units which are purely explorers shouldn't get the drones all worked up. Since the game has a feature allowing a unit to be a primary defender, why shouldn't it also have an ability to designate a unit as an explorer, meaning it is exempt from the drone creation problem, by trading off it's right to initiate combat against another faction (alien mind worms should still be killable as a self defense measure.) I like to do a lot of exploration, since there is all of those pods to be sucked up, but the drone riots situation gets severe. The game should distinguish between pure exploration of unknown territory and offensive deployment of military forces - real societies usually have.