(Not taking racial abilities into account)

Scouts : Are these actually useful? Even veteran scouts get caught FAR too often, even when set to spy and nothing else. On my end, I have caught enemy spies gathering intelligence in my territories even when I have NO military units in that territory...let alone any set to patrol. This basically makes patrolling pointless as you can easily catch enemy spies anyway...

Also the chance of disarming a minefield is practically nil in my experience due to the above problem (Getting caught extremely easily).

Unit stats : Are the firing rates actually used, or are they just fluff figures? How is attack/defense used? Where can i see the exact bonuses that a unit has (e.g. fighter bonus vs other aircraft)? There is basically no info on this. Im trying to figure out what good infantry are for...one on one they are weaker than their vehicle counterpart, the only reason I can think of to build infantry is to reduce the maintenance penalty you get for having many units of one type, and infantry/vehicles are counted as different types for the maintenance penalty.

But for things like shockwave dreadnaughts vs shockwave carriers, i cant really tell which will win in a direct matchup. The shockwave carrier has a lower attack strength, but much higher defense and a much higher firing rate.

I also cant tell how effective a flak ship or flak launcher is exactly. The game implies they get a bonus vs air units, but not how much. So if i have a flak launcher, how many bombers or fighters can it shoot down? I have no idea, so i have no idea how many to build. To make matters worse, the standard ground defenses can clearly shoot down air units, and seems to do so quite well...so it doesnt look like you need flak at all.

Missiles : Are these useful for anything? You are throwing away colonists, space and resources to build these, yet they are extremely easy to shoot down, even by militia and standard ground defenses. A few AM deflectors + militia can stop 16-20 supernova warheads with little to no damage. Seige cruisers are more expensive, and less effective in my experience.

I once saw the AI launch 4 supernova missles at my sea platform which only had one flak launcher as defense...and the flak launcher easily shot all 4 missiles down before they could do any damage. And those are supposed to be end game missiles? Meh.

Unit orders : Setting units to avoid mines seems to be mandatory as disarming them via scouts basically never happens in my experience. Unfortunately that makes units go full retard and kill all the buildings too...is there another easy way to take out or bypass minefields?

And retreat % doesnt seem to matter much, because units die too quickly anyway. They pretty mcuh get focused fired and gibbed before they can retreat.

Money : This seems to be the main limiting factor early game. Transportation costs can eat up a lot, which forces you to make each territory as self sufficient as possible. Then theres the problem that you cant make much money till you get to metal replicators...even a territory full of automated factories doesnt make much trade revenue, and tax revenue at the highest setting is fairly unimpressive unless you are playing humans.

I find that if you only have a handful of territores, that a "basic" army of 10 infantry + 10 vehicles + a few medics/command corps costs so much in maintenance that you have very little left over.

Micromanagement : This is really annoying me. I find that i am spending too much time micro managing everything. For example, everytime i want to build units, i have to manually add them to the build queue, then manually re-assign the colonists after the untis are built. Every single time. This gets old quickly. Is there no way to automatically re-assign colonists once they are done building units?

Its also annoying how the game doesnt optimize colonists when you set them to upgrade a building. E.G 5 colonists takes 2 turns to upgrade, 6 also takes 2 turns, but when you drag colonists over to upgrade, the game doesnt move ONLY 5 colonists...if you hold down ALT and drag the colonists, it moves -all- colonists so you end up with 6. If you dont hold alt, it only moves 1 colonist. The game doesnt seem smart enough to move only 5 colonists.

Its also really tiring having to manually set newly built units to the proper retreat % and "Avoid mines" every single time...not to mention the sheer hassle of having to activate the military training center, assign colonists, then shut down the building manually when you dont have any units to train...

Is there a better way to automate all this?

In Deadlock 1's official strategy guide (I consider that they are the same game mechanics as Deadlock 2) there are specific pages that describe Scouts and Missiles and give advice.

I share these scanned pages (6 in all) since I have not yet translated these pages in my own language And so it would be difficult for me to talk about it clearly.

About the retreat order, its only real utilitated is that if you set the rate to 0%, this way you can discover nearby land without taking any risk.

Another trick that you must have already understood is to set the% rate as low as possible so that your veteran unit can escape without risk of combat.

Here is the link to the pages and as well as a rar file grouping them all.

For the rest of your questions I could not find answers, sorry.

Edit: Retrait du fichier.

Thanks for the help. That scout formulae is really broken...most veteran scouts will have a 30% chance of being caught every turn while spying, in a territory with 5 enemy units that aren't patrolling. So on average, in 3-4 turns your spy is caught. Not very useful.

That guide doesnt seem to mention disarming minefields...i guess that wasnt in deadlock 1. But i doubt its easier than spying.

Is there a way to automatically set the retreat %? It is very annoying having to do this for all new units.

AFAIR you can set it in the production queue. It is a bit hidden. But don't nail me, or I just did it while having them all selected......You can definitly do it for a whole group AND still have different values for others.