spqr12: I'm playing the M.A.X. campaign on average difficulty which is already very challenging on the second mission...
My question to the veteran players is: what does the Sentry order do exactly? I cannot find any explanation in the manual and its effect is not obvious to me in the game itself.
In practice, setting a unit to on sentry will cancel its planned path, will enable reaction fire, will cancel auto survey for surveyors, and will auto-select the next unit if auto select next feature is enabled in the in-game preferences menu.
In
Turns based game mode, on sentry has little to no other effect as military units cannot be set to "Manual" operation mode in which case military units will be in On Sentry or Awaiting operation modes. In both of those modes, the military units will attack enemy on sight (reaction fire) in most scenarios. For example if your stationary gun turret is on sentry or awaiting and an enemy scout enters its attack range, the turret will attack the scout until it runs out of available shots, ammunition or the scout gets destroyed.
Now in
Simultaneous turns based game mode, military units receive a new command called "Manual". If a military unit, except infiltrators, is set to Manual mode its automatic reaction fire is disabled. Switching off Manual mode or changing to Sentry mode enables reaction fire back.
The rationale behind not having Manual mode in turns based mode may be that the player that is being attacked cannot interrupt the attacker player's turn to decide whether to react or not thus default behavior is better (to react) as we cannot expect players to remember the reaction fire state for hundreds of units found scattered on the map.
We should note that in early demo and internal test builds of MAX there was no such thing as "Manual" mode at all. We have evidence that Sentry mode was in the game since the v1.0 public press release demo at least. No earlier build of the game exists anymore so we cannot tell when Sentry mode was introduced into the game design.
In most use cases awaiting and on sentry unit modes are interchangeable for computer player decisions. But even in the minority of cases where sentry and awaiting modes are handled differently, at the end the computer players will try to estimate whether the non on sentry units could be a threat and will attempt to defend against them...
The fact that sentry and manual modes are not described in the user manual nor anywhere in the in-game help speaks for itself too.
We can conclude that unless a player uses the Manual unit command, the Sentry command has no practical use and even then Manual can be simply toggled on and off any ways without using the on sentry command... I never used the manual mode in any of the missions I played...
On campaign mission 2:
- a dumb enemy, a low difficulty level, might not be the best choice for this mission. Dumb enemies will attack head on not considering the consequences, their own losses. Smarter enemies, at higher difficulty levels will try to be sneaky and will try to keep gains and losses on par. They will also tend to leave more attack reserves at the end of their turns to "defend" against threats. Smartest computer players are cheating. They know exactly where your units are. This means they may split up to go against both of your bases instead of focusing on their actual mission goal.
- air transporters and drop - shoot - pick up tactics is crucial for this mission.
- having air support, ground attack planes, around an area will discourage the enemy to invade there.
- a player that never seen this mission will never win the first time. Learn the enemy movements, units, then retry.
- keep in mind that in simultaneous turns based mode the faster you finish with your turn, the less time the enemy has to move its wast number of units... the computer thinks slowly... use this to your advantage.
Know thy enemies...
