During play, remotely-controlled ships will appear to be owned by the player who controls them, not who owns them. This is an important distinction: if you see a Crystalline-controlled ship approaching which actually belongs to the Bird Men, you have to set primary enemy Birds to attack it.
PHost tries in several ways to tell you that:
- Both the original owner and the remote control player will receive player messages listing the ships, their true owner, and their remote control player. This information will also be reported in util.dat. Advanced client programs, such as , and will also display this information (for example, PCC will say "a Bird Men ship under Crystalline control").
- Non-involved players who scan a remote-controlled ship will also get the util.dat record.
- The names of all ships under remote control will be modified by PHost to end in *N, where N is the code for the true owner (1..9 for Feds to Robots, A for Rebels, B for Colonies). For example, when the Crystals in our example name the Bird ship NX Borgslasher, PHost will report that name as NX Borgslasher*3 in Result files, so everyone knows that it's actually a Bird ship. In subspace messages, the ship will have its real name, without the tag.
- PHost will prevent that you name your own ships ending in *N to avoid spoofing.
You need to know the true owner of a ship in many cases:
- If you want to attack a ship, you need to set the Primary Enemy to the true owner, not to the player who controls it.
- When you want to set a mission which is restricted to certain players, it's the true owner which defines whether it will work. For example, when you're Crystal and set mission 9 on a remotely-controlled Bird Men ship, the ship will do Super Spy (the Bird Men's mission 9), although many programs will list the mission as Lay Web Mines (the Crystalline mission 9). If your client doesn't let you set the mission you want, use the extended mission 31, Special Mission, instead.
