Why is it that most people seem to be utterly clueless about probing? My brain hurts every time I see a sqadded player go through an aleph, turn towards the next aleph on his/her route, and drop probes on the way. What on earth are these people trying to achieve? Every time I discover such probes while flying a blind int, I die a little more inside.
Probing takes time, and dropping the probe smack on the flight route between alephs wastes that time. The probe you just dropped there will be eyed and destroyed the first time an enemy comes that way. Quite likely it will be destroyed without even eyeing that enemy.
So you are out in a scout, and you took probes along. Good for you. Take 10 - 20 sec longer to place that probe, and it will actually be useful. Dive or climb at least 600+m below or above the route you are taking, or even (ooooh!) look how you could place it about 900m from a He rock or two to eye the miners that may come around later. Even better, place a probe to eye important stuff that will come through an aleph. An EWS 1 has a a sensor range of 500m before faction mods and GAs. That means that if you place it 900m from an aleph, it will eye anything with sig 200+, which is pretty much everything important in early / mid game. Bonus points for putting it on the enemy side of the aleph.
Go to the side of the aleph cone (yes, I know you actually have to take the time to get there, and even check the range by targeting the aleph... man, if you wanted to work this hard you'd sign up for volunteer work, right?). For extra points, get away from the plane of the map, to make deprobers work extra hard. Drop at 900, when the aleph looks like this < and you have actually dropped a useful probe! Then go on your merry way, and drop more of them.
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This public service anouncement brought to you by a recovering scout-ho.
"South of the Alps and East of the Adriatic, paranoia is considered mental equilibrium..."
