Bug? Or am I doing something wrong?

Just got the beta, Excellent game btw. However I’ve run into a…quirk.

I’m on the battles from the start (in particular the 2nd one against the empire (circle ships with lots of fighters)). After attempting to design my own fighter to counter theirs i found i couldn’t…not a problem, more than one way to win this. I then setup some cruisers with excellent defenses and decent beam weapon firepower with a few missile cruisers as backup (remaining ships are just some fighters and missile frigates. I had done this as i had noticed that the the enemies ships seemed…fragile. Who cares about the fighters, if they have no frigates/cruisers i win anyways right? I order all of my cruisers to ignore the fighters by removing the order from the default 3 that show up. Start the fight…and watch my cruisers wander around the screen swatting at the fighters. Its not that the fighters are dangerous…they can’t even break the shields…but the enemy blob easily picks them off one at a time as they have all drifted apart chasing fighter clouds. While they ‘do’ engage the cruisers/frigates if they get within main gun range i don’t have the focused firepower i need…dooming me to a multi-hour match (if i let it go that long). I also tried setting the ‘attack fighters’ order to a priority of 0%, that had the same results.

Am i missing something? (and yes I’m aware that using even longer range weapons would probably work…but i still don’t like that my battle plans aren’t being followed.)

Also a button to blow up your own ships would be…amusing. Insubordination will not be tolerated.

It’s being addressed with an ‘ignore x ship’ order.

In the Gravity Well challenge, you just can’t have any part of your fleet outside of strong anti-fighter protection. Otherwise you’ll lose those undefended ships to the distraction of swarms. If an isolated ship has no anti-fighter capacity, it can’t rid itself of latched on swarm and never returns to the battle proper. Even with attack fighter orders removed, ships regard fighters as targets of opportunity absent any other targets. The key to winning Gravity well is designing an effective anti-fighter fleet first. Pad the remaining population cap with anti-cruiser weapons second. That’s not so easy since there’s plenty of cruisers too.

There are two waves of fighters, an initial attacking swarm but also an equal number of squadrons in the rear pinned to escorting cruisers. Killing each of the cruisers replenishes the fighter swarm. So you must not lose all of your anti-fighter cap in the first half of the battle.

I think a Ignore Ship Type command should eventually supersede deleting an attack ship type command. But it’s not the key to winning Gravity Well. You would still lose the challenge, and probably any fighter heavy challenge, with or without Ignore X.

“Im in ur shield bubble, killing ur hullz” - fighter swarm

Watch a swarmed cruiser’s hull health bar in the status window. :slight_smile:

Like i said these ships had plenty of defenses…yes they ‘do’ get shots in past the shield bubble…but those shots hit the armour plating (heaviest available) and the superficial damage is repaired with the repair system. I did finish the fight, used a group of heavy plasma cannon sips, the range allowed some of my ships to keep focused on the larger ships (still i should change the design as laser cannons seem useless against fast moving fighters.

I think this is going to change in the next patch:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2506

So hopefully, if you remove the “Attack Fighters” command from your cruisers, they’ll no longer get distracted trying to swat those pesky flies.