My ships, even my biggest cruisers just don’t retreat ever, no matter how I set the caution bar. My ships are generally slow moving but they don’t even seem to try and turn around. I usually set my caution to about 90% so that they would retreat more or less as soon as their shields are gone but they just stay in the front line until they get pounded to dust. Anyone know why this might be?
I find the caution order pretty useless anyway, if your ship lost shields it’s going down in a matter of seconds in most cases.
I guess only fighters and really really fast frigates would benefit at all from it.
I think that caution bar might only take hitpoints into account, so if you set it at 99 you would still no retreat until both armor and shields are gone or nearly gone.
Yes , ideally it would be great if armor is counted in as damage, because armor is the only window of opportunity for a retreat, once it’s gone it’s too late.
Thanks for the replies. At this stage I’m not playing on-line, I’m not sure whether that makes a difference but my ships tend to stick around for a good few seconds even after the shields and armour are gone. In my last scenario one of my ships survived a battle in the bottom half of the screen with no shields, no armour and only half its hull and then immediately cruised up to the rest of the battle instead of obeying caution and hanging back to repair. Somewhat annoying, it’s seems caution is pointless (and therefore repair bots as well) and I hate pointless features, they tend to waste a lot of your time while you’re finding out just how pointless they are!
I appreciate the help, it’s nice to have a better idea of whether I should be bothering to give orders or not.
This will likely be improved in future updates.
Perhaps three slider bars for the cautious order?
Shields 0--------------100%
Armor 0--------------100%
Hull Points 1----------100%
This would be perfect.
Cautious isn’t pointless, it depends how your ships are designed. Small weak frigates that are under heavy fire, set to retreat at 90% damage are indeed doomed, but large cruisers with autorepair systems and cloaking devices set to retreat the minute they take hull damage can easily survive and return to battle.
It’s also invaluable to a carrier and fighters strategy.
I wouldn’t rule out future changes to take shields and armor into account though.
This would be amazing for shield and armor tanking ships.
Caution is beyond pointless, it hurts you more than help. Ship on left edge = dead. No repair module/carrier bay is worth having that caution tag on your ship.
To further illustrate. You got a 1500 HP ship, with 75% caution they retreat once they hit 1125 HP. Even with the slightest chance that it escape with it’s repair intact. Repair give you 450. Then you go back, get fired at 2 times, and goes on retreat forever with it’s 1125 HP and repair emptied out. I rather it just fires for the whole 1500 HP duration.
The caution tag needs to be changed so it’s null after all repair module/carrier bay empties out.
Then again, not like repair modules for HP is any good…
It’d be amazing for fighters. A fighter with only plate damage can retreat at full speed.
lol
But again, once your carrier bay runs out, your fighters will run away with a little scratch on their armor, as they hug the left edge with full HP.
So effectively you still lose HP from not having caution tag and let your fighters fight til the end.
I STILL say use this as I make dedicated (more than one bay) carrier ships and take the hit in dps. I’ve found that sometimes it is worth having the carrier sitting (yes no engines) At the edge for the fighters to run back too. In my Eve-online mod ALL ships will have a carrier bay, but thats only becasue i’m using drones as fighters and in eve-online even frigates have drones .
Lone Starr
Even if we ignore the amount of resources wasted on carrier bays, you will still need more carrier bay supply than (caution %) of all your fighters health just to break even.
True, But that is also way I’m Making the larger Carrier Bays have unlimtied repair or maybe a huge number of supplys to allow only one per ship and not run out after two or three fighters dock for repairs.
I guess anything that removes “hug the left wall” will make caution usable. And unlimited supply does just that.
Agreed. The present quirk of what happens to your fighters using Caution when the carrier runs out of repair capacity is really, really annoying. So far, removing the supply cap on those carrier modules looks like the simplest solution. Is it the best? Possibly not, but in the absence of other proposals as neat & clean as this I’m willing to go with it.
someone should cross-post that on suggestions…