So prior to 1.08 I would delete attack orders on my fighters to avoid getting caught up with cruisers until everything else is dead. Normally this would result in them ignoring cruisers altogether, until nothing was left, at which point they would swarm them together with my missile boats annihilate anything left.
I’m in the process of going through all missions so I can experiment with the other races, I again did this and my fighters totally ignored the cruisers, they still swarmed them, but would not attack, even after everything else was dead. Do we now have to lower priority to 1% to get this behavior?
they should still attack if there are no other viable targets. Is it possibly the case that they have flown to within minimum range? I doubt it, as fighters can attack very close. Are their weapons working or maybe destroyed?
Is this reproducable?
Seems like you shouldn’t have to delete the orders. You should be able to move the bar down to 0%. IMO that means you never move towards that target unless all other types are destroyed.
But on the firing thing it can be difficult. You don’t want missile boats waiting their first volley on fighters. But at the same time if you make a ship with some anti-fighter weapons you want the anti-fighter weapons attack fighters, just not necessarily chasing after the fighters.
I’ve seen several suggestions, and this is what I’ve come up with tweaking commands. The current “Attack” commands for priority and range only should affect the movement of the ship. All firing priority should be set on a per weapon basis. I think Cliffski said in ship design screen you can save priorities to ships. Here you should be able to set the firing priorities for every weapon individually (or groups of weapons).
Then you can make a cruiser with anti fighter weapons and short ranged cruiser weapons that dives in against an enemy cruiser formation while still firing at fighters, but not chase after the fighters.
On a similar note on how attack orders work right now. I’m playing on a large map, and the enemy sends a wave of fighters over. I put my fighters on escort, have some tractor beams, and on my frigate at attack priority to 0% for fighters. I don’t want to delete it because they can shoot down fighters caught in tractor beams. As the fleets are moving closer everything works great. Frigates are shooting and killing fighter in the tractor beams. All my frigates/cruisers are in formation to a lead cruiser. This keeps them all in formation until the lead unit is killed and everything releases close to the enemy.
The problem happens when the formation breaks. Now all the frigates that had fighters set to 0% keep going after the fighters, ignoring cruisers and frigates that are set to 100%, but are out of range. This is exactly what I want to avoid by adding more control to the movement and targeting of units.
This behavior still occurs on patch 1.09 for me :(.
The game is still a blast, this is just a little nag for me
Edit: Err, so cliff, yes this is reproduecable for me, and no the fighter’s weapons are not destroyed, and they are well within ranges to fire on the enemy cruisers, especially as they are still swarming.