It seems that the game bias’s the cpu’s fleet over mine. Their cruisers ignore my fighters and my cruisers will waste 15 hours trying to shoot down their fighters all the while getting curbstomped…
I set priorities on my frigates and cruisers as low as possible on fighters and highest priority on attacking frigates and cruisers and all the while the CPU AI just laughs mockingly at me as it’s cruisers ass rape my fleet
am I doing something wrong? I change fighter priority distance to as low as it goes as well. I have cruisers with all anti-fighter lasers that do the trick but all my other heavy ships waste time trying to pick off fighters at max range even before they’re attacked by them instead of the cruisers they’re escorting
WE NEED MORE SPECIFIC CONTROLS OVER OUR FLEET COMMAND
or i need to notice something i’m missing, as it stands I feel i’ve wasted my money on a crappy game that only serves to drive me mad.
As far as I can tell the computer uses the same AI as your ships get, it’s just a question of commands.
I used to mix weapons on my ships but lately I’ve been making some dedicated “ship killers” that have no anti-fighter capability and no fighter attack order at all.
I’ll then either have dedicated anti-fighter ships or other mix ships that are set to follow (escort or formation) the dedicated ship killers. That way they can kill the fighters without flying all over the map trying to chase them down.
Note that if your ship doesn’t have an “Attack Fighter” command, it will completely ignore them until there are no other targets left, and then it will go ahead and attack fighters. (This can be a handy command to give your own fighters. Or make a bunch of rocket fighters, set them to ONLY kill enemy frigates. They’ll kill all the frigates first and then attack whatever is left.)
The computer ships use the exact same AI as the players. If they seem to be doing better, they just have more exacting orders set for the different ships. You can prove this is true by issuing challenges to yourself
the best way to deal with enemy fighters, IMO, is to have more fighters yourself escorting your ships. And don’t remove their attack fighters order from cruisers unless they have missiles or plasma, they might help a bit.
I have a frigate fleet with a pulse laser or missile mounted on each. It sounds good in practice, but midway through battles with lots of fighter spam, they tend to lose their zeal and drive aimlessly at the fighters buzzing overhead. Their primary weapons are still firing at the proper targets when in range, but they just eventually end up in odd corners of the map.
This is with 1% fighter, 98-100% cruiser/frigate attack orders.
I’ve had issues with I think it’s the “Rescue” plan doing that. They’ll get fixated on a fighter group that’s attacking a ship in another area of the map (e.g., a ship that retreated with Cautious) and driver over there to “rescue” it even to the extent of ignoring closer targets firing on other ships.
I’m not sure if Cooperative may do the same thing too. Like sometimes they decide to cooperate against a target that’s out of range despite the ample numbers that are in range.
That’s what I thought too, but eventually I removed all of those orders and still ended up with issues. They certainly will complicate things further, though.
The most elegant thing might just be to have 0% as the lowest possible priority value and have it ignore that craft type as a driving target.
Oh I love this idea. 0% for “shoot at them if there’s nothing else to shoot at but don’t go out of your way to follow them around”.
Incidentally, I found that Cruiser Lasers + tractor beams seem to make better AA than actual AA weapons, at least against fast, armored fighters (so basically the Icarus…) It’s crazy DPS, reasonable tracking that becomes basically a guarantee against a tractor beam target, plus they’re useful against ships!
It’s interesting to note that tractor beams will target fighters at all times, regardless of whether or not you’ve deleted the ‘attack fighters’ order.
So tractor beams are a safe, if not somewhat expensive, AA measure to spread across your fleet without using the fighter attack order. The killing unit is what has to be specialized.
No. In that case, idle weapons won’t fire at fighters at all until the match is virtually over, instead of becoming an improvised AA used on approach.
i mean, deleting “attack fighters” and “attack fighters 0%” is literally the same, isn’t it? zero means to me “don’t do it”, and not “do it during approach”…
and currently, setting “attack fighters” to 1% means they will shoot at incoming fighters but switch to another target with higher priority as soon as it comes in range.
maybe it’s just me, but i’ve never seen ships hunting down fighters with 1% priority.
I suspect the way it works is that if you set them to 1% fighters and 100% frigates, each individual turret will shoot a frigate rather than a fighter, if given a choice, but the ship itself may still pick a fighter as its “pursuit target”, especially if you have it set to “Rescue” or “Retaliate”.
Removing fighters entirely from the list means it won’t shoot at them even if nothing else is in range. So your ship swarmed by fighters heading towards an enemy cruiser will shoot at nothing until it gets in range of the cruiser.
Ideally setting it to 0% would tell it to go ahead and shoot at them if they’re in range but to never pursue them, unless that’s the only thing left.
There is definitely a bug in the AI, but you can exploit it and get the CPU fleet to do the same useless mulling about waiting to die the death of a million mosquito bites. The bug is that your ships prioritize by distance and the minimum priority for engaging fighters is non-zero, even if you DELETE the engage fighters order! So if the enemy sets cruisers to “cautious” and gives them 2 or more engines, then those cruisers can get so far out of range that your own cruisers will park and wait to die by fighter spam instead of finishing the fight. (Minimize by setting “engage cruisers” to 100% and deleting the engage fighters order) The reason the priority is non-zero is so that gunners will shoot at fighters when they have nothing else to do but unfortunately the same priority is given to the pilot of the vessel.
The counter is to never deploy a cruiser that doesn’t:
a: have the ability to munch fighters OR
b: has the ability to move faster than 0.1 so that it is much less likely that running enemies can confound the AI OR
c: Play as Rebels and always have fighter superiority or at least parity.