Hi, got a copy on steam a few days ago and having lots of fun.
However I have a problem. When I give ships the orders cooperative, vulture or/and keep moving. At some point after blasting a few enemies ships they will start targeting fighters instead of cruisers (even if I give them priority 1%) and go away from other targets. I can just remove the attack fighters order, but then they will never shoot at fighters, even if there is nothing else to shoot at all.
I was wondering, if it is possible to set orders in a way that ships will shoot fighters if there is nothing else its weapons can shoot. But “ignore” them if there is a higher priority target somewhere in the map. And how.
Removing the engage fighters order will not completely prevent them targetting fighters - they will attack them after all other targets are dead.
Trouble is, defense lasers won’t defend against fighters unless the engage order is given.
The work around is to build specific fighter defense craft or interceptors and remove the order to attack fighters from capital ships that you just want to blast big lumps off other capital ships with.
The PD weapon paradigm is not to do damage, but it checks a %, and kills or doesn’t kill the missile.
What needs to be added are “defensive” weapons that only attack fighters unless there are no other targets in range.
So anti-missile PD, and anti-fighter PD.
I’m feeling your pain… Part of me wishes ships without orders to attack a ship class would at least fire on them when they get in range… But another part of me was glad they don’t, when I was fighting with missile dominated fleets, since missiles fired pointlessly at fighters have a loooong cooldown.
I’ve said before, but ideally I’d like the ability to set ‘movement target’ seperate to ‘weapons target’ (even better would be the chance to set this by weapons class (based on tracking value) or even by weapon pod… But just seperating movement from firing would be a massive benefit (for example, it’s usually better to kill frigates before you kill cruisers, but you still want to approach those long ranged missile cruisers while you’re doing it.)
God, can you imagine the levels of OCD tweaking we’d all get into if each pod could be assigned orders rather than just the ship as a whole!
Ooooo - can we get the targetting computer to boost specific weapon slots that we choose too?!
Or how about directional shielding…
*insane giggling and knee-hugging…
I’ve noticed that tractor beams will grab fighters even without engagement orders. Of course, somebody has to be ordered to actually shoot them.
I actually had this problem earlier. Although my cruisers had been ordered to only give fighters 1% priority, the battle split into 2 fronts, and a force of 3 cruisers, none of them setup to attack fighters apart from the little green laser and PD, they stayed and tried (and hilariously failed, on the whole) to destroy all the fighters.
What they should have done was travel back down the map to where the rest of my force was getting utterly slaughtered.
Making a dedicated anti-fighter ship and then putting it into formation with another ship works pretty well. So your main ship completely ignores fighters and focuses on the enemy while the tag-along follows blindly behind and shoots at whatever comes into range, including fighters, but doesn’t chase them (until the lead ship is dead, anyway…)
As posted, dedicated AA ships will do the trick. You can also try altering your formation so that your fighters, if you have any, intercept enemy fighters long before your cruisers get there.
Please for the love of GOD add this order.
Its not exactly game breaking, so I dont know how much of a priority it is. We lived with it thru the beta, no problem.
It doesnt break the game, but is limits the flexibility in fleet composition and orders.
It doesnt seem reasonable to not have this type of order, considering how easy it should be to implement.
I’d love that order. A similar problem exists with ranges. I set a range on the attack frigate order, and the ship it decides it wants to attack the frigate in the back of the enemy fleet, and will charge into point blank range of other ships, completely ignoring the range order on cruisers.