This may be more of a problem with my strategy, but I’m currently finding that escort and formation can cause some really odd behaviour. Whenever I tell a few ships to escort another ship that is behind the, they always seem to start off by turning in to get as close as possible to the escorted ship.
Formation, however, causes problems when applied to ships with similar weapons ranges. What can happen is that once one of the ships is in range it’ll stop and start to fire, but this means that any ships that aren’t yet in range will just sit there and let the lead ship get pounded away.
I think that these problems are probably fixable by using them in different ways and using different orders, so using protect instead of escort say or creating formations out of different ship types.
I’m not 100% happy with the way the escorting squadrons look in battles. My current thinking is that rather than being a group, any escorting fighters should be distributed as a ‘cloud’ at the start of a battle, within radius of the parent ship, that will spread them out more evenly and maybe look cooler :D. Thoughts?
I like the idea of a cloud of fighters surrounding a cruiser, like bees 'round a hive. How would frigate escorts work though? Ideally I try to have them ahead of a cruiser to shoot down the fighters and missiles before they reach that cruiser. The behaviour says that they try to keep to within a certain distance from the escort target, could the area that they keep to be matched to the initial setup distance? That way they stay with the cruiser and will provide advance cover until the cruiser catches up with whatever combat they’ve got caught up in.
