Setting up your line is all well and good. But I hate it when I place groups on the flank only to have the AI decide it wants to attack the center.
I’d like to be able to tell squads to move to some point in space before really letting them go. Kind of like how you chalk out football plays.
This would let us plan real flanking maneuvers and/or force a squad to go ‘up the middle’ before the AI goes off and decides new moves.
It doesn’t even have to be complicated with legs and stuff, just a simple line from start to some point. The ships would be compelled to follow the line before they can then maneuver freely.
I support a deploy to order that will cause a ship to move to a certain point, firing at other ships, but not deviating from the shortest path to that point. To limit stacking, only one ship could have a deploy order to a given point on the grid (some more complex math could be done with lengths of paths and stuff actually, but that’s totally unnecessary).
I think we’ll also need some filtering on orders at some points, so that you can show all ships with certain orders, all escort lines, all protect lines, etc…
This kind of “after deployment” order would add depth to the game and also make it feel just a little less hands-off once you start the battle. I’d really appreciate something like that, if only for the spectacle of vast flanking maneuvers.
I hate that!!! you get a nice formation going and all of them start heading roughly the way you want them to, but noooooo… some little frigate or a single cruiser without escorts decides it can take on the main group…
Maybe we need voice input so we can yell at the captains better…
This is definitely near the top of my wish list for the final version. I’m cool with not having live control of the battles, but it would be nice to add a tactical element like this. And as has been mentioned it would stop lone-cruiser attacks, or those moments when your reserves just refuse to get involved in a firefight that’s outside their range.
This would be very cool. This, and/or improvements to the formation/escorting orders would solve a lot of issues for me. I often line up a group in the middle opposite an enemy cluster, only to have half break off towards the top and half towards the bottom. Not very ideal. I’ve thought about using formations or escort orders to try and mitigate this, but since they only support a direct one-to-one relationship to another ship, they feel like awkward, kludgy, half-solutions to the problem. Much better would be if I could assign groups - e.g., these five cruisers are a group, and this group of frigates should escort them. Allow me to set a max distance from nearest group member and we’re done. That way the whole thing doesn’t fall apart if the lead ship dies, it takes less clicking around to set up, and it gives the constituent ships more flexibility to maneuver and engage appropriate targets to boot.
