I thought that maybe having one thread on good tips and tricks on ways to set up fleets could be helpful for everyone. Or use this thread if you are trying to figure out something, but can’t seem to get it to work. I’ll go first with a few things.
Tip: If you want a fast ships in formation with a slow ships use escort instead. Then the fast ship will still use it’s speed while flying around the slower ship that helps it avoid shots.
Question: Is there a way to keep a bomber class fighter from running off in front of the fleet and getting destroyed. I’ve tried having it escort a capital ship hoping it would engage when the capital ship got close, but no go.
A “wait for X seconds” order, with a customizable time, would be very useful.
I find formations somewhat useful for keeping big heavily defended ships in front of weaker, less well protected ships. A cruiser with mostly armour, shields, and some close range stuff, works quite well formated to a missile cruiser just behind it.
I’ve found formations great for keeping a bunch of big beefy cruisers with craploads of shields, armor and healing at about half of my missile cruisers maximum range. The enemy stops to shoot at the damage sinks and then gets taken apart by the missiles. Simple and effective.
An interesting formation trick is to ‘stack’ several missile cruisers in the same place then put them all in formation with one ship. It means that more missile cruisers get into range at the same time, thus launching more missiles at once, thus increasing the amount of missiles that make it through the enemies PD. Plus it looks really cool when a salvo of about 200 missiles shreds an enemy cruiser in seconds.
When I found out that you could set engagement ranges by clicking on a weapon rather than using the slider it must have halved the time it took me to set up my fleet…
Try using protect rather than escort, it should result in them flying off to bomb any ship attacking it’s target. Make sure the engagement ranges are set correctly though, if you tell them to attack a ship from outside their weapons range they will quite happily sit and do nothing.
Anytime you want your ships to do anything beyond charging at the nearest enemy target with guns blazing. One example would be to have a mix of lightly defended long range snipers (say heavy plasma toting ships) and heavily defended ships (perhaps entirely PD and anti fighter with maximum armour and shields). If you place the heavy ships in front of the snipers, the enemy will almost always engage those ships before moving on to attack the more vulnerable ships at the rear. A few well designed “damage sinks” can ensure the enemy spends the entire combat trying (unsuccessfully) to destroy these vessels while the rest of your fleet sits back and pounds them into submission.
