Setting your cruisers to 1% priority on fighteres doesn’t seem to work properly right now. Right now my cruisers still get tangled up turning around in circles when attacked by fighters even at 1% priority. My guess is that even at 1% a fighter appears “closer” i.e. to be a higher priority target than the mass of cruisers and frigates at the other end of the map that is the real target. So the cruisers that are attacked turn around in circles seeking optimal range on the fighters, resulting in a massive traffic jam for the rest of your cruisers and grinding your fleet to a standstill. Not really a fun thing to watch while your fleet is being pounded by missile salvos.
The current solution to this problem is to delete the fighter attack order entirely, but if you do this, your ships will not fire on fighters at all even while they are crossing the map with no other enemies around. Basically the ideal situation would be to have your cruisers ignore fighters completely for movement purposes until there are no other ship classes left, but still open fire on them when there’s nothing else in range. That way your cruisers are still useful when support units tractor beam the fighters, but they don’t waste their time otherwise.
So either the fighter prioritization needs to be tweaked further, perhaps give the ability to lower the priority lower than 1% (this seems possible by tweaking some text files), or the movement prioritization needs to be tweaked. Cruisers should really never concern themselves with positioning in relation to fighters.
That or at least have some code that treats “defensive” weapons differently. Say you delete attack fighter orders, but none the less any fighter inside the range of a certain class of weapons will be attacked regardless (that being what those weapons are for).
Tractor beams currently fire on fighters even without attack orders. However some general purpose weapons have decent tracking speeds and would be somewhat effective against fighters like Ion Cannons and you would want these firing on the enemy fighters as well.
Basically your gunners should always be busy shooting at something (since they conveniently have unlimited ammo). Every shot fired has a base chance to score a lucky hit even if it’s tracking is too slow and one less enemy is always a good thing. So they should always be firing at a fighter in range unless they can estimate that enemy cruisers or frigates will come into range within say the next 3-4 seconds. This was minimize the chance of slow firing weapons like missiles losing an opportunity to fire at the real targets by wasting a salvo on the fighters.
I would like “Attack Shield” order for ships with shield drain weapons to avoid firing at ships that have their sheilds down, but still has enough armor to deflect most of the anti-shield weapons.
I would like a flank order that will make ships try and move around behind the enemy and cut off ships that are using the cautious command and are trying to retreat.
I doubt the AI can see what the opposing formation really looks like- at best, you might get it to charge straight into the enemy line to chase an escaping enemy down. You might be able to create the effect equipping long-range weapons, using ‘vulture’, and playing with engagement ranges, all in unison.
I don’t like the idea of ships knowing how much armor their target has, but a command to attack shields would be nice to play with, especially in mixed fleets. I think the ‘anti-vulture’ (‘attack undamaged’? ‘attack healthiest’'?) idea would be similar, though I think you’re looking for a command to force disengagement when shields are dropped…
I do think that deleting the ‘attack fighters’ order, and adding some anti-fighter hardware to other escort ships (plus fighters of your own), is the best way to go, but I do really wish that cruisers wouldn’t re-orient themselves to fighters.
Personally, I think the dynamics between fast and slow weapons and ships would be fixed best by being allowed to edit the targeting behavior of individual guns, or simply making guns pre-programmed to target only certain classes of ships (large beam weapons only target CR or FR and CR; rapid-fire weapons only fire at FI and FR, etc). The latter would be used in tandem with the current ‘target’ orders, but those orders would just be to steer the ship at whatever target class.
My “anti-vulture” might also be expressed (or perhaps a different order) as “spread fire.”
Spread Fire would have ships try to NOT overlap attacks where possible. Divide fire evenly between targets.
More orders is good because different offensive/defensive space ship designs don’t exist in a vacuum (OK, pun sort of intended ), but are the result of doctrine.
Allowing order sets to make particular use of a design decision makes the game more complex. Complexity is NOT bad. Complexity is what allows replay, otherwise ships could just be boiled down to attack and defense values and a die rolled for the whole outcome.
The attack fighters order could have a checkbox next to is that disables the range option. That way your cruisers will still fire on fighters as targets of opportunity but will ignore them for the purposes of range.
I sort of worry that this could make the game too micro-managey but it is one possible solution. Another possible way to do it would be to give global firing priorities to your entire fleet on a per weapon basis with the option to exempt specific groups of ships and set their firing orders separately. That way you can order all your Cruiser Defense Lasers to prioritize killing fighters even while your cruiser is busy bashing shields down with it’s Cruiser Lasers. I suppose it depends on how many ship designs you want to field. But ideally your Cruiser Defense Lasers should be set to prioritize killing fighters anyhow since they are pretty bad at any other task.
Yeah, I kind of like this idea too. This way you could have your main body of ships attack the enemy head on while another group of ships attacks from the side and attempts to get at the rear. Sort of like how cavalry was used as a flanking force in ancient battles. Your enemy of course would have to deploy his own “cavalry” to counter your flankers. Of course this makes more sense when there are weaker units like frigates in the back or if ships take additional damage when being hit from the side or rear.
The general gist of the other stuff seems to that we need a find a way to optimize weapons fire for certain weapons, namely shield destroyers, EMP weapons and disruptor bombs and target painters. And maybe missiles as well because you don’t want half your fleet to fire off volley of missiles just to eliminate one frigate or half dead cruiser.
It would be nice if your cruiser captains understood not that the entire fleet doesn’t need to paint the same missile target. Some sort of fleet wide command dialogue might be useful for managing fleet behavior globally. (I’m not sure your fleet really understands how to act as a fleet actually. It seems to act as a group of individuals which seems to be part of the problem.)
It would be interesting to have this global command dialogue order your EMP frigate teams to only attack the same target X number of times with EMP missiles or disruptors before moving on to the next available target. And ideally the targets they select are not already on fire with large craters where half their weapon bays used to be. Hopefully having the ability to give fleetwide commands would push the game more towards managing the overall strategy of your fleet, which is what real space admirals are supposed to do.
Anyway, who said anything about complexity? If adding features improve the overall gameplay experience, then it’s obviously a good thing. If it doesn’t, well then it isn’t.
My idea is to have “special” orders that can be bought for each battle using the remaining available deployment budget. These special orders should be expensive so that players will have to choose between them or having more ships or potentially earning more honour. The special orders will act as global “buffs” that could turn the tide of battle into your favour if used at the right moment but will be of limited duration during the battle and could only be used once per battle. You get to choose when to use the special order during the battle via clicking on a big shiny red button in the GUI. Here is what I mean. For example:
Federation Special Order: “Budget Surplus” (All weapons gain x% increase in firing rate for y seconds due to availability of extra funds for ammo).
Empire Special Order: “Imperial Proclamation” (All ships gain x% increase in shield regeneration rates for y seconds due to fear of the Emperor’s wrath).
Alliance Special Order: “Hive Mind Link” (All weapons gain x% increase in tracking speed (accuracy?) for y seconds due to omniscience effect of the Hive Mind Link).
Rebels Special Order: “Resistance Manifesto” (All ships gain x% increase in speed for y seconds due to increased belief in the just cause).
I think that this idea doesn’t violate the “no-micromanaging” philosophy of the game but adds a tactical dimension to the game, not to mention more “racial differentiation” and identity between each game races.
I would like to see a “hold and attack” order.
Keep my fighters wait until the first salvo and go. But as a commander you must always estimate the time needed. This will especially be more useful after AOE weaponry is also introduced in the game.
Another idea may be “break through”.
This means the unit will not keep focus on the nearest opponent but try to catch those in the rear. It’s very common to have some supporting units in the rear part of the fleet placed (carriers/missile boats without much armor&shield), and the key point to suppress the opponent fleet is always to knock those out as fast as you can.
And third one: “Attack and withdraw”
Like hit and run, you will need tell the units the period they are allowed to stay under the hostil fire before retreat. This will lure the opponents out of their formation and at least give you a chance to attack them with your main forces from the flank. You need tell them the retreating direction like the corners or to a given friendly unit. The behavior in sequence would also be interesting but maybe hard to implement.
It would be nice if there was a Cautious order keyed to Shield strength (as a percentage of the CURRENT max), so a fast ship could make an attack run, withdraw hopefully before its shields are completely trashed, regenerate, then repeat. Since shield generators can burn out if individually depleted, it would have to use the current max, otherwise one blown generator would lock the ship into a permanent retreat even though its not going to heal.
a lot of people have suggested this one: loose formation. basically, hold formation until the ships start being fired at. then they scramble out of the formation to attack.
I was thinking along these lines for capital ships. When they explode, they damage adjacent ships (or that’s my understanding); so why not a reverse of the Cautious order, where once a ship is damaged beyond salvation it muscles in as close as possible so as to hit the enemy with shrapnel?
And for that matter, how about an order to tell your ships to spread out to prevent just that sort of thing? Give them a minimum range so they can’t approach allied ships any closer than that.
That would also sort out the ‘space hulk problem’, where, esp fed, ships which have no modules functioning, but maintain hull strength, drifting though the map. Or a repai beam would sort that out…
), but are the result of doctrine.