Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: Nesano on February 03, 2023, 06:22:36 PM
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I don't really know how else to word it, I built a traditional fleet composition and the bigger ships trip over each other, the smaller ones let themselves get caught out, and they basically only press advantages when I hit Full Assault and I'm just mopping up a battle. They don't even remotely follow their orders unless it's a defend/escort order or an order that involves an objective.
I usually run a fleet of Wolf-class frigates or phase frigates and mow down any fleet I go up against unless they're significantly more-powerful because that seems to be the only thing the AI can do right.
I'm not even a new player. I've got hundreds of hours into this game, but it seems like you just punch the Full Assault button when you have the advantage or just watch your fleet get picked apart when you don't. I actually started an entirely new save without any ship/weapon mods to troubleshoot whether or not the AI just doesn't know how to handle modded-in ships and weapons, but they're just as clueless. I remember a time where I could designate a fleet anchor with a Defend order, drop an Engage order on their fleet anchor, and that was good enough for my fleet to know what to do - I don't know what happened to that.
The game version I'm running is 0.95.1a-RC6. Most of the mods I'm running are QoL mods and the only mod I have that changes mechanics is Nexerelin, the latter of which puts fleets in the game that disregard the 30-ship soft cap, so that may not be helping.
I'll post a screenshot of my fleet since I'm sure people will be wondering: https://files.catbox.moe/zzljl9.png
The ones with officers are Aggressive and the rest are default Steady.
Normally I'd have more frigates, but they're the ones that get destroyed the most and I'm waiting for an order to come in.
Hullmods focus mainly on armor, hull integrity, and weapon range.
The battles I've been having lately have been this fleet largely composed of Hegemony ships up against Hegemony fleets. So basically low-tech vs. low-tech.
Is there some kind of sweet-spot fleet composition that the AI actually knows how to use?
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For brevity's sake, instead of replying to specific people with acknowledgements of build flaws, I'll put bullet points below.
- The Onslaughts are the way they are because somebody told me Mjolnrs are the best large ballistic weapon. I didn't realize how much more flux that 1.25/damage was running me up.
- In the early game I ran a wolf pack of, well, Wolves and they all had reapers, pulsers, ion cannons, and PD lasers. Any overuse of those weapons elsewhere (especially the pulsers on the Eagles and Falcons) can be pointed at that. I didn't realize how short their ranges were until Hatter and Safari came along, which is something I didn't really notice while they were mounted on the front of the Wolves. I'll give the beam combo Hatter mentioned a try.
- I play on normal battle size. The fleet is capital heavy because the fleets I go up against tend to be, too. I'm also in the middle of switching some of the bigger ships for smaller ones, I'm just not as familiar with the smaller ships that work well in line combat.
- I'm kind of surprised to hear the AI has a hard time landing torpedoes, but maybe that's just because Wolves have an easier time placing them so I just got tunnel visioned on them from the wolf pack stage of my playthrough. Maybe I'll try the Harpoon/Breaches Safari mentioned.
- The weapons on the civ ships are mostly just for show. If they ever see combat I'm probably loading a save anyway.
- I have Integrated Targeting Unit on almost all of my ships and consider it one of if not the most useful hullmod in the game.
- Here's a screenshot of my current Onslaught XIV build after making adjustments based on what I've heard in this thread (A significant improvement): https://files.catbox.moe/qv53d7.png
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I don't think the AI has any fleet building knowledge beyond what faction doctrine sets. My two cents:
Your Onslaughts are overfluxed and cannot handle 3x Mjolnr. Dominator can't handle double Mjolnr flux either, not without SO. Mjolnrs are good at punching down and can deal with both shield and armor, but not as well as dedicated anti-shield or anti-armor weaponry. Try putting some lower flux ballistics instead and seeing if that helps.
Personally I like putting Sabots on the Radiants because energy has a lot of anti-hull options but not many anti-shield. The Champion is actually good with medium ballistics. They may not benefit from HEF, but they help breaking shields. Conquest only needs on side to have actual guns and Proximity Launchers can't focuse fire from hardpoints. Something homing like Harpoons or Sabots is good because they can fire on the same target without being limited by the hardpoints.
Check if the Eagles are getting into range to actually use Ion Pulsers. If not, consider changing them out for a couple Gravitons and an Ion Beam.
You also use heavy autocannons a lot. Consider whether Heavy Nedlers (close range burst, range matches with large energies) or Hypervelocity Drivers (high range) would work better in places. I like having a couple HVDs on an Onslaught for the range.
Unless you play on a larger than default battle size, you're not going to be able to deploy all of your 300+ DP fleet. Any ships you can't deploy are just diluting ledership skill pools and possibly officer slots. Slim it down to what you can actually deploy.
If you've dumped up the battlesize, consider also adjusting maximum officers + skill thresholds proportionately or trying out the vanilla DP limits.
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The battles I've been having lately have been this fleet largely composed of Hegemony ships up against Hegemony fleets. So basically low-tech vs. low-tech.
Your ships are overfluxed and you don't have enough sustained anti-armor damage for fighting low tech, like Heavy Mortars and Hellbores.
The AI has trouble consistently landing torpedoes, especially all those Reapers you have, maybe try Harpoons or Breaches on the smaller ships.
Your fleet seems obsessed with Ion Pulsers; lots of good energy weapons you are sleeping on like Heavy Blaster and Ion Beam.
Finally, weapons on civ ships = pointless, only way a civ ship survives combat is by avoiding it.
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> the smaller ones let themselves get caught out
> They don't even remotely follow their orders unless it's a defend/escort order or an order that involves an objective.
I usually click every frigate and ""assign"" it to some more bigger ship, actually seems a as decent solution to me in some scary fights. Enemy AI usually fights like you described, however, slowly blundering the smaller ships and then eventually run out of material to fight me. But I could get you wrong, I think it'd be nice and helpful if you had a video of a simulator fight attached with the flaws highlighted.
edit: I must clarify that so far I really like how AI follows orders. It may be the case that you need Aggressive or Reckless officers assigned to large ships. Yep, I'm blind.
edit2: AI sometimes seemingly troubled with Conquest ships.
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The Civilian ships:
2x Salvage Rigs
1x Prometheus Supertanker
2x Ajax Superfreighter
The Combat ships:
2x Conquest with double-squall, Expanded Missile Racks and ECCM, other stuff as appropriate. The 2x officers have elite missile.
18x LP Brawlers with HMG/Assault Chaingun/Light Dual Machine Gun/ION Cannon, Hardened Subsystems and Solar Shielding. 8x officers with appropriate skills.
5x Omens with 2x Tactical Laser and Swarmer SRM, Aux Thrusters/Hardened Shields/Hardened Subsystems/High Scatter Amplifier/Solar Shielding. No captains. ECM/ECCM/High Resolution Sensors come with the base ship, along with an inbuilt EMP weapon.
Character skills:
Tactical Drills, Coordinated Maneuvers, Crew Training, Officer Training, Support Doctrine. (NOT Wolfpack Tactics, even though I have 8x officers in LP Brawler frigates. I should probably add that.)
Officers:
All steady, all 6th level, a few elite skills as appropriate. I should make several more of them elite, have been lazy.
General tactics used:
My character has no skills in the combat tree, mostly because my reflexes are terrible. I have to armchair general.
* Send in all combat ships (185 deployment points total - if I was dumb enough to send in my 5x civilian ships it would only be around 215 DP total).
* Form a line - try to keep the damned Conquests back, they tend to rush in and headbutt the Radiants.
* Thin the opposition. Make certain that half the Brawlers don't go off chasing one ship and leaving the rest of the fleet vulnerable. Send malingerer's back to bigger concentrations of the opposition.
* After a couple of minutes, when I judge the opposition is cleared out enough, full attack. Quite often I have to pull the Conquests back because they're trying to headbutt the Radiants with Full Assault on. It helps to make sure that the Brawlers/Omens get in front and block them from doing stupid stuff like that.
Aftermath, no losses:
(https://i.ibb.co/kgLD5Ht/screenshot114-Large.png) (https://ibb.co/jvCwb6S)
And a regular bounty fleet.
(https://i.ibb.co/wpgDJxN/screenshot102.png) (https://ibb.co/CV8xJT5)
Yeah, sometimes I'm too slow and the Conquests get themselves killed quickly. NVM them's the breaks.
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For brevity's sake, instead of replying to specific people with acknowledgements of build flaws, I'll put bullet points below.
That's not how forums work.
Speaking from perspective of endgame AI fleet combat:
- With few exceptions frigates are only useful for grabbing objectives at the start of the battle and you will only need 4 at most to do this.
- Regular destroyers are basically useless, they lack firepower/shields to win flux battles yet can't easily disengage or avoid incoming fire like the frigates can.
- Falcons are basically destroyers, see above.
- Eagle is a strong candidate for one of the worst ships in the game. XIV version doesn't really make it any better.
- Onslaughts and Dominators are mediocre because AI doesn't like hardpoints. Also I hope you're armor tanking them, there's nothing more sad than shield tanked Onslaught.
- Mjolnirs are not the best large ballistic, they're a luxury weapon that basically only fits on a Conquest because nothing else has enough flux to support it.
- Speaking of, flux is a thing. You should aim to be flux neutral(flux of your main batteries firing + shield upkeep < ship flux dissipation)
- Your weapons have too much of an explosive bias. Kinetic damage is always more important because it lets you win flux battles. Once enemy ships get high on flux they have no choice but a) stop firing their weapons, b) drop the shield and take damage, c) retreat, d) all of the above. This means that i.e. when you're fitting ships and have a large and a medium slot, the large should always go to a kinetic. Kinetic missiles(Squall MLRS) are especially good for this because they cost no flux to fire, which gives them flux efficiency of infinity. In that way, most of your ships are fit completely backwards.
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For brevity's sake, instead of replying to specific people with acknowledgements of build flaws, I'll put bullet points below.
That's not how forums work.
Yes it is, this is so people aren't repeating what others have already pointed out.
I've been putting what everyone has said into practice and it seems the biggest problem was overfluxing, mostly as a result of getting recommended mjolnir cannons and not realizing they were sucking tons of flux up. One change I made was replacing the Onslaught XIV's mjolnirs with hellbores and it turned into a murder machine.
If I recall, I believe I actually used to pair every frigate with another ship, like Nick9 said. Not doing that anymore might be why my frigates are sometimes AI core officer levels of suicidal, that of which is why I've gotten rid of my Radiant. I've replaced it with a Brilliant in hopes that it's not as suicidal, but so far I'm not entirely convinced.
Another key thing is I replaced basically all of the destroyer-and-up ion pulsers that I didn't realize didn't have enough range. I used Hatters "a couple Gravitons and an Ion Beam" idea on the Eagles and I'm using 2 gravitons and 2 tactical lasers on the Falcons and that increased the effectiveness of those two classes by a good margin.
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Yes it is, this is so people aren't repeating what others have already pointed out.
On a normal forum it is expected that everyone will read all of the posts before replying. This isn't Reddit where threads get split with every comment.
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(Yes, but it's also a nice idea to update the OP in case people don't. Let's all get along, eh?)
One question I wanted to ask, just to make sure: do you have Integrated Targeting Unit or at least Dedicated Targeting Core installed on all of your cruisers and capital ships? It's not going to compensate enough to make weapons like the Ion Pulser work on Eagles, for example, but it's more or less required to make most normal loadouts work. Destroyers should generally have it, too, though that's more situational.
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some (slightly) more fleet-comp-oriented tips because everyone else has given fairly good advice about the individual builds -
- as BCS said, eagles are really bad, I'd swap them + the falcons & dominator for champions / eradicators + a heron or two.
- I'd drop at least 3 of the 4 non-radiant capitals & pilot the last one manually, no reason to cart around / waste officers on ships that'll never get deployed into a battle.
- seriously, 220 of your 240 dp is capitals, you're probably just getting plainly outnumbered most of the time
- specifically mentioning manual piloting because the player can generally have a better effect on a battle in a capital ship than the AI, even with no combat skills
- I'd also drop all of the wolves, maybe keep 2 vanguards / tempests if you really need the point capping capability, but they kinda just take up space for better ships in my experience
and a few ship-specific ones as well -
- swap the core in the radiant for an alpha core (and integrate it), it can get more than enough CR w/ crew training & combat endurance + it's the only automated ship in your fleet, no reason not to go all out w/ it.
- I'd also swap the reapers for sabots & hurricanes for hammer barrages, go all in on burst damage.
- swap the proximity charge launchers on the sides of the conquest for harpoons / breaches / pilums, they've all got the range & tracking to be useful at longer ranges
- swap one side's mjolnirs for devastator cannons, no need to waste OP on guns that won't be firing & largely just serve to confuse the AI
- swap the ir pulse lasers for a grav beam on the devastator side & an ion beam on the mjolnir side, they've got much better range
- and for the last conquest tip, put a pair of hypervelocity drivers or heavy maulers (or one of each) in the medium mounts on the mjolnir side, they're nice for extra damage at kiting ranges
- you seem to be fairly light on PD in wierd places, I'd swap most of your heavy machineguns (and the 2 medium mounts that are right by the onslaught's bridge) for single flak cannons; they're much better general purpose PD
- mentioning singles in particular becausre they're (imo) a better deal than dual flaks, if you can get enough of them out there
- and last of all, I'd swap the side larges on the onslaught for either mkix autocannons or devastator cannons, hellbores on the side will rarely hit stuff due to how slow to turn / fire they are & how generally innacurate they are
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I wouldn't call the Eagle "bad:". it's actually very capable in a lot of situations. I think it would be more accurate to say that it's "overshadowed" or that there's almost always a better option for the cost. Maybe that's semantics but calling it one of the "worst ships in the game" is going a bit too far. The only thing it's actually bad at is getting into range with all its weapons in an assault role. As a long-range platform, it's decent, if underwhelming. Thankfully, it's getting a lot of attention next patch.
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One question I wanted to ask, just to make sure: do you have Integrated Targeting Unit or at least Dedicated Targeting Core installed on all of your cruisers and capital ships? It's not going to compensate enough to make weapons like the Ion Pulser work on Eagles, for example, but it's more or less required to make most normal loadouts work. Destroyers should generally have it, too, though that's more situational.
Good point, sometimes I forget in cruisers. It makes them excellent long-range snipers.
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This mod may help you a lot: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=25485.0
It allows you to install up to 5x 0-OP mods on your ships. Mouseover them to see what the effects of other mods (also your skills and officers) have on your ship.
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I wouldn't call the Eagle "bad:". it's actually very capable in a lot of situations. I think it would be more accurate to say that it's "overshadowed" or that there's almost always a better option for the cost.
That... would make it "bad" by definition though? If every alternative is better?
Thankfully, it's getting a lot of attention next patch.
"Not to start another Eagle thread, but..."
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Just thought of another AI question. Is there a way to put an engage marker on an enemy capital so one of your capitals will focus on it without your frigates seeing that marker and thinking "SIR, YES SIR! PROCEEDING TO JUMP OUT IN FRONT OF IT AND KILL MYSELF FOR NO TACTICAL REASON, SIR!"?
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Just thought of another AI question. Is there a way to put an engage marker on an enemy capital so one of your capitals will focus on it without your frigates seeing that marker and thinking "SIR, YES SIR! PROCEEDING TO JUMP OUT IN FRONT OF IT AND KILL MYSELF FOR NO TACTICAL REASON, SIR!"?
If you click on an enemy and give the engage order, you have no control over who gets assigned. That's why you should instead left click on your capital ship and then right click on the enemy you want to target.
Also, seeing all those wolves in your fleet made me die a little on the inside. Of all the amazing high-tech frigates you could've chosen, you picked what is hands-down the worst one. Don't get me wrong, wolves are fine in the early game and can even pull off some fairly impressive feats in player hands, but by the late game anything else would be better. Even lashers are better at this stage, and they're cheaper!
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Well I just read through the other comments and I saw some frigate bashing, so I'll throw in my 2 cents here. Aside from the vanguard, frigates all rely on shields to survive. Period. I don't care that the lasher is low-tech, heavy armor only nets you 450 armor. Frigates always need a decent number of caps, and hardened shields if you can get it. This is part of why the wolf struggles later on: in small skirmishes it can 1v1 enemies without worrying too much about getting flanked. Late game your frigates don't have that luxury so the wolf is crippled by its tiny shield arc. It also doesn't help that both its main gain and its shield are forward fixed, meaning you can only block and shoot in the same direction. Omni shields alleviates this a bit, but I would still recommend other frigates.
For example: you could run 5 wolves for 25dp or you could run 3 scarabs for 24dp. Scarabs pack enough of a punch to make up for the lower numbers, but more importantly they have better survivablity. They can make great distractions for enemy capitals even if they can't solo them. Omens, monitors, centurions, lashers, and tempests are all also good choices. Not sure about the vanguard because I haven't used it much. Stay away from the brawler, the vigilance, and the wolf.
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Just thought of another AI question. Is there a way to put an engage marker on an enemy capital so one of your capitals will focus on it without your frigates seeing that marker and thinking "SIR, YES SIR! PROCEEDING TO JUMP OUT IN FRONT OF IT AND KILL MYSELF FOR NO TACTICAL REASON, SIR!"?
If you click on an enemy and give the engage order, you have no control over who gets assigned. That's why you should instead left click on your capital ship and then right click on the enemy you want to target.
That doesn't work because it puts an eliminate order on the enemy, which recreates the suicidal AI problem. Unless you meant put an Engage order on the enemy first, then order the capital to attack.
Also, seeing all those wolves in your fleet made me die a little on the inside. Of all the amazing high-tech frigates you could've chosen, you picked what is hands-down the worst one. Don't get me wrong, wolves are fine in the early game and can even pull off some fairly impressive feats in player hands, but by the late game anything else would be better. Even lashers are better at this stage, and they're cheaper!
They're leftovers from the early-mid game - I've been letting them go via attrition and replacing them with mostly Tempests. They're definitely not the worst high-tech frigate in the game and there are few things more destructive than a fleet of Wolf frigates with Reapers and Ion Pulsers. I wouldn't use them as general-purpose, late-game frigates, but as a wolf pack they make fireworks.
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In terms of ordering an engage on an enemy capital and not having your frigates go to attack it, you have a couple of options:
1) Attach your frigates to other ships via right click escort orders, if they are the type of frigate this makes sense for.
2) Assign your frigates to waypoints, again via right click - they will then skirmish out from that point, or be pushed back, using the normal "leash" mechanics. I often do this on the flanks and to the rear of the enemy blob, and make action groups so I don't have to keep selecting them. These points may need to get moved or cancelled depending on how the fight goes, because if the enemy goes far away or over-run the position then the frigates are going to be either not fighting or murdered, respectively.
3) Tell them to eliminate something else as a pack, preferably an isolated target that won't get help before your mobile but fragile ships get the job done.
Basically, if you don't want your ships to follow one of the general orders, then tell them to do something else. I vastly prefer ships attacking if I don't tell them otherwise rather than ships not attacking at all! (Then again I'm in a bit of a weird phase where I'm experimenting with using as many reckless officers as I can on non-SO ships: it works really well for a surprising number of them! Not Medusa's though, they get in over their head with the teleport.)
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In terms of ordering an engage on an enemy capital and not having your frigates go to attack it, you have a couple of options:
4) Set them on Search & Destroy, which will exempt them from global orders.
But yeah, ships defaulting to Eliminate and not Engage on a right click is a problem. I too complained about it before! Kind of.
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In terms of ordering an engage on an enemy capital and not having your frigates go to attack it, you have a couple of options:
4) Set them on Search & Destroy, which will exempt them from global orders.
That does stop them from following engage/eliminate orders, but Search & Destroy tends to get frigates killed in and of itself.
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In terms of ordering an engage on an enemy capital and not having your frigates go to attack it, you have a couple of options:
4) Set them on Search & Destroy, which will exempt them from global orders.
That does stop them from following engage/eliminate orders, but Search & Destroy tends to get frigates killed in and of itself.
Frigates rarely do well in direct combat, usually they are relegated to escort duties, though some specific frigates (Tempest, Scarab, Wolf, Lasher, Brawler & all phase frigates) can do well, but must operate as a group with either the "Escort" or "Defend" commands set on one of them, or they (usually) get killed off while in Search & Destroy.
Additionally a lot of (almost all) of my frigate builds use SO, the notable exceptions that don't are Tempest (On some builds, most still run SO), Scarab (Same story here) & Omen (Never run these SO'd as they act as dedicated escort frigates), if you count the Brawler as a frigate (I would, it's priced the same supply wise) then there's only 1 Brawler build out of the 4 that I use that does not use SO's (though SO's from the (LP) variant though, so built in/free).
That said here's a few things to keep in mind when using frigates in general:
1. Choose ahead of time what your frigate hulls will do and build them accordingly, Escort frigates (generally) need Peak time & PD, Wolfpack frigates need DPS and ideally burst DPS with a priority on Kinetic Damage, so that even against ships that they cannot outright kill they can atleast convince to back off to dissipate flux. Mixed role frigates rarely do well or end up taking some sort of tradeoff.
2. Don't operate non-phase frigates alone, always send them in packs of 2 or ideally more say 3-4 as single frigates are far to likely to die without accomplishing much, alternatively you can pair them with a destroyer.
3. Avoid high kinetic alpha damage targets (Anything carrying a Sabot SRM, Heavy Needler or large quantities of MG's etc. etc.), unless you have built your frigates specifically built to counter those, or lack shields but not other defensive systems, such as Phase Cloak or Damper Field.
4. Don't overcommit to Expanded Missile Racks, there's several builds that don't need it, but as a rule of thumb, if you bring sabot and it's your primary or your only Kinetic damage weapon then always take EMR, otherwise, consider the pros & cons and don't default to it, that might lock you into less optimal builds on some hulls.
Additionally, accept some amount of losses within your frigate lineup, especially in dangerous fights, most frigate lineups cannot surive the later fights without atleast some losses.
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What's bugging me is that DEFEND order is really useless. Assigned to defend ships will stay afk behind and watch "defended" ship die no matter what... or maybe I just need "SUICIDE DEFEND" button and more reckless officers.
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What's bugging me is that DEFEND order is really useless. Assigned to defend ships will stay afk behind and watch "defended" ship die no matter what... or maybe I just need "SUICIDE DEFEND" button and more reckless officers.
Funnily enough, I have the exact opposite problem. When I put a defend order on a ship, the ships assigned to """"defend"""" it abandon it and go off chasing frigates and getting scattered all over the map. It's especially annoying when my cruisers and capitals do this. I've just stopped using the command in general.
I've found that literally doing nothing on the fleet command screen and letting my ships do whatever they want has yielded the best results in terms of survivability and contribution to the fight overall. Sometimes they even perform me outperform damage-wise, and I think I'm at least decent at the game. I don't know if this says more about my ability to give orders to my fleet or the AI in this game.
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The "defend" order doesn't literally make the AI defend whatever you put it on. There isn't really any order that does that. Orders like "defend" and "escort" seem to act more like "stay in this general area" and the difference is how long of a leash they get.
As a player, it intuitively makes sense that you would want your ships to move forward and defend your capital when it's in trouble, especially when you put defend or escort orders on it. But the AI doesn't really think like that. The ships make individual risk assessment based off nearby enemy ships/allied ships and their own flux level; they aren't able to look at an ally's flux bar and then decide to take greater personal risk to protect that ally. If the calculations tell it to back up and play it safe then it will, even if it means abandoning a slower ship to basically fight for itself.
There are ways to finesse the AI into doing what you want, but often times it's not at all obvious and it takes a lot of frustrating trial and error.
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What's bugging me is that DEFEND order is really useless. Assigned to defend ships will stay afk behind and watch "defended" ship die no matter what... or maybe I just need "SUICIDE DEFEND" button and more reckless officers.
I think it suffers mainly from lack of explanation, along with escort, because both are very useful, but only if you know what they do.
Defend would be better named "Rally" in my mind, because that is what it does: it makes a good number of ships use the spot/ship as the center of their movement area. Like normal, if your ships in that area are winning, they will push forward and attack. If they are losing, they will be pushed back. This means that the "defended" ship can be left alone if it is slow and the other ships are outmatched.
If you want the "defending" ships to surge forward and protect the main ship, you can order that by telling them to eliminate the threat! Select them and right click the enemy. Once they are engaged and the main ship has had a chance to vent/repair knocked out weapons, cancelling the eliminate order is a good idea because otherwise the smaller ships are both going to block the line of fire and are also going to get killed.
Escort is a much shorter leash, and it assigns ships to fall behind and to the sides of the escorted ship - it might be better called "Protect Flanks" though that is a bit of a mouthful. If the escort is short ranged, or not aggressive, they won't even be able to fire at what is in front of a capital! So they aren't that great at protecting the "escorted" ship from the front. However they will stick to their posts quite well so are good for stopping a ship from getting flanked on the side, because they won't chase other ships very far at all. I strongly prefer having aggressive or reckless escorts with decent range, because in that case they are more willing to push forward and can fire forward. The same trick of ordering an escort to 'eliminate' a target in front that you need them to kill applies to get them to really go forward and cover, with the same caveat of cancelling the order when appropriate.
HVD/Mauler/flak Enforcers (officered or not) with aggressive/reckless settings make fantastic escorts as they are tough enough to survive capital level firepower (for a short time at least), shoot down fighters and missiles, bring missiles of their own for finishing support, and can even bring an escort fighter too, though that starts to eat into the OP budget a lot. Plus by being escorts the primary weaknesses of the enforcer (slow, vulnerable to getting swarmed) are mitigated.
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What's bugging me is that DEFEND order is really useless. Assigned to defend ships will stay afk behind and watch "defended" ship die no matter what... or maybe I just need "SUICIDE DEFEND" button and more reckless officers.
I think it suffers mainly from lack of explanation, along with escort, because both are very useful, but only if you know what they do.
Defend would be better named "Rally" in my mind, because that is what it does: it makes a good number of ships use the spot/ship as the center of their movement area. Like normal, if your ships in that area are winning, they will push forward and attack. If they are losing, they will be pushed back. This means that the "defended" ship can be left alone if it is slow and the other ships are outmatched.
If you want the "defending" ships to surge forward and protect the main ship, you can order that by telling them to eliminate the threat! Select them and right click the enemy. Once they are engaged and the main ship has had a chance to vent/repair knocked out weapons, cancelling the eliminate order is a good idea because otherwise the smaller ships are both going to block the line of fire and are also going to get killed.
Escort is a much shorter leash, and it assigns ships to fall behind and to the sides of the escorted ship - it might be better called "Protect Flanks" though that is a bit of a mouthful. If the escort is short ranged, or not aggressive, they won't even be able to fire at what is in front of a capital! So they aren't that great at protecting the "escorted" ship from the front. However they will stick to their posts quite well so are good for stopping a ship from getting flanked on the side, because they won't chase other ships very far at all. I strongly prefer having aggressive or reckless escorts with decent range, because in that case they are more willing to push forward and can fire forward. The same trick of ordering an escort to 'eliminate' a target in front that you need them to kill applies to get them to really go forward and cover, with the same caveat of cancelling the order when appropriate.
HVD/Mauler/flak Enforcers (officered or not) with aggressive/reckless settings make fantastic escorts as they are tough enough to survive capital level firepower (for a short time at least), shoot down fighters and missiles, bring missiles of their own for finishing support, and can even bring an escort fighter too, though that starts to eat into the OP budget a lot. Plus by being escorts the primary weaknesses of the enforcer (slow, vulnerable to getting swarmed) are mitigated.
An excellent and accurate summation of the differences in behaviour between the two commands.
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Mjolnirs are not the best large ballistic, they're a luxury weapon that basically only fits on a Conquest because nothing else has enough flux to support it.
My Atlas mk II would like a word with you.
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Well it better be a short word because Atlas Mk.II runs out of flux after two syllabes