Generally I find if you have enough ships, they'll naturally spread out over the battle space into something that vaguely looks like a line. If you don't, you can use the way point or capture point command to suggest them to take certain positions. If there's no enemy presence nearby, they'll go there. So, getting an initial engagement in an line I find isn't too hard with waypoints. See the attached images for an example.
I have seen the images and I want so say that it is not impossible to make your ships fight side by side. I have even employed your method on my own several time. My gripe is that this method :
- It is quite convoluted
- It can be unreliable and it will fail against certain enemies
- Do you consider this way of doing things a good aspect of the game?
In my current fleet, I generally escort an Onslaught with a Lasher and a bomber equipped Mora, and I've got several free floating Lashers and Enforcers, which tend to adequately deal with the smaller stuff. I find several Daggers will drop enough ordinance to finish off a frigate fairly regularly. Similarly the escort Lasher also seems to make the Onslaught not turn to face flanking frigates quite so much. If flanking frigates are engaging frigates and destroyers first, then the capitals won't get distracted by a kite with 2 reapers in it's rear arc.
Ok than how do you solve this issue when the enemies has more fast ships (frigates, destroyers, high tech cruisers) than you?
Can you give specific, reproducible cases and what you'd like to see happen in those cases? I mean, "I don't like how ships respond to commands" is reasonable feedback, but it is very hard to act upon. It's hard to adjust the AI without the exact stimulus that is causing the behavior in your particular case. This is often why Alex asks for saves, or easy to reproduce simulator situations.
There's also an implicit assumption you don't want your ships following orders to the point of destruction each time. Although perhaps you would prefer ships to follow player orders to destruction. You are likely to get a variety of differing opinions on that question on the forums is my guess.
The aggression of ships and "stickiness" of orders could be ramped up, but that impacts all situations, not just the ones where players are seeing the AI be overly cautious compared to what they would do. It will lead to situations that previously had reasonable behavior driving the ship to it's destruction, in addition to improving situations where it wasn't aggressive enough.
The AI is certainly not perfect, has room for improvement, and I'm sure Alex would be the first to tell you that.
My counter argument is as follows: This game usually throws at you difficult battles, against your odds. You are supposed to win through optimized builds for your fleet, pilot your flagship excellently and
be a superior commander. Against some of the harder challenges of the game the last point i made previously matters most!
Also, i will try and gather footage, screenshots and save files in the following weeks in order to prove my point if that seems to be a discussion point.
I'm pretty sure Alex is continually trying to improve the AI as ideas occur to him on how to do so. And I'm willing to bet he's had a development version of the AI where he's cranked up the importance of player orders, and run into what he sees as problems with how the game plays out. The fact that he implemented command points also means he doesn't see Starsector as having, say, an RTS level of fleet command where you need to be constantly giving new orders to your mindless minions with 60 actions per minute.
I also find the fact that the game doesn't act like an RTS a unique and positive aspect. The problem i see that willingly or not, the very game design puts a lot of emphasis on commanding your fleet and when this aspect fails it can be really frustrating.
I think most people that play this game and will ever play it will accept losing a ship or two(even more) from their own incompetence but NOT from the incompetence of the AI.
At the present moment the AI isn't acceptably good at either handling the battle on its own or at following orders (will often ignore orders except eliminate order which it follows to its death even in absurd situation).
Maybe to put in other words it is not consistent. You don't know what to expect out of it and the performance variable is too great leading to a lot of situations where your lose ships/battles for the simple fact that your fleet though it was a good idea to ... , despite you telling them otherwise.
