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[Sleet]

Hi. So I've been playing for, uh, a while, and I'd like to ask something.

I know the following:

• Activating "full assault" makes your ships more aggressive.
• Selecting "search and destroy" makes your ships more aggressive.
• Having aggressive/reckless officers makes your ships more aggressive.

But I'd like to know: is there an option for my un-officered ships to be more aggressive while following their orders? I currently have this fleet arrangement:

Spoiler

[close]

This fleet is good, but I'm wondering if I can order my unofficered ships to be less boring and attack harder when I list something as eliminate? For sometimes when I do that, they hang back from the ship, while the ships I've encouraged to defend - even unofficered! - will try move far beyond their defense point to fight ships far away from what they've ordered to do.

Any help?

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

Hi. So I've been playing for, uh, a while, and I'd like to ask something.

I know the following:

• Activating "full assault" makes your ships more aggressive.
• Selecting "search and destroy" makes your ships more aggressive.
• Having aggressive/reckless officers makes your ships more aggressive.

But I'd like to know: is there an option for my un-officered ships to be more aggressive while following their orders? I currently have this fleet arrangement:

Spoiler

[close]

This fleet is good, but I'm wondering if I can order my unofficered ships to be less boring and attack harder when I list something as eliminate? For sometimes when I do that, they hang back from the ship, while the ships I've encouraged to defend - even unofficered! - will try move far beyond their defense point to fight ships far away from what they've ordered to do.

Any help?

Set fleet doctrine to aggressive captains. This will make non officered ships behave as if they have aggressive officers.

[Phenir]

Eliminate basically turns your officers that are targeting that enemy reckless already.

[Worldtraveller]

As noted, fleet doctrine is where you want to look. It's in the colony settings. I recommend reading the descriptions carefully, as it isn't quite the same as the aggressiveness level on officers. (Maybe it is, and the wording in the doctrine tab is just a little different?)

[Sleet]

I already had my aggression set to max! :(

[Nettle]

Automated ships are half a notch more aggressive than reckless in some aspects, and you can have quite a lot of them if you are ready to compromise on cores tier. Also shield shunt makes regular ships more aggressive, but is usually detrimental to ship's performance. That's about it for ramping up fleet aggression in vanilla Starsector.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

I already had my aggression set to max!

The AI can be overly scared of missiles and fighters if your ships lack PD, and it gets worse the more missiles and fighters there are.
Looking at your fleets I see very little PD.

Reckless is supposed to ignore that, because it's reckless, but I still see enemy reckless officers stalling and avoiding missiles from time to time.

[MuleDriver]

I found that the weapon loadout can make a big difference to the ships behaviour. It seems to me that if an agressive or reckless officer sees a target that he can inflict hull damage on in one "turn" (i.e. going in, blasting away, retreating without running out of flux) he'll do it.
When I swapped out the 2 frontal Atropos racks on my Eradicator (P) for Reapers, the officer/ship became much more aggressive. The stupid things burns forward and shoots the pair of reapers at every FF it comes across ... with a low hit-%age, sadly.
Or this little firecracker (see attachment)... loves to hang out in the back until it spots some prey (anything up to a light pirate cruiser) seperated from its pack. Then it 3-jumps in and starts blasting from shortest possible range.
And returns back behind my frontline as soon as any ship with decent shields appears on screen.

Actually, I am quite impressed by some of the AI behaviour I see. Would love to have some speech bubbles displayed next to the ships showing what the AI "thinks" at the moment.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[robepriority]

In general, the biggest thing is that fits should allow them to be agressive:

Non PD weapons should match ranges
Flux dissapation and output should be close

If you have a range mismatch or your ship is overfluxed even putting an alpha core won't enable agression

[RASTIL]

I find that my ships are way more agressive when the enemy is flanked/encircled, or they just fear them less. So at start of every battle i try to set up my forces for this by at least putting them in kind of a horseshoe pattern and then letting them loose at the enemy. To encourage them more I lead by example nascaring around the battlefield in my oddysey

I found that the weapon loadout can make a big difference to the ships behaviour. It seems to me that if an agressive or reckless officer sees a target that he can inflict hull damage on in one "turn" (i.e. going in, blasting away, retreating without running out of flux) he'll do it.
When I swapped out the 2 frontal Atropos racks on my Eradicator (P) for Reapers, the officer/ship became much more aggressive. The stupid things burns forward and shoots the pair of reapers at every FF it comes across ... with a low hit-%age, sadly.
Or this little firecracker (see attachment)... loves to hang out in the back until it spots some prey (anything up to a light pirate cruiser) seperated from its pack. Then it 3-jumps in and starts blasting from shortest possible range.
And returns back behind my frontline as soon as any ship with decent shields appears on screen.

Actually, I am quite impressed by some of the AI behaviour I see. Would love to have some speech bubbles displayed next to the ships showing what the AI "thinks" at the moment.

Try this, I love this mod for giving my ships some personality in combat  https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=10399.0

[Rusty Edge]

I find that my ships are way more agressive when the enemy is flanked/encircled, or they just fear them less.  https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=10399.0

 Rastil had sound advice. The ai loves cheap shots, and having bigger allies around. Try adding an LP Manticore or a cheap cruiser to either of your Brawler squadrons. Something decently quick, but beefy enough to trade blows with another cruiser. It frees up your brawlers so they can close in while staying out of the enemy's main firing arcs.

[twetyy]

I struggled with this pretty bad.
I had revelation when i noticed my capital started performing better in battle, it brawled allot better, lasted longer and beaten bigger ships easier. And the reason was removing one of my large weapons.
So losing DPS and freeing flux actually made my ship better
Yes cause it was in that equilibrium of cleaning soft flux of enemy fire, also cleaning 15% of hard flux and still sustaining to fire all it's weapons.

My best tip is to: Beat the AI.
The AI does things predictably, you saw it on your ships. When it fills it's hard flux, it tries to back off, even tho it can smash the enemy ship, it tries to back off to clean flux.

Stacking your wolf 4DP? with kinetic weapons(Anti shield) can actually make 10-20DP ships back off. It will never kill enemy ship, but it fights it, both have to back off to clean flux.
or
Experiment with with stuff. Having tanking ship with maxed shields, flux capacity, speed and just PD weapons with cautious officer and send them at start to go behind enemy lines.
It will drag half of their fleet for minutes, just remember it dies if it's engines shut off so that's it's N1 weakness.
or
slow projectile weapons / missiles. YOU can back off, vent flux and come back in and enemy will keep their shield up cause one of your rockets is SLOWLY flying towards them.

[mark.sucka]

If you're open to mods, this one might be exactly what you're looking for:

Automated Commands

You can add the behavior (timid-reckless) of an officer into each specific ship.
You can also embed automatic retreat commands when various PPT exhaustion, hull damage, CR readiness, or missile exhaustion thresholds have been reached.
There is also a feature in there which forces a ship to vent flux when above a certain amount (90% I think), rather than idiot AI officers keeping shields up at 90% hardflux for minutes and minutes without any incoming fire and then putting on surprise pikachu face when the enemy takes advantage of their idiocy on the next kiting run.

All of these are added as 0 OP hullmods.

Easy way to force aggression of un-officered ships, not having to micro-managing getting ships out of the fight when PPT is exhausted so they can fight fresh again in round 2,3 and 4 instead of burning all 70% their CR on 2 extra minutes of deployment this round, and getting phase missilers or missile frigates out of the fight once they've fired their load and the only thing they have left is their willy in their hand.

[Void Ganymede]

I already had my aggression set to max!

The AI can be overly scared of missiles and fighters if your ships lack PD, and it gets worse the more missiles and fighters there are.
Looking at your fleets I see very little PD.

Reckless is supposed to ignore that, because it's reckless, but I still see enemy reckless officers stalling and avoiding missiles from time to time.

This and maxing out ECM to reduce threat from weapon arcs has a large effect. The same battle with 10% enemy ECM advantage vs 10% friendly ECM advantage is utterly different in how AI behaves.

Somewhat more subtle is using large ships to anchor smaller ones against enemy capitals and cruisers. Not entirely sure how that works, whether it's hardcoded or emergent. But a swarm of Enforcers with a Legion behind it is far more confident than just adding a Legion's worth of Enforcers.