Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[erikem]

I have a huge fleet, which consists of several strong flagships and loads of mini-carriers (in my case these are neutrino smallest carriers, which support 2 fighters and require only 6 supplies to unleash). By loads I mean that I have like 12-15 of them.

My problem is that when fighting with no orders issues and no officers assigned they usually do one of the following:

• They just avoid fighting and keep fighters close so basically they are useless
• They rush in as if they were super-fighters and die either of friendly fire or simply by the hands of the enemy. They do this even if they don't have ANY weapons installed. Not even PD.

Both of these behaviours seem totally stupid for carriers. What I would expect them to do (being weaponless motherships) is:
To stay as far from enemies as possible but within fighters range and constantly engage enemies with fighters. Probably some mix of harass behaviour + engage command for fighters

Now predicting some possible suggestions here are some extra thoughts:

• I can't really assign officers with proper behaviours to every carrier because of officers limit
• Issuing manual "fighter strike" commands only works in small battles. If the battle has like 20-30 enemies you won't simply have enough command points to make carriers useful
• Making carriers "escort" flagships do not help because carries then go too close to enemies (sometimes even stick in front of flagships) and die fast
• "Full assault" still doesn't make them engage enemies with fighters if they have decided to be passive
• Manually controlling each carrier - I hope no one actually suggest this

So the question is - is there any way either in vanilla or mods to make them behave like I expect them?

[TaLaR]

Combat doesn't really work with more than 11 ships on your side. Officers are not optional, since ships without them are total cannon fodder. So question of fleet composition boils down to what kind of up to 11 ships can you afford with your battle-size.

As to what can you do:

- Carriers generally don't engage with fighters-only (they prefer to use them as escorts), so have at least 1 bomber wing per carrier, to trigger engage behavior. I prefer Longbow for this role, since they fire universally useful Sabots even while regrouping + have BurstPD.
- Carriers *need* Cautious or Timid officers. Default Steady behavior gets them killed even in most trivial situations.
- 'Avoid' vs Capitals and sometimes Cruisers is mandatory unless your whole fleet is Cautious/Timid.
More on it: non-carrier ships can't be Timid (useless), and Cautious ones are close to that too (they want too much safety margin before engaging, like Cruiser vs single frigate). With Steady and above use of 'Avoid' becomes mandatory against strong opponents, since these are willing to engage even Paragon 1 vs 1 with any ship.

[erikem]

Thx for the answer butt it all feels like workarounds to achieve something that should basically be available by default.

11-ships stuff is... well I have a high-end PC and I really wanted to experience those huge battles like 20vs20 or 30vs30 but with such AI behaviour it indeed seems broken.

I also hate being forced into having bombers (I am quite comfortable with all-fighters) and with cautious and timid officers I'm sure they won't do "engage" unless they actually have bombers.

Are there any plans to fix carriers behaviour in the development pipeline or should I drops such tactics altogether?

[Wapno]

I can relate to this, as I really love using carriers, although maybe my case isn't as severe, since my pc can only support the default battle size with Nexerelin mod.

Although this isn't by any means a solution, and barely a workaround, one approach to tackle the situation is my tactic - using a few large carriers instead of a swarm of smaller ones. This both reduces the need to micromanage and tones down the demand for officers.

That's just my opinion, but I think Condors (those smallest carriers) are actually horrible for their role. Unlike most other carriers in the game, they lack a ship system which would augment performance of their fighters. Drover and Gemini have Reserve Deployment, Heron has damage boosting Targeting Feed, while the Astral has its  awesome Recal Device, for spamming bomber runs en masse. Odyssey and Legion don't have any, but it's okay, because the former is a Gunboat/Carrier hybrid, rather than a dedicated fighter platform, while the latter simply rolls by with its mobility, high number of flight decks and raw firepower to support is fighters. Condor meanwhile, has Fast Missile Racks, an obnoxious system by itself, but particularly useless for a Carrier, since it berely synergizes with fighters, if at all.

A little bit closer to the topic, I also hope for changes in AI behavior of non - direct - combat ships, but I see a problem here. Most of the Carriers in the game are at least relatively decent at using their weapons in direct combat, to put pressure on the enemy alongside allied Gunboats. I'm not putting Heavy Needlers or Hypervelocity Drivers on my Herons, or dual Railguns on my Drovers so they cowardly lurk away from the action.

[erikem]

I have though of this but my idea was a total domination of battlefield by fighters and important parameter for me is DeploymentPoints per Fighter.

In Neutrino there's a carrier that costs 6 DP and has 2 fighters, which results in 3 DP per Fighter. This gives me 32 fighter wings for 96 DP. And 32 fighter wings can actually decimate almost any army officers and bonuses or not =)

Even in vanilla you can kind of get 3DP/f by installing fighters on Valkyrie. But it'll suck.

Unfortunately when it comes to big carriers the ratio falls down seriously, e.g. Astral has 7,5DP/f and although it is a formidable ship on it's own - it lacks the mobility of smaller ships.

[Megas]

Combat doesn't really work with more than 11 ships on your side. Officers are not optional, since ships without them are total cannon fodder. So question of fleet composition boils down to what kind of up to 11 ships can you afford with your battle-size.

That is not true anymore, at least with a capital, cruiser, and carrier fleet.  Maybe it still is for small ship hordes (which I have not tried yet).

That said, I can only deploy about ten ships give or take a few because of map size limits even at max.  If I use default map size, I probably would only be able to deploy about five or so ships.

As for the OP, your only recourse is Fighter Strike spam, and you need to install Operations Center hullmod on the flagship (yes, it hurts, but you need it!) and get at least Command and Control 2.  You start with 8 OP, and you gain CP fairly quickly.  You will spend many CP quickly in bursts, ordering strikes against ships one after another.  During a lull, you get CP back.  This works even in large fleets battles.  However, it fails at battlestation fights because carriers will charge it then die.  Carriers seem to approach targets when fighters strike targets.  They do not understand to let fighters kill things while staying in the back.  This is normally not a problem with enough fighters, but ends badly against battlestations.

It would be nice if AI carriers sent fighters to kill stuff by default, not escort your ship or themselves.

[TaLaR]

It would be nice if AI carriers sent fighters to kill stuff by default, not escort your ship or themselves.

Depends on how many fighters you have in fleet. If it's just few, escorting player-piloted Medusa is usually the better option, because otherwise fighters would be quickly eliminated without doing much.

Now, covering said Medusa with impenetrable carpet of escorting fighters is a useless overkill. AI should be attacking with fighters long before reaching that point.

[Wapno]

In Neutrino there's a carrier that costs 6 DP and has 2 fighters, which results in 3 DP per Fighter. This gives me 32 fighter wings for 96 DP. And 32 fighter wings can actually decimate almost any army officers and bonuses or not =)

Even in vanilla you can kind of get 3DP/f by installing fighters on Valkyrie. But it'll suck.

Unfortunately when it comes to big carriers the ratio falls down seriously, e.g. Astral has 7,5DP/f and although it is a formidable ship on it's own - it lacks the mobility of smaller ships.

Oh... You were talking about a mod. Derp of me, sorry, I thought you were talking about vanilla carriers...

Your point about DP/f is valid, I think. That said, you should consider that a value of a fighter wing may actually  vary depending on the carrier that launches them. That Astral stands poorly in terms of raw DP/f ratio, but (if it's fitted with bombers) those same bombers are worth many times more than deployed by multiple cheaper carriers.

But that's vanilla. I didn't play Neutrino, so I have no idea how those carriers in that mod work.

[Alex]

Hey! A couple of quick notes:

1) There's a bug where combat carriers equipped only with PD weapons will decide to close to weapons range. This does *not* affect non-combat carriers such as the vanilla Shepherd. For combat carriers - i.e. ones that behave as combat ships rather than always trying to keep at range - I'd suggest either a full combat loadout, PD plus one longest-range weapon you can mount, or no weapons at all (which you did say you tried).

They rush in as if they were super-fighters and die either of friendly fire or simply by the hands of the enemy. They do this even if they don't have ANY weapons installed. Not even PD.

That, I can't actually reproduce here. What I'm seeing is combat carriers with no weapons reliably stay at range and engage with fighters. Maybe it's something specific to the Neutrino carrier you're using? If it had a built-in weapon for example that would do it.

2) There's another bug (fixed in-dev) where deploying a large number of exclusively carriers may result in "escort chains" - i.e. A will escort B -> C -> D -> A, resulting in them pretty much just milling in place. Have to have at least 4 carriers next to each other for this to happen. Doesn't sound like that's what's happening, but thought I'd mention it.

They just avoid fighting and keep fighters close so basically they are useless

Hmm - again, not something I'm able to reproduce. Maybe specific to the ships you're using? E.G. I could see this happen if the fighters happened to have a very short engagement range.

If there's more info about the specifics (or screenshots/video - or better yet, a semi-reproducible scenario using vanilla ships), I'd love to take a closer look.

[Megas]

1) There's a bug where combat carriers equipped only with PD weapons will decide to close to weapons range. This does *not* affect non-combat carriers such as the vanilla Shepherd. For combat carriers - i.e. ones that behave as combat ships rather than always trying to keep at range - I'd suggest either a full combat loadout, PD plus one longest-range weapon you can mount, or no weapons at all (which you did say you tried).

That hurts!  I wondered why my AI Herons with dual flak, no ITU, and Unstable Injector were trying to kiss the enemy when I want it to stay far away from enemies.  I want the dual flak, but not if it makes my Heron stupid.  If I pilot it, great, but that is only one ship out of several.

Full combat loadout is not really an option given the OP costs of fighters (Warthogs cost 12 OP each, for now) and the two or three obligatory hullmods (Expanded Deck Crew, Unstable Injector, and maybe Resistant Flux Conduits).

[Alex]

Yeah, at the moment you pretty much need a cautious/timid officer on that loadout.

[HELMUT]

Another good way to avoid that situation is to order the said ship to escort something that will naturally stay out of the fight, a non-combat carrier for exemple.

[erikem]

If there's more info about the specifics (or screenshots/video - or better yet, a semi-reproducible scenario using vanilla ships), I'd love to take a closer look.

Thanks for the answer.

I will try to reproduce the behaviours I was talking about in pure vanilla and will record some videos.

As for escort chains - probably that is what have happened in one of the combats - I have deployed 12 carriers and nothing else with no ship under my control. And I was really surprised to see them staying away from enemies all the time until I started giving out orders.

But when you say about escort chains - does it mean that there are some basic escorting even if I did not assign one?

[Alex]

I will try to reproduce the behaviours I was talking about in pure vanilla and will record some videos.

Thank you!

As for escort chains - probably that is what have happened in one of the combats - I have deployed 12 carriers and nothing else with no ship under my control. And I was really surprised to see them staying away from enemies all the time until I started giving out orders.

Ah, that sounds like that could be it, then.

But when you say about escort chains - does it mean that there are some basic escorting even if I did not assign one?

Carriers will hang around a nearby ship, trying to stay behind it and use it for cover. So not exactly "escort" but more like "reverse escort". I.E. that's not going to cause the carrier to try to get in front of the other ship or anything like that.

[Wyvern]

Hey! A couple of quick notes:

1) There's a bug where combat carriers equipped only with PD weapons will decide to close to weapons range. This does *not* affect non-combat carriers such as the vanilla Shepherd. For combat carriers - i.e. ones that behave as combat ships rather than always trying to keep at range - I'd suggest either a full combat loadout, PD plus one longest-range weapon you can mount, or no weapons at all (which you did say you tried).

They rush in as if they were super-fighters and die either of friendly fire or simply by the hands of the enemy. They do this even if they don't have ANY weapons installed. Not even PD.

That, I can't actually reproduce here. What I'm seeing is combat carriers with no weapons reliably stay at range and engage with fighters. Maybe it's something specific to the Neutrino carrier you're using? If it had a built-in weapon for example that would do it.

2) There's another bug (fixed in-dev) where deploying a large number of exclusively carriers may result in "escort chains" - i.e. A will escort B -> C -> D -> A, resulting in them pretty much just milling in place. Have to have at least 4 carriers next to each other for this to happen. Doesn't sound like that's what's happening, but thought I'd mention it.

I -think- this one (number 2 there) may be a cause of problems?  I've seen battles where a drover with a timid pilot has literally rammed enemy cruisers - but that -only- seems to happen when I deploy a large number of carriers and give them no particular orders.