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[TrashMan]

I haven't ever fought 10 at one (never fought more than 4 at once tbh) so I can't say for sure. Maybe 10 would be too long for a battleship, it all depends on how long it takes the enemy to burn in. Ideally I'd want my fleet and flagship pressed up as far towards their border as possible to minimize the 'fly down the map' time.

That's the opposite of good strategy.
Right now the enemy AI is lacking and they just charge at you. Letting them cross that distance means that lighter, faster ships get ahead of the rest and are isolated, making them easy pickings. And if for any reason things start going south, you can far mroe easily retreat.

[AgentFransis]

You don't need cheese to kill infinite pirate fleets with an endgame fleet. You're just fighting your own CR timer, which this discussion is about.

[DrPhat]

Recently I've been playing with the limitation that my fleet must stay small, so I've forced myself to play better.

There are two main issues with playing the way I do.
Firstly, enemies regularly outnumber me. This is fine if I just optimize my ships more, but against tanky enemies it can get difficult.
Secondly, AI is extremely stupid when it comes to fleet cohesion. Any ship significantly faster than the rest will immediately get isolated and die. Even a hammerhead is fast enough for this effect.

You simply need tougher ships. Look to add some really tanky ships into your gameplay. If you are not going to win by numbers you have to win by brute force. These are typically high tech ships like the Paragon and if you really don't want a capital then a pair of Apogees with hardened shields and officers with the right skills are what you need.

Avoid ships with burn drive, they are more in tune with overwhelming the enemy and killing them faster than they can organize. This play-style is effective against equal or lesser numbers. As soon as you get a Dominator it will just burn-drive to its death especially if most of your other ships are surrounded in a ball formation.

If you want to use missiles and fighters then you have to use them both and ideally in replenish-able numbers. This means pilums with bomber squadrons to put so much point offense on field they can't all be shot down, or using a bunch of effective killing missiles like harpoons on griffons for their missile auto forge ability.

If not then you need to have ships that can get in and out of combat reliably without getting killed. Your options are limited to Eagles Falcons and Auroras. They all work well together or in numbers of individual types.

Destroyer and frigate size variants are ill advised unless you use them for a very specific backline support like a buffalo mk II with pilum launchers for their low deployment cost.

Tell me what you would prefer and I'll help guide you into a small fleet that can effectively take on much larger foes.

Everyone here talking about how to take advantage of the game mechanics and no one is actually thinking of how the ships themselves work.

[Thaago]

I haven't ever fought 10 at one (never fought more than 4 at once tbh) so I can't say for sure. Maybe 10 would be too long for a battleship, it all depends on how long it takes the enemy to burn in. Ideally I'd want my fleet and flagship pressed up as far towards their border as possible to minimize the 'fly down the map' time.

That's the opposite of good strategy.
Right now the enemy AI is lacking and they just charge at you. Letting them cross that distance means that lighter, faster ships get ahead of the rest and are isolated, making them easy pickings. And if for any reason things start going south, you can far mroe easily retreat.

You don't need cheese to kill infinite pirate fleets with an endgame fleet. You're just fighting your own CR timer, which this discussion is about.

: thumbs up :

I was responding to 'can you kill 10 pirate armadas without running out of PPT'. Since I have never fought 10 at once, I was speculating on how to do it as fast as possible. Letting the enemy trickle down to me is the opposite of that.

[Plantissue]

If you are ever caught in a random pirate raid, half of those fleets are smaller fleets, so it isn't as bad as it looks. Still it is easily 20+ Atlas MK II and hundreds of lesser ships. Since they tend to be spread out a fair bit, you will only fight a few at a time unless you are really unlucky. I had found mass Conquests and Herons work really well. They basically run up and kill everything. In the end the Atlas MK II is just the strength of a cruiser with the speed of a capital with some burst damage and if your AI controlled officered ships can just take the damage its not much of a problem. It helps that both ships can just retreat behind each other as they are speed enough to do so. Use lots of commands to focus down ships as needed and you will churn through them till you run out of commands. After a while it is possible to move up the map to where the reinforcements trickle in and then you got to be wary and pull them back in case they get shot at where they can't respond from or get suprise damage.

[Scorpixel]

I am not sure if you guys play with any hard mode mod (over ruthless sector) but aren't pirate fleets kinda pathetic?

Even in vanilla-like where they run pretty much free a single raid-size fleet with 3-6 Atlas mk-trashcan and all the flow of smaller flying junk can be dealt with using little more than a pair of falcons, herons, hammerheads and some wolves to utterly melt the small fry and end-up with their crapitals getting ganged-up.
Getting a single Onslaught(XIV) (and changing falcons to eagles) allowed this taskforce to simply smash through the formation and spawnkill everything that arrives (up to 2 big fleets and some little ones) even in max battle size, only getting the wolf-pack to retreat once the enemy spawn is reached.

I mean, everyone here is clearly better at the game than i'll ever be, and i would guess also used to run mostly capitals in endgame, so aren't pirates closer to a swarm of D-mods getting squashed like flies by Paragons and the like without those ever stopping until reaching the other side of the map?
Compared to Nexerelin's capital/carrier deathballs (still getting nightmares from the 15 triumphs with conquest/chronos/victory toppings) this does seem rather tame.

[Thaago]

Yeah - without the pirate boosting mods (of which there are many), pirate fleets are very weak. Light cruisers and destroyers can win against their strongest fleets with good builds, and using any capital lets you steamroll them. So it becomes a CR battle when fighting many pirate fleets at once: can you route them fast enough to beat the timer?

[TrashMan]

Yeah - without the pirate boosting mods (of which there are many), pirate fleets are very weak.

And they should be. They are a barely organized rabble without proper resources or facilities, surviving on theft and driving around is broken down, poorly maintained garbage heaps.
Of course they melt when faces with a proper line warships.
If anything, the problem is that the player can get such powerful warships too fast, too easy.

[Xonok]

Well, speaking of pirate fleets, they are so far from being a threat that I don't even care what size they are. They can't hold up a formation.

Most of the time when fighting superior numbers I'm just trying to make the AI not act ***.
AI is very lacking in basic cohesion. They seem to always think that an ally ship near them is somehow useful, but then end up blocking their fire and dying alone. If they don't do that, they just separate from the formation, thinking they can fight 3 times their mass alone.
Carriers with full wings also like to put them to escort a single ship that isn't even in firing range. The only way I've seen to counter that is by having no non-carriers whatsoever.
It seems the AI can only handle bombers and SO/Burn ships consistently. Everything else just ends up standing around until it's time to suicide.

[Scorpixel]

The AI really is stubborn when it decides to do anything, keeping your ships in check require constant attention like toddlers next to a road.

The best way yet is to give them one or two global objectives (assault/defend a point or random position next to another) regularly change the elimination targets to avoid them diving into the enemy formation in order to try and destroy some hound, make sure none of your large ships is chasing a phase/blink frigate to the ends of the map, etc...
Also a direct "eliminate" order to force them to actually attack, and then "retreat" so that the ship actually fly in he direction that won't result in it exploding.

Biggest issue yet has been frigates, they're way too shy against other frigates. How many times did i watch my wolves tail drams in a chase without ever touching them? (Kites are even worse at it, won't even get into missile range). Or the classic 3 on one where they attack one at a time like it's a power-ranger episode? You're all both individually faster and stronger than him! This ship should have been debris two minutes ago and here i am watching those goofs with full assault and direct kill order losing CR, only winning because the enemy did first!

All my thanks to the mod to force "aggressive" on every ship, also auto-resolve for pursuits is the only way.

[Thaago]

There is a button called "full assault" in the upper right that makes the AI more aggressive. You can also set your doctrine for non-officered AI ships in the fleet production tab.

[Scorpixel]

Yes that is what i was referring to, the full assault button is almost always toggled whenever i want my ships to actually fight the enemy instead of entering into a staring contest. Combined with right clicking the enemy i want to explode by other means than being uncomfortable in face of so many of my ships giving him mean looks.

As for the five little squares yes, set on steady/aggressive because anything else mean either that my frigates commit kamikaze runs or my carriers stay so far away even their fighters cannot reach (i experienced a timid officier once and it was mooore than enough).

Maybe it's because i tend to use smaller ships? Since i rarely make use of more than two capitals per battle even in endgame it could be that the survival instinct of the AI is "that thing fire bullets bigger than my ship, maybe, just maybe, it is a bad idea" any knowledge would be welcome.

[Thaago]

Yeah, ships do get scared by big enemies or lots of enemies in an area, so its hard to get frigates to engage endgame. Its kind of a fine line between "my ships won't engage" and "my ships suicide". One thing I've found is that building for range can help quite a lot - I use a lot of destroyers and when endgame comes rolling around I need to refit them from brawlers to long ranged artillery.

Another thing I've found is that ships can be encouraged to attack an enemy if one of their number (or the player) drives up that enemy's flux or turns them around. For that purpose, either the player or a Reckless officer in a nice murder or tank ship driving straight into the enemy line can get all the rest of the ships to attack as well (not to mention throwing the enemy into disarray).

[bobucles]

It would be nice to teach phase ship AI a bit more in the way of backstabbing. Phase cloak is simply a completely unique play style- going through enemy ships, being able to dodge gunfire as long as they have spare hard flux (soft flux does not reduce "spare phase cloak" time), and multiplying their speed inside phase space to be far faster than normal ships. These traits allow them to easily sneak behind enemy lines, charge directly up to ship flanks, or completely break away from combat to vent. Instead they try to dance around and fight like a normal frigate, which makes them look dumb. But I know AI is a super hard job that rarely plays out as intended.

[TaLaR]

Phase AI works only in simplest conditions:
- single front shielded and not particularly fast opponent
- no missiles or fighters to distract the phase ship (even stuff that can't really hit it, like Cobras + Annihilators can distract phase ships well enough).
- Phase ship has longer range weapons (AM blaster only config does not work).

Even then it will probably faff about quite a lot, especially with finisher.