is that your fleet's AI is unplayably timid. Anyone else notice this? I have a fleet entirely of reckless & aggressive officers & I can't get them to engage an enemy fleet in a fair fight. It's coming up in basically every combat encounter that I have that I have to manually order my fleet to engage every enemy 1 at a time, which Alex has specifically made (with the command points mechanic) not doable.
Heres a quick screenshot of what im talking about.
https://imgur.com/a/bBAVrrE1 vigilance with a tac laser is keeping 1 cruiser with an ion & kinetic beam and 2 tac lasers & missiles and 1 destroyer with dual heavy burst lasers & missiles at bay at 2k range. Notice that neither ship is moving towards an enemy??? One of them has a reckless officer, the other aggressive. Yes, I'm using mods, but Im p sure none of them affect the AI, and I get the same problem in vanilla. This is an evenly matched battle in theory bc its 1 cruiser & 1 destroyer plus frigates vs 1 cruiser & 1 destroyer plus frigates, but in actual practice its 3 frigates vs ^ bc more than half of my fleet (if u count a destroyer as 2 frigates & a cruiser as 3) is being knocked out of the fight by the friendly AI just being borked & refusing to fight anyone for no discernible reason.
or, later, having manually cleared out all of the enemy's fleet & having nothing but an enemy cruiser with 4 tac lasers left, I order my entire fleet to eliminate the cruiser and this is what they do
https://imgur.com/a/oBXBHoynobody's doing any damage, or taking any (except for my flagship), nobody's advancing. It might look like they are trying to catch up to the enemy but just before I took that screen all of my ships were nearly in range at 1k and just backed away from the cruiser to 2k range with 0 flux. My flagship is literally running out of CR & about to start breaking down LITERALLY WAITING FOR MY FLEET TO SHOOT AT HIM
In fact! (I tried to take a screenshot before exiting the game to reload a save to try this fight again which I've been doing on repeat for at least the last 2 hours but it didnt fire this time so I didnt get it), since that last screen shot where my flagship is at 40% CR & waiting for my cruiser destroyer & brawler to engage the enemy cruiser, I literally hit 0% CR while waiting & my 7 hammers went unused bc my reckless brawler sat at 2k range & just watched me literally age to death. Its absurd
Every battle is like this.
My first non-frigate battle this release (before I modded) was joining an ally fleet defending against a tritach drone swarm fleet of an Astral & a couple of shepards. I had my HVD brawler & my heavy torpedo drover flagship go after the enemy Astral, if I tanked for my brawler until it cracked the Astral's shield I could hammer it into dust, and then once it was nuked the rest of the battle would be a cake-walk & I spent like a solid 5 hours trying to get my brawler to shoot the Astral. I can force it to get near range of the Astral by making it escort me, but at basically no point was I able to get it to fire at the Astral more than once before the Brawler flipped around & presented its unshielded backside to the Astral to destroy.
Even when the Astral's wasps (which are such little of a threat + so incapable of the Brawler to deal with anyway that it shouldn't even be acknowledging them if there are either enemy or ally ships nearby) were elsewhere bc they were focused my ally fleet, the Brawler refused to shoot at it and would just sit inside the range of the Astral's guns until it or I died having done 0 shield damage to it.
I don't get it. The game definitely didn't have this problem back in 0.6. Back then I tested the AI heavily at the time bc I was impressed with it & remember noting explicitly that the battle AI was more or less point-perfect in how it handled battles, how when outmatched the AI would do its best to get in what it could get in before dying & give its allies a shot at taking down their opponent (I spent literally hours testing an enemy lasher against varying fleet comps to test the AI).
Now my fleet
REFUSES to fight -- even literally a reckless cruiser and an aggressive destroyer will not engage
a vigilance.
I get that the reason its been changed to be this way since the procgen was added to the game was to allow AI fleets to last longer while traveling around the overworld, give them more self-preservation instinct, bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbuuut, it seems to be to such an extent that its making the game nearly unplayable for me bc MY ai does not respect what battles I want to fight. It feels like, there's no point in giving me a choice what battles to engage or not engage in bc my fleet AI is going to decide for me whether the battle will be possible or not. Might as well just have the game select battles on my behalf, not even waste my time asking me. It feels like I'm the second in command in my own fleet. If they did this in an IRL military they'd get a pistol bullet to the back of the head for dereliction of duty.
I just don't find my #1 enemy in every engagement being my own reckless officers refusing to engage unless I manually order eliminate on every enemy one at a time until I run out of command points then watching my ships die from CR loss as they refuse to engage while I wait for a point to replenish to be fun. At this point I don't know that I'm gonna reinstall for 1.0, bc the game that I love died after 0.7
edit: and yeah, just double checked, no mods that change the AI.
https://imgur.com/a/0F9yXfE