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[narf03]

I need some recommendations.

I noticed that my ships dont follow my command anyway, so i decided not to do it, before battle, i save, then deploy any ships that i need to, then let them fight, i go do something, like watch a short video or comic, come back like 10 mins later, if the result isnt good, load, and do it again.

Its painful to give them order like move away, then see them rush forward and die. I rather dont see it at all.

The last battle i tried like 5 times, hope not to get some d-mod on some critical ships, ok if them die, but not ok if they get some d-mods.

I wonder how you guys do it on difficult battles ?

[Grievous69]

I pilot my ship and don't afk? This is certainly a weird question. You're asking what could you do but you seem to watch video and comics instead of playing the game, don't get it.

[narf03]

1 ship wont make too much different in a huge battle, like 20 vs 20 ships.

[Igncom1]

Depends on the force composition I suppose. Picking the right ships to serve the right job is quite important as a Mule freighter isn't going to be as dependable as a Hammerhead Destroyer, but neither is going to be superb against carriers if they aren't built to fight them.

What kinds of foes are you fighting?

[Grievous69]

1 ship wont make too much different in a huge battle, like 20 vs 20 ships.

Oh but it can, pretty much anything with either good speed or lots of missiles, or maybe some glass cannon, makes for amazing flagships. When piloted effectively you can defeat half of the enemy fleet alone. You just have to practice and eventually you'll get the hang of it.

[Salter]

It really depends on the type of flagship you got. If you are commanding from a carrier then might as well set it to autopilot and give general orders from there, like getting PD ships to escort and so on. You will still need the command system and applicable use of it anyways when it comes to fighting rem ordo's.

The player flown combat ships and the like are much better though, and the AI cant appropriately use certain ships like Ody or Zeno so its worth it to learn how to pilot your own ship.

[db48x]

Make a fleet with one Elite Conqueror and 25 Luddic Path Brawlers. Give the brawlers a Heavy Machine gun (good against shields), an Assault Chaingun (good against armor), and an Ion Cannon (disables enemy weapons, very handy). Maybe throw in 2 or 3 Sunders with High Intensity Lasers and Ion Pulsers or Ion Beams. These make good support ships that can do good damage without needing to get in close, leaving more room for the brawlers to get into knife–fighting range.

In many fights you will be able to click “Full Assault” and then let them go to it, especially if you have some of the leadership skills that buff frigates, ships without pilots, etc. I don’t think the combat in this game is so boring that I am compelled to go watch TV while the game plays itself, but in my current game I haven’t picked up any combat skills at all and am mostly just giving strategic orders during combat rather than focusing on flying a ship of my own. Learning how to use those orders well was more interesting than I expected. It really is more like delegating to subordinate officers rather than micro–managing every unit the way you would in a normal RTS.

I did have one especially hard fight the other day though. I jumped into the middle of a system not realizing that there was a full–scale pirate invasion happening. My fleet was basically as described, plus a bunch of Atlases carrying 12k of valuables that I picked up out on the rim. Even with all my combat ships, seven pirate fleets immediately converged on me. I guess they figured that if they could all dog–pile me then the survivors would have a huge pile of loot to split. They were very nearly right.

I used a story point to evade most of the incoming fleets, but three large pirate fleets still caught me a few seconds later. I won the fight, but only my Conqueror was still standing at the end, and it was down to 40% CR. I was able to recover most of my ships, but of course they were all at 0% CR and burning supplies like mad to repair. I thought I was in the clear, but the seventh pirate fleet, consisting of an Eradicator, a Mudskipper, and a Kite caught me before I could react. I went into that battle with the Conqueror and a Sunder that had gotten up to 4% CR. The Sunder promptly broke in half. I think the pirate flying the Eradicator was a coward, because he never once tried to charge me. I’m pretty sure he could have caused me a lot of trouble if he had just charged in and unloaded all of those rockets. The fight was a lot of fun, because I was never sure if I could win or not.

[Thaago]

Beyond using more powerful ships, giving orders and piloting yourself are how to win hard battles. Orders can range anywhere from moderately to extremely good depending on your forces (all line ships? Only need a few position orders+cancels and a few eliminate+cancels in a battle. Slow ships backed by interceptors will need frequent fighter strike orders to concentrate interceptor kills on frigates/destroyers (using command groups is handy for this! I put my Thunder Condors on group 1 for this purpose). Wolfpacks will want frequent orders, most importantly "avoid" and "eliminate" with cancels at the right time.

For player piloting, there is a big skill curve depending on the player's expertise at the game. A new player will be worse than the AI, while an experienced player can take any ship and have it fight 3 times better (before taking possibly having more combat skills into account, this is just in target selection, shield management, and venting), or take an elite/playerbait ship and have it fight 5 or more times better than the AI can.

[Hiruma Kai]

In regards to ships not doing what you want, the ability of the AI to execute orders can be highly dependent on fleet composition, fitting, as well as the opposition.  Although it's true the move command is more of an "engage nearby enemies, and move in this direction if you're not fighting" type order.

I find avoid works fine, assuming the ships you want to avoid are slower than your own.  Eliminate will certainly get the ship moving towards the target, but unless it's really a one sided fight and no where to retreat to, you kind of have to pay attention and know if and when to cancel the order (as the command will make the ship ignore anything but the target, and it's own flux levels).

I personally make liberal use of the escort order on larger ships, with small fast frigates/destroyers as escorts, as I find this means flanking frigates and phase ships have the escorts in between, resulting in the larger ship staying on task better.

When I actually issue timely orders, as opposed to just letting my fleet do it's thing while zipping around in a fast hard hitting flagship, I get significantly better results out of the ships.  And even in that case I'll issue orders at the very start, setting up escorts, and initial move/capture orders, and then cancel the move/capture orders once ships are initially engaged.

A lot of it is just practice and experience in seeing how orders are actually carried out, or in personal piloting skills.  Human judgement does make a lot more difference on fast ships, or ships with "go fast forward" mobility systems (burn drive, plasma drive), as the AI is bad at realizing when you can dive a target, or when to let it go because it's got too much support.

[Brainwright]

The single thing I do when taking on a stronger fleet is have all my ships defend my biggest, most durable ship.  That prevents the fleet from spreading out and each individual part getting picked off.  I usually have a group of fast attack frigates or destroyers in my fleet, and I use that to engage the opposing fast attack, like Furies or Pirate Falcons.

The last of it is retreat when you've killed enough to disengage cleanly.  Or once you've killed one or two of the big ships.  It really helps to prevent your CR getting ground down, and if you do disengage, your missile ships reload and your damaged ships can take a day to repair. 

It can really make an impossible battle possible.

[Daynen]

I've never understood why anyone would go AFK during battles in this game.  They're the main selling point.  They're almost universally the top reason people like the game.  Tricking out an awesome flagship is one of the biggest goals of my fleet development.  Taking it into battle to shred my foes is the second.

[BCS]

I don't go AFK because I like watching ships blow up but I agree that unless you're piloting a ship yourself the battles are extremely "hands off" affairs and trying to not make them as such - by using orders and micromanaging - is usually an exercise in frustration because the AI ships have a great deal of autonomy so instead of giving orders it's more like you're making suggestions and hoping they'll listen. And that is in addition to individual ship AI being quite bad(except for when it comes to dodging fire or managing shields - then it's inhumantely good, no complains there)

In fact I'd say that the battlefield UI overall is THE single worst thing in the game at the moment:

 - you don't know the current ECM/nav rating unless you're piloting a ship
 - you cannot issue orders to multiple ships simultaneously
 - most orders seem to be "fake": for example Search and Destroy is just the default ship behaviour so what it actually does is exempts the ship from other global orders, and ordering to take/hold an objective seems to just be a move command
 - there is no way to adjust general ship behaviour outside of two extremes(full assault/full retreat)
 - no "keep formation" order or at least "keep together" - you can use the move command but that makes ships bunch up and block each other's line of fire and leashes them to a location which can be bad too
 - no orders relating to overall strategy - charge down the middle, work on flanks, prioritize one flank, charge, give ground(I guess that's more general ship behaviour) etc.
 - battle notifications are very barebones - for example I'd love to know if any of my ships got below 75% hull HP(actually I'd like to be able to set it as a value at which my ships retreat automatically); I'd like to know when a ship runs out of missiles/ammo; I'd like to know when carriers get below certain replacement rate; and so on
 - the notification messages are color-coded but having them sound-coded would be nice - so I know I don't even have to look at them unless I hear a sound that relates to my ships
 - having the ship icons on strategic view rotate along with the ships would would make it a lot clearer
 - free camera when zoomed in

[Grievous69]

Half of the things you mentioned already exist in the game, the other are just bad ideas because we're not playing an RTS here. Micromanaging your fleet to that extent is not the point of the game. There's a mod precisely for getting notifications when ships run out of ammo, get below certain HP% and so on, forgot what it's called.

Ship rotation on the tactical map sounds decent, although not sure if that would make the readability even worse than it is, wonder if Alex ever experimented with that.

[keckles]

I've never understood why anyone would go AFK during battles in this game.  They're the main selling point.  They're almost universally the top reason people like the game.  Tricking out an awesome flagship is one of the biggest goals of my fleet development.  Taking it into battle to shred my foes is the second.

To be fair, I have found that the AI can make better use of multiple turrets and gun groupings than I can on larger vessels, if I'm piloting a capital I'll take control to get it into position and to take out key targets but otherwise I'll let autopilot take over and let the AI autofire for me.

[Igncom1]

I've never piloted, and basically don't know how 

I've always had good success just as an fleet admiral.