Hello. First of, let me say that I enjoy this game greatly and have put a ton of hours in playing it. As everyone else here I'm really hyped about the new patch and I keep checking the forums for updates. I've read the patch notes and while I really love some of the balance choices you made (the nerf to MIRV was super necessary), I was a bit sad when I didn't see more AI changes.
More specifically, my biggest gripe with this game right now is the AI of your ships in battle, even more specifically the way they follow commands. The ships don't act according to the command description at all. The problem is they are too aggressive and prioritize chasing enemies over anything else. It doesn't matter if you order your ships to either assault or capture a capture point, they will chase frigates with their much slower ships til the end of the battle without actually capturing the point. The BIGGEST problem tho, is the
defend command. I start each battle by selecting all my ships except my main ship, and ordering them to defend the area behind the closest capture point. Then I myself go in front of them, to capture the point myself, and position myself between the oncoming enemy and the rest of my fleet, I basically want nothing else from my fleet other than covering my back side. So the map from top to bottom looks like this :
-Incoming enemy forces
-various capture points
-My main ship that I'm controlling on top of the lowest positioned capture point
-the rest of my fleet, usually two to four ships.
Sometimes if a good capture point like a nav point or a sensor point is on the side I position my fleet behind it's outer side and put my ship between my fleet and the incoming enemy forces, you get the idea. However how the battle ALWAYS ALWAYS ends up if it takes more than a couple of seconds, is that the rest of my fleet abandons their defend point, and either go chase the enemy to the end of the world, or in many cases go right in front of me and into the crossfire, so I have a hard time not doing any friendly fire. That's utterly ridiculous if you ask me, failing so hard at following the simplest command, that isn't even issued during the fight but before it begins. Here are some examples, but honestly, If you want I can take like 10 screenshots like these during any day I have time to play. Remember, each one of these screenshots started the same way I described above, and for clarity, my main ship is the conquest. -
http://imgur.com/a/WQ9nj I tried this same strategy with the rally taskforce command instead of the defend command, and issuing a command to each ship to go to the rally task force point, and It makes no difference. Examples -
https://imgur.com/a/OhozdThe distance that ships can go from a point that you issue a command on should be hard capped, and the hard cap could be somehow calculated from the ships top speed and effective range, if that's not too big of an issue, just any arbitrary hard cap would be fine tho, like a third of a screen for cruisers and capitals, half a screen for destroyers, and a whole screen for fighters and frigates. This change alone would make the combat soooo much more enjoyable, it would actually make sense to take increase your command points. For now, they are pretty useless if you want to keep your whole fleet together.
Another change that would make combat a bit more enjoyable and challenging is if the enemy forces attacked at once. The way it is right now, I usually destroy like 80% of the frigates and fighters before being in any danger, and only after that the destroyers cruisers and capitals come. But that's a bit more complicated and would require testing, while the change that I suggested above seems like easy enough to implement and would improve the gameplay dramatically.
If there is anything I could do, like provide you with more examples or even videos, or play test some scenarios for you, I'd be happy to help.
