On Fleet control and boarding

[Pocus]

The two subjects are NOT related [:)]

The easier question first, are troops in troops module boosting also boarding defense? I would fancy the idea to add a special force land unit as a permanent garrison to my capital ships, just to roleplay they have some buffy Marines Companies onboard. But if they serve no purpose...

Now for the main question(s). This is about fleets orders. A fleet don't behave as a ship, order wise. I'm still trying to figure a few things.

One quite annoying behavior is that when you issue a move or refuel order to a ship, when it has ceased moving, you get a message in the top panel. This is mightily interesting.
Not so for fleet. You get no notification, and so more often than not, you end up with your fleet idle until you remember to check on i.
Any solution to this problem? I don't see why this was done on purpose my the developer, but there must be a reason?

Second question on fleet... Under which circumstance a ship within a fleet will revert to the order of the fleet itself? It seems that in some cases when a ship has no ongoing order, it will move toward the fleet leader. But sometime not! And sometime it will instead copy the current fleet order, but sometime not!

Final one, how to prevent fleets from issuing by themselves a refuel order?

[RogerBacon]

Troops on a ship don't help in its boarding defense. Use boarding pods for that. The troops in the boarding pods ARE the marines.

If you want to be reminded when a fleet gets somewhere the best way is to select one ship in the fleet and use the !note command.

Ships in a fleet that are separated from the leader are supposed to move to rejoin the leader. They are also supposed to copy the command the fleet has IF they are capable. One forum poster came up with a great strategy which I haven't gotten around to using yet but still plan to. He made all ships in his invasion fleets with troops (obviously) EXCEPT the leader. That way he could issue a "load troops" command and all the ships except the leader would head off to pick up troops. Then, when they were loaded they would automatically return to the leader who had never moved since it can't load troops. Brilliant!

I wasn't aware that fleets issued their own refuel orders.

[Retreat1970]

Troops on a ship don't help in its boarding defense. Use boarding pods for that.

Or use more hab modules.

[Uncle Lumpy]

Hi Pocus,

When you "Select" a given fleet it will show in the screen bottom left. On that screen it will show that fleet's current mission, if it has one.

It does seem that a lot of the controls of the game are counterintuitive. Below are some useful, if dated (they're still valid, though), posts that may help explain how to manage your fleets. If nothing else they provide interesting reading into the game.

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Hope it helps. Happy gaming!

Lumpy

[Bingeling]

When you (or the AI, I assume) give the fleet an order, every ship in the fleet is given that order. As written, a fleeted ship will move to leader if it has no order.

If I tell the fleet to move A, and then tell a fleet member to refuel, the refueler will complete his mission and then follow the fleet leader. If I give the fleet another order, the refueler will lose his refuel order and take on the fleet order. So "special" missions are only fulfilled if the fleet is "idle". A way to work around this is to move the fleet leader, which mean the rest will follow and the "special order ones" carry on with their missions.

This mean that if you are in the nasty situation with a ship on low fuel, and you need the fleet to attack, you either need to drop the refueler from the fleet, or make sure to always order the fleet around by selecting all ships present and ordering them to attack, etc.

Ships (and fleets) will take on refuel order if they judge themselves to be critically low on fuel. The way around this is to never be particularly low on fuel.

I am quite happy there are no messages on fleets being idle, as that is my default stance for them. My fleets are parked in spots where they are ready to act on a nearby emergency. Or they are actively used in war, in which case I pay attention to them. If I want an idle fleet to do some mission (but a pirate mine or whatever), I typically queue up "return to base", "refuel", "move to X" or similar to not have to pay attention to them completing their kill.

If a "proper" fleet is close to the mine bust, though, I will just order a few of fleet members to kill the mine, and they will move back to leader afterwards. Just make sure the fleet leader is not among them and drags the whole fleet along to be parked at the position of the destroyed mine.

[Lucian]

If you want to be reminded when a fleet gets somewhere the best way is to select one ship in the fleet and use the !note command.

Could you elaborate on how this works? I dont really know what you mean by "!note command".

I also often lose track of fleets which have completed their mission and are sitting idle for minutes / hours because I simply forgot about them and the game didn't bother to tell me they had finished their mission the way it does with individual ships. So if there's a way to solve the problem, I'd love to hear it.

[Pocus]

Thanks all for the infos.

The !note command is only available with the Bacon mod, which is a mod adding commands and fixing bugs, but you can still play 'vanilla' with it if that's your choice (although I play with an edited package UE+Retreat+DasChrome).

@Roger: I use the !note trick on a single ship to get a notification, but often she is not the last one doing the order, i.e refuel. You'll get a reminder, then you check the fleet, and see that 3 or so ships are still being under refuel. So you add a new !note to one of these 3 ships. And then you get another notification, hopefully from the last ship being refuel, but sometime not. So as you see that's not ideal.

One way to reduce the issue is to always queue a move order after refuel. This way even if the ship that get his notification is within a fleet finishing its move, chances are that they are anyway all our of warp and moving with thrusters to the rendez vous point, so you can issue another order that makes sense from that.
Still I never quite understood why you don't get notifications from fleets. It is as if the game want you to forget about them once they got an order!

--
A pity about troops in troop transports not defending, that would be a nice roleplay thing to have some special forces in capital ships named after the ship name and acting like reinforced security troops. Boarding pods don't have this 'flavor' somehow... (said boarding pods were renamed to 'Marine Company' in my mod to give them some more 'cachet').

[Lucian]

ORIGINAL: Pocus

Thanks all for the infos.

The !note command is only available with the Bacon mod, which is a mod adding commands and fixing bugs, but you can still play 'vanilla' with it if that's your choice (although I play with an edited package UE+Retreat+DasChrome).

Ah that explains why I've never heard of it, I dont play with mods. Thanks!

[Pocus]

Tutorial on pirate gameplay indicates that troops in troops pod bolster ship defense. I don't think it would change with a patch, so... Anyway what would happen if you captured a troop transport full of Dahuyt troopers... They should defend then die, not be captured.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Pocus

Tutorial on pirate gameplay indicates that troops in troops pod bolster ship defense. I don't think it would change with a patch, so... Anyway what would happen if you captured a troop transport full of Dahuyt troopers... They should defend then die, not be captured.

I'm pretty sure that is referring to boarding pods but you can test it yourself and let us know.

[Aeson]

Troops in troop compartments provide boarding defense. Evidence:

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Aeson

Troops in troop compartments provide boarding defense. Evidence:

Actually that tiny number (48) comes from your crew. Here is a ship with 10 troop compartments and it still shows zero boarding defense.
I think of troops as being carried in external compartments with their tanks, AT-AYs and whatever else they need to fight on the planet. They don't do ship to ship. That's what the troops in the boarding pods are for.

[Aeson]

Look at the number in the red box in the inset in the lower left corner of the image - "Defenders 1231." The ship which has 1231 defending strength against a boarding attack is of the class of ship whose design screen is shown, though not of the same nation - I spawned it in using the editor, transferred ownership to another empire, loaded it up with a bunch of troops, and then ordered another ship, which I also spawned in with the editor, to capture it. Design boarding defense strength is 48, and the ship's actual boarding defense strength with troops on board is over 30 times higher than that.

[Hattori Hanzo]

Aeson is right, the troops onboard actively participate in the fight subsequent to a boarding assault

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

Aeson is right, the troops onboard actively participate in the fight subsequent to a boarding assault

Yes, it appears so. It just isn't show in the design stats until at attack is in progress.

[Yaourt]

I confirmed the aforementioned. Boarded troops participate to the defense, as I painfully learned when my top notch capital ships was stolen on the spot. By now i tend to include troop compartiments in every ship, which has the double advantage of giving invasion capability to all fleets.

[Hattori Hanzo]

hard lesson, best way to learn.. [:'(]