Ship behavior ROTS vs Legends

[new_bee]

Didn't buy new release yet, wanna ask a few question:

When LRS warn about enemy fleet on a attack vector to my mine it seems that my automated ships and fleet did not care to setup an ambush there, is this still true for legends?

Same scenario - LRS warn about incoming, i send all my ship there, enemy pop out from hyper and concentrate fire on single mining platform, while my ships are failed to do so, as a result they only manage to lower shields on some enemy ships before they jump to next mine platform in that system. Failed to catch 'em while they wipe out all my platforms and invade newly colonized planet w/o troops, they followed them to their homeworld where all of my ship lost because of heavy armed defence platforms.

And another. My escort are going to refuel at gas mining platform engaging system targets, meanwhile a pirate frigate jump out and attack same gas station. Escort captain didn't bother - "i'm low on fuel cannot comply" so he dock with station refuel and then slooooowly undock and move at impulse speed, mission description still "refueling at xxxgasstation" and only when he move away at certain range from station he switch to "attack pirate frigate", seems like he followed routine dock/undock operation and want it made by the book, if i order him to attack pirate then he immediately setup a flank speed and shoot.

[elliotg]

ORIGINAL: new_bee
When LRS warn about enemy fleet on a attack vector to my mine it seems that my automated ships and fleet did not care to setup an ambush there, is this still true for legends?

Your ships will respond if they are able to - i.e. not busy with something else important, and within range to respond, etc. But it is impossible to say for certain what will happen with every different situation - there's so many variables involved: are nearby military ships available, etc.

I strongly recommend using the new fleet postures to set up defensive fleets in critical systems. They can then respond to incoming attacks with a reasonable level of force.

Same scenario - LRS warn about incoming, i send all my ship there, enemy pop out from hyper and concentrate fire on single mining platform, while my ships are failed to do so, as a result they only manage to lower shields on some enemy ships before they jump to next mine platform in that system. Failed to catch 'em while they wipe out all my platforms and invade newly colonized planet w/o troops, they followed them to their homeworld where all of my ship lost because of heavy armed defence platforms.

There are a lot of factors involved in target selection - so I can't tell you exactly what will and will not happen in every situation. But military ships attempt to gang up on targets so that they can destroy them quicker (i.e. your responding ships would attempt to focus fire on two or three enemy ships instead of the entire fleet). But when there are large enemy forces this is going to be less effective anyway.

You can control the attack overmatch factor in the Game Options screen: Game Options (O key) > Empire Settings > Attack Overmatch. Higher values will assign more of your military ships to each enemy target.

But as you can see the enemy attack AI is now more stream-lined - they rapidly plow through your systems, destroying everything in their path - which makes for a more challenging game [:)]

And another. My escort are going to refuel at gas mining platform engaging system targets, meanwhile a pirate frigate jump out and attack same gas station. Escort captain didn't bother - "i'm low on fuel cannot comply" so he dock with station refuel and then slooooowly undock and move at impulse speed, mission description still "refueling at xxxgasstation" and only when he move away at certain range from station he switch to "attack pirate frigate", seems like he followed routine dock/undock operation and want it made by the book, if i order him to attack pirate then he immediately setup a flank speed and shoot.

Yes, refueling takes priority over everything else - the ship cannot fire its weapons without energy/fuel.

But we can probably tweak this a bit so that the few seconds of the undocking procedure does not stop the ship from responding to an attack. We'll take a look at that.

[Bingeling]

The AI has even in ROTS been on serial kill missions that are mostly impossible to stop, I think. There is nothing saving a mining station from a large fleet arriving as a force. And that is OK by me. Raiders should not stop to fight, they should go on raiding.

I would love some tweaking of arrival procedure, though. Take this example:

My mining base is attacked by a pirate. I manually send a fleet to intervene by ordering it "move to planet". They will lazily exit hyperspace and approach the planet, even if a pirate is sitting along them shooting up a mining base.

Some sort of "Is there an attack going on? Is this my last order and am I reasonably close to my target? If so, attack" would be nice. I believe that today an order has to be "done" before a new order (like attack pirate) is looked for. Some sort of "almost done, open for suggestions" status of an order would be nice. On a move order this should be after exiting hyperspace at the target location.

The same thing happens if a defense fleets races to an invasion target. If you don't micro manage they may sit by and watch the invasion if they have not quite finalized their "cruise" approach to the planet. I tend to pay attention when this happens, though.

[Erik Rutins]

I haven't seen as much of an issue with this with the fleet postures in Legends, but the various combinations of orders and situations can get fairly complex and I'm sure some corner cases still exist. We'll see what we can do to tweak this further once we've had some more feedback on how it's working in Legends.

Regards,

- Erik

[feelotraveller]

Bingeling, I'm sure there's a good reason I'm missing, but why don't you just target the pirate for an attack rather than giving a move to a nearby location order?

Tweaking is good. [:)] But remember there will be cases when I want to move to a nearby location and not to engage in an attack. I sometimes use this, for instance, on individual ships to keep them out of range but nearby until I get a good grouping for attack. Can easily mean the difference between getting munched by a Kaltor on not if you only have a couple of ships.

[Malevolence]

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

Bingeling, I'm sure there's a good reason I'm missing, but why don't you just target the pirate for an attack rather than giving a move to a nearby location order?

keep in mind that AI uses pursuit pathing and not intercept pathing when setting enemy fleets as a target. that means your fleet aims at where the enemy fleet is and not where it will be based on vector. this is why you see your fleets pulling in behind an enemy and then overtaking them.

based on my observation, once an enemy fleet sets a target it does not deviate until it reaches the target... in other words, no change of mission once given an order.

[feelotraveller]

I was missing that!

[Bingeling]

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

Bingeling, I'm sure there's a good reason I'm missing, but why don't you just target the pirate for an attack rather than giving a move to a nearby location order?

At least there is a reason.

It depends on what I want to achieve. Sometimes I run to defend a mine with my fleet, and I want to be sure to get there as one pirate is often followed by more pirates. If the original pirate leaves or is killed (by other forces), it is my experience that the fleet will stop dead in confusion. The same will happen if I target the mining base and it is killed by the pirate. So the way to make sure the fleet ends up at the destination is to tell it to move to the planet.

[feelotraveller]

Ah yes, that all makes sense. Since it was you posting I suspected it all would. Just couldn't get my head around it though.

If you hadn't guessed [:D] I tend to micro a lot of things. So I will just order a patrol on the base and keep an eye open to see if it's going to get destoyed. If it is then I will target the pirates directly (assuming I still want to pursue them). Means dropping out of hyperspace and losing time but I don't ever encounter your problem. To avoid the stopping dead when (and if) the first pirate dies you could queue up attack orders on the others as they arrive in the system... but yeah, I do love micro... [:)]

[Bingeling]

I don't ever use the patrol order, I think. Maybe I should. I order my fleets to sit around, move, or attack. It could be that those on patrol are more alert than the others, as those sitting around tend to have a less than stellar reaction time. I was fighting a little war yesterday and sat in defense of a colony with incoming fleets. Once ships entered the spaceport, fleet, and defensive base all let the first ship come very close until realizing they should maybe fire.

[feelotraveller]

I don't use patrol much either as it chews through the fuel with the ships constantly on the move. I find it handy when I know/suspect that a base is under attack. The difficulty with it in ROTS at least was that it bumped up the priority of engaging system targets. This meant that if there was more than one target in the system, or if there was a second wave incoming, often some or all of your ships would run off to fight elsewhere. I suspect lots of possibilities have changed with the fleet postures in Legends. Yet to explore these...

[Bingeling]

I should indeed work on fleet postures too. I notice that some protection fleets takes off even if I never asked them to. I hope such fleets ends their attack with "return to base". Fleets sitting in protection in a system have a bad habit of ending up everywhere else (nearby) since they chase attackers. Maybe some proper posture settings cure this.

[Gelatinous Cube]

My only real complaint with the posture system is that the "Defend Sector" setting is still much too small on the biggest map settings. Easily fixed just by making more fleets, but being able to manually input the desired range would be slap-tastic.

Other than that, Fleet Postures have made the game far, far easier for me to control. Being able to flip "Fleet Posture" overlay on and at a glance see my defensive network is quite awesome.

[Bingeling]

Having a small defense fleet in each sector is not too bad until you are across large parts of the galaxy. But all those little defense fleets spam the fleet list quite bad. I can also imagine having one sector as the "end of empire" and just a couple of mining bases just across the sector line. In these cases setting a range (viewed in posture settings as a circle) would indeed be just great.

[Gelatinous Cube]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

Having a small defense fleet in each sector is not too bad until you are across large parts of the galaxy. But all those little defense fleets spam the fleet list quite bad. I can also imagine having one sector as the "end of empire" and just a couple of mining bases just across the sector line. In these cases setting a range (viewed in posture settings as a circle) would indeed be just great.

Exactly. [8D]

[w1p]

Having fleets to defend anywhere early game normally ends up with fleets flying about with low/no fuel, but that's my fault for not changing the range.

Is it me, or has anybody else noticed that explorer's are a touch more efficient, and it happens less that I see them moping back to with no fuel? I mod the initial one and give it a few more fuel packs and a few guns to deal with kaltors, and I thought in ROTS that may have confused it, but in legends it works perfectly.

[Gelatinous Cube]

ORIGINAL: w1p

Having fleets to defend anywhere early game normally ends up with fleets flying about with low/no fuel, but that's my fault for not changing the range.

Is it me, or has anybody else noticed that explorer's are a touch more efficient, and it happens less that I see them moping back to with no fuel? I mod the initial one and give it a few more fuel packs and a few guns to deal with kaltors, and I thought in ROTS that may have confused it, but in legends it works perfectly.

I've always used auto Ship Design, and my explorers don't seem any more efficient than they were before.

However, turning on fleet vectors during the exploration phase of the game really gives you a much better sense of where you're explorers are and what they are doing, and makes the whole process feel much more involved.

[w1p]

Not having 2 reactors on my first explorers making them go at 8000 instead of 12500 is too frustrating for me. But yes, showing the vectors makes a massive difference, especially when you only have a few explorers and they decide to try exploring something miles away and nothing close first.

[Sithuk]

+1 for setting fleet posture radius.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: w1p
Is it me, or has anybody else noticed that explorer's are a touch more efficient, and it happens less that I see them moping back to with no fuel? I mod the initial one and give it a few more fuel packs and a few guns to deal with kaltors, and I thought in ROTS that may have confused it, but in legends it works perfectly.

Hopefully you'll see all automated ships and fleets handling fuel better than in the past. [8D]

Regards,

- Erik