Keeping Fleets Together?

[Keston]

I am having a hard time moving and attacking with fleets. Hotkey and double-clicking to select the fleet is easy. Clicking on a target is easy, but they don't seem motivated - wandering off to refuel on the way. Or they just show "no mission" after getting a fleet order so need to be individually ordered to the destination.

I have to keep going back to see if they have gathered, and disaster can strike in the meantime - the assembly point is too close to the orbit of a planet and its defences that swings by. Assembling troops for invasion also consumes a lot of attention, since I seem to have problems queueing orders and the transports sometimes just sit.

Having them all attack and all at the same time also can take micro. Fleet commanders should have some skill.

Any standard techniques to make fleet handling easier?

Advance thanks for help.

[lostsm]

for troops i build transports and leave them on auto. they fill up with troops on their own and then idle away until i have a need for them. then it's just a matter of gathering them together

[Joram]

The game doesn't make fleet management easy.  The biggest oversight is the fleet doesn't move at the speed of the slowest member.
 
The biggest tip I could give is to simply be sure you have ordered them all to refuel immediately before you choose to use the fleet for an important mission.  The second tip is to use a staging point.   Don't order them to go directly to attack a planet.  Send them to an uninhabited planet or even outside the system to stage and then use their normal engines to get to your objective.  And whether warping or using your normal drives, cut long distances into short stages, this allows the stragglers to keep up.

[Shark7]

Best bet is to make sure that all your ships have the same hyperspace speed. Some will still lag behind, but it won't be as bad and its like having a second wave hit in the attack. I purposely keep troopships slower than combat ships so that the combat ships can engage the defenses before the troopships arrive.

[Stardog]

Sup Guys!

I do all the above post > Top off on Fuel,Keep Jump speeds the same on all fleet ships But still - Fleets for what ever reason do not make the Hyper Jump at the exact same time - Its very close. They also enter system scattered about sometimes.

Maybe as patches come this will be enhanced But wouldn't Fleet Formations be Cool addition!


WM

[thiosk]

While not directly related to ordering the movement of fleets, I made a post back in 1.02 about redefining the concept of fleets, and changing the way the game treats them. Rather than a loose collection of ships, as an institution.

tm.asp?m=2433837

[Keston]

While not directly related to ordering the movement of fleets, I made a post back in 1.02 about redefining the concept of fleets, and changing the way the game treats them.

tm.asp?m=2433837

Excellent thread. I think just having fleet detail info and special fleet commands from the fleet menu or with the fleet selected on the map would be a big help, maybe including standard orders like transports picking up more troops once empty, whether ships refuel in an coordinated manner or just DON'T drop off in the midst of a fight, and that ships rejoin the fleet when they have no mission (there should be some default that ships join their fleet unless the player gives a specific order).

Having fleet colliers service the fleet ships for refueling, going back and forth, maybe with an escort, or letting fleet ships share fuel, would be a fleet level command.

Being able to examine the ships in the fleet and their whereabouts using mouseovers on the fleet info card would be vastly preferable to going to the ship list and sorting and clicking to find out where the ships wandered to.

Allowing administrative fleets (performing a mission, not necessarily all together) would also help, such as Escort Command, Border Patrol, Piracy Control, Home Fleet (defends the core worlds), Sector Fleets, Commerce Raiding Fleets (raid a specific player's commerce etc, hit and run). Players could skip it and the AI will decide.

Any thing not assigned to any fleet would either be under player orders or do whatever missions the AI prioritizes.

I'd probably let the AI swap equivalent ships between fleets if their locations made that desirable.

Setting a target strength and building to fill would be good, but could get complicated.

Leaders or just experience gain is nice chrome, and all these things would make the game more fun and strategic and less nuisance housekeeping - but the MAIN thing is to please cure fleet ships of attention deficit disorder!