Carriers not "standing off"

[Litjan]

Hi everyone,

I built a destroyer with a fighter bay and some beam weapons for self defense. I set the engagement rules to "stand off" for both superior and inferior enemies. Yet the destroyer closes to maximum beam-weapon range to join the fray. Since I built it with fairly weak shields and bad agility it was quickly obliterated.

Am I doing something wrong? Shouldn´t it "stand off" to maximum fighter-distance with these settings? What is the maximum fighter distance, btw? If I try to steer the ship away from the enemies manually, it will recover all fighters (as the attack order is no longer valid).

What happens with the "evade" command? Will the ships flee? I just want them to hang back as far as possible while having the fighters do theire thing...

Jan

[Starfry]

Torpedoes are longer range than beam weapons so try using that. Realistically, you should not try to build a carrier with weak abilities as fighters and bombers take too long to destroy a Tier one frigate before getting in range kill the destroyer. If you still plan on going ahead, first make a fleet with tough sluggers and have them get all the enemy's attention while the 2nd fleet with carriers jump in a few moments later and unleash their crafts.

[Aures]

Fighters don't have a range as such. Stand off means it will try to maintain the max distance where at least one weapon is in range, so if you only have beam weapons that will be the range it will use. I haven't tried playing around with using evade with fighters but that might be what you are after. Afaik evade will not cause it to flee, when it does that is determined by the flee setting.

[dazoline II]

Anyone know if a ship with only point defence and fighters behaves the same way?

I'm waiting until I get larger ships before I try this out.

[Erik Rutins]

Hi Litjan,

In my carrier testing, I realize my designs had missiles and that may have helped with standoff. Fighters should definitely have a standoff distance assumed by the game though, we'll make sure this is working properly.

Regards,

- Erik