How to Prevent Ships Going Home to Repair 1 Armor

[Tampa_Gamer]

Is there a setting to prevent ships in a fleet from immediately fleeing to home to repair 1 armor. I would like to utilize long range fleets with resupply and repair ships, but I cannot seem to prevent them from peeling away the first time 1 of their 20 or so armor components gets damaged. I have them on manual control but after a few seconds they want to seek the nearest starport. Very frustrating when the fleet is deep in enemy territory.

[mSterian]

Yes, the game should have an option for what % of the components to be damaged to return for repairing. Or, not return for repairing if it's getting repaired during the fight. But it's a bit difficult to implement and to make perfect.

[Tampa_Gamer]

Not really looking for a complicated fix. I just think "manual" control should mean just that. If I want them to repair/refuel I hit the "R" key. I think armor should be treated differently than components anyway since its no different than shields being depleted.

Although now that I think about, some of my ships that have the behavior "never flee" as to their shield strength also have some armor damaged and are not fleeing home. Will have to experiment with this as a possible work-around.

[mSterian]

Indeed, if you're so into microing every and each of your ships, just set them to never flee.

But the rest who do play manually but don't micro THAT much, do need that option turned on.

[Kayoz]

I don't think Tampa's request is an unreasonable one. Armour is there to absorb damage. If it's taking damage, you shouldn't flee any more than if your shields are taking damage.

The retreat mechanics need to be revisited. This has been a problem since they introduced rail guns (Legends?).

That said, it's been posted several times in tech support as a defect and never been addressed.

[Fenrisfil]

The problem has been made a whole lot worse by the inclusion of the chicken gun. *Ahem* I mean gravity weapons. One hit from one of those and ships have a tendency to just run away.

It's all very well judging when to flee by shield level and it would have worked fine when DW first came out, but now we have not one but two different weapons that can bypass shields (three if you include the AE Gravity weapons seperately) and so this system of determining when to flee is now outdated and redundant.

All we need is to replace shield % with a simple danger level that takes into account shield and armour/component damage all together. Call it: Low Danger, Medium Danger & High Danger (along with the standard enemy sighted, attacked & never). At Low danger level the ship will flee at 50% shield or when it receives damage (i.e the same as it currently is), at Medium it will fleet at 20% shields or after X damaged components and at High it will only flee when shields are depleted and all the armour modules have been damaged or when X non-armour components are damaged(making it pretty close to never fleeing, but at least with some chance of survival if things go wrong).

[Icemania]

Another example of the need to improve and/or better explain existing mechanisms rather than focus on new features.

[btd64]

I like Fenrisfil's idea. Wish list item.[;)]
Cheers