Invasion Fleet Escort Ships Not Defending Troop Transports

[Bellrock]

Game Version 1.3.1.1

I’m playing Humans, and have an Invasion Fleet consisting of 3 Escorts, 3 Frigates, 2 Troop Transports, and 1 Fuel Tanker. When I send this invasion fleet to invade an enemy colony, the fleet arrives at this colony, the Troop Transport ships will travel to the edge of the planet and deliver the Troops as expected. Meanwhile, the ships assigned to escort these Troop Transport ships, who also arrive at the planet, will park themselves some distance away from the planet, stand idle by leaving the Troop Transport ships open to attack.

I had this issue in my last game (which I played roughly a month ago) and suspect this is not some isolated issue; seems to be a thing. In this last game, I would lose a number of Troop Transport along with their loaded troops resulting in a failure to invade the planet in question.

Invansion Fleet issue.png (5.11 MiB) Viewed 863 times

In the attached screen shot, the two green circles show the position of the invasion fleet. The Troop Transports are unloading the troops at the enemy colony, and had approached the planet un-escorted while being attacked as they approach. The second green circle is the position of the escorts ships well out of range of being able to protect the Transports. Interestingly, in this screen shot, there is an enemy ship actively attacking these escort ships while my escort ships stand idle (they are not returning fire.)

In summary, the escort ships of Invasion Fleets are no longer protecting the fleet; they follow but do nothing when they arrive.

[MaximKI]

Thanks. Do you happen to have a save you could share with us? Do you happen have one from before you noticed the issue?

[Bellrock]

Maximki,

I submitted a save file, of the game in question, to your e-mail address.

Regarding providing a save before the issue, the saved game I submitted is a new game for me, and this was my first contested invasion, therefor can not provide a save of the invasion fleet working correctly.

The last game I played, a couple of months back, seemed to have a similar issue, where my invasion fleet started failing. At the time I could not explain why, except to noticed there were hostile fleets at the planets.

[elliotg]

Note that this is happening because the fleet tactical settings specify that individual fleet ships have an Engagement Range of 'Do Not Engage'. This matches the setting of your related Fleet Template.

So this is working as designed.

If you want your individual fleet ships to auto-respond to enemies then you should set the fleet's Engagement Range (Fleet Ships - Tactical Overrides section) to System or similar. This is the default setting.

Alternatively you can turn off the tactical setting 'Fleet Tactics Override Ship', so that each fleet ship just uses their own tactics.