How-To Fleet Posture

[Bingeling]

I am searching for motivation to start a "posture" game to figure that part out myself, and I also miss the red circles to indicate attack ranges. The plan is to run all automated fleets ruled manually with postures and the posture attack targets... Time will show how that works

Loading up Legends I only find red circles after assigning attack targets.

[necaradan666]

Huh? what are you guys on about, it works same as usual here. Are you doing it right?

Set attack target, enemy base. Set range, system. Red circle appears, fleet is supposed to go off to kill things in that system when at war. Mine just seem to sit there mostly. But I do see the red circles.

[Bingeling]

If desired behavior is:

1: Defensive stance: Defend any base attacked within range.

2: Attack stance: Attack anything within range, even if they do not attack anything.

3: Set attack target: Attack anything within range based on target.

Then 1 and 3 got circles, but 2 does not. Postures never made much sense for me, so I am not sure if this is how they work. That is what I plan to figure out.

Until then I live by "Never trust the AI to do anything useful apart from reacting according to the normal stance."

[necaradan666]

Been a while since I read the thread but I think unless you set 3, 2 does nothing. Gelatinous Cube makes quite a point of that in post #4. You can set a home base and an attack target, the attack/defend button switches between modes

[Aquitaine]

It seemed to me that you were able to designate an arbitrary range (rather than 'sector' or 'nearby systems') by using the 'set target.'

Is it the case that 'set target' doesn't actually cause the fleet to go and attack the target right away? If so, perhaps it should be called something other than 'set target'...

[Bingeling]

I am not sure how it works, which triggers the motivation to try to play with automated fleets, and manual control of all "war and attacks", ship building, and fleet formation.

My small tests with postures have been totally unsuccessful, they are sitting idle when they should move, and move when they should sit idle

When testing quickly in Legends, I had to set a foreign attack target. When I set the colony of my neighbor, they did not seem eager to head that way, though. The lack of a state of war could be a cause for their lack of urgency, of course.

[necaradan666]

Recently I'm not sure if I've even seen a defensive fleet moving to another system to defend mines and such when set to defend nearby systems or sector of their home base. I remember them doing so around Legends when I found this thread and did my own testing to learn how they work. Perhaps fleet postures are currently bugged?

[Bingeling]

I don't know how they are supposed to work, so it is hard to say if they are bugged. I have never payed much attention to postures, and mostly notice them taking off once in a while when on manual and stuck with the default "attack anything anywhere" stance. They also love to return to home base after repairs, and there appear to be no way to clear their home base. This has not annoyed me enough to try hard to clear their home base, though.

[Efaferal]

Bingeling,

I am new to DW but I have to say that postures makes for some interesting and fun strategic play.
When setting the attack postures the help files indicate that you must have an attack target and be at war. Otherwise only the defensive postures will result in fleet actions. The other thing to keep in mind is the attack ratio settings for ships and invasion. If you set the attack ratio too high then fleet will not initiate operations until it's firepower is sufficiently high. If you want a lot of harassing attacks set it down to 1.0

When letting the AI use postures to attack I have better success with one large fleet and 2 or 3 strike forces. It ends up the strike forces fly around and harass mines drawing off defenders while the main fleet ( if large enough ) will go after the hard targets. If you add troop carriers to the large fleet the AI is pretty aggressive about invading.

The only ships I ever leave out of a fleet are escorts as the AI for these appears to spread them out to potential targets before attacks occur.

[Bingeling]

Thanks for the info, and in particular the hint about attack overmatch.

It will be interesting to see if I can make automated fleet mop up pirates properly. Considering how many pirates are around if the AIs are left alone, my guess is that they won't do too much damage to pirates

[Keston]

There were comments in posts a few years ago about using automated settings with fleets to clean up pirate appearances effectively, but Pirates have been expansioned into a major play element and playable factions. As was said earlier, Pirate empires are never at war as such, so postures would not work for them. Empires make war on Empires, Pirates make Raids on everyone. Like historical merchant companies, they may fight empires or each other, but that is usually not the best way to do business.

Neither Pirates nor Empires would want to generate animosity or dissipate forces with attacks on all Pirate ships going about their business. However, with the new patch providing that Empire ships don't attack Pirates doing smuggling for them, it would be reasonable to enable settings allowing fleets to respond to Pirate ships making an attack or others of that Pirate syndicate. Smugglers could go about their business.

[Efaferal]

In practice the AI only defends against pirates. With Escorts going around patrolling, and Frigates responding to attacks. Until you get Hyper Deny it is fun just watching the rat pop in scare the mine, the task force show up run out the guns, the rat runs, rinse repeat. When I use more and smaller anti pirate forces I get lots of attack notices, but eventually the pirates move on because they aren't getting successful raids. When I use fewer but larger ships I zap a lot of rats but they also raid constantly.

This is the only justification I can come up with for using small ships.

Your mileage may vary.
-E

[mop999]

Are fleet postures buggy/broken I have done some testing on v1.9.5.0 of DW:U it seems like for a while it was working for attack posture but further testing reviled not so much. Am I missing something I have read this form and also set fleet formations to manual and also set war to suggest and attack to manual. Also set fleets to automation.

For some reason every time I set attack to suggest and the AI suggest the fleet I already had a posture for, the AI resets the attack posture. Also some testing reviled that proximity of the fleet home base plays a role to. Defense posture sorta seems to work.

Are there any mods or fix for this issue which may help?

[Mordino]

Hello guys. I`m having this problem I can`t find solution for. Every time I use search I find people having problems with fleets not invading stuff, but not other way around. Is it somehow possible to stop my ships from invading every independent planet they see? I`ve set every automation option to be as peaceful as it can, and they keep invading independent colonies. That heartless bastards! My reputation is suffering from it. Thank you.

[Aeson]

Opening the design up and setting the "invade when" option to "never" should work (if the issue is a recovered derelict, then select the derelict, find the line in the unit details in the lower left corner of the screen listing the class, and click on the class name; that will open the ship's design and you can change the class's invasion setting from there). Taking troop modules off your non-troopship designs and keeping all of your troopships in manually-controlled fleets should mostly do it. Playing a more friendly or less aggressive species might work; I can't recall seeing random recovered capital ships with troop modules invade worlds when I'm playing Ackdarians and I've forgotten to disable the recovered vessel's automation, for example.

The other way to handle this is to just accept it and be more active hunting pirate bases; busting pirate bases improves your reputation, and invading independent colonies is the most economically viable way to expand a starting empire anyways.

[Mordino]

Thank you very much sir. =) You`ve helped me to discover yet another layer of this amazing onion of a game. :] While following your advice I also learned how to make designs and stuff. :]

[Cruis.In]

Wow this is useful!

Are you telling me, I can set up a 'fleet' of troop transports, to automatically collect troops from the nearest colony and invade nearby 'enemy' colonies? I always hated doing this manually, as getting the troop transports to different home planets, collecting troops, then transporting them to enemy planets, involved heavy micromanagement, it was one of the reasons I quit! I hate excessive micromanagement, and this isn't a game where you can micromanage one aspect for too long with so many other things happpening!

[Bingeling]

I don't know how this helps, but for loading troops you can just tell the fleet to load troops. The transports will go for different colonies according to where they thing they can find troops.

And if the fleet leader does not carry troops, he just stay where he is as he can not do a "load troops" order. And a troop transport that collected troops at the chosen colony will go back to fleet leader, just like any fleet member that completed any mission will.

The result should be that some transports are full, while some only have maybe a single troop. Because they will only load at one location each, and all locations probably don't have a "perfect amount for loading".

Pressing "load troops" once is not excessive micro management in my world.

Also, an automated, unfleeted, troop transport will happily run around to pick up troops as its behavior, and stay put once completed. I use this for the transports that struggle with getting filled up. Doing that is a bit micro management, but it is mostly a result of not having enough troops in the nearby area.

[Cruis.In]

Hey, I've been prowling around again looking to play another game, but I see even in tech support, the developers or no one don't respond to tech support issues, is this game still supported?

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: Cruis.In
Hey, I've been prowling around again looking to play another game, but I see even in tech support, the developers or no one don't respond to tech support issues, is this game still supported?

For tech support I would say your best bet for prompt feedback is the Slitherine e-mail in the Tech Support FAQ.