Matrix Games Forums

If a ship is damaged but able to move, it automaticaly decide to go to a repair station, even if a construction ship is on the way to repair it. you can order it to stop all you like, they start their engines back on the next second, so the constructor ship cannot do its job.

Well I just found out that it is not possible to choose the base where you will repair a ship. If it is damaged, it chooses the nearest, and that's all. It keeps overriding my orders until I give up... It is strange that, sometime, right clicking gives a menu, and sometime, not. And sometime, you want to give the order "reapair" or "refuel", but all you get is a default order like "patrol this planet". How frustrating !

Yes, this is extremely annoying, especially when you want the damaged ship to keep fighting or otherwise doing its mission: In order to get to to be repaired by the construction ship, you have to spam the stop order over and over and over until the construction ship can pin it.

Sometimes if I want a ship to be repaired or retrofitted at a particular spacepoort I just give it a move order (which it usually obeys) until it is near that spaceport, then repair gives the option of "at nearest spaceport" which is the one you have moved it to. Does that make sense? I do that if multiple ships need work and I don't want them all landing at a small spaceport at the same time.

Well, I figured that there are other situations when your orders are systematically overridden. For example, when your ship are under 20% shield and that a ennemy fleet is nearby, it turns its mission to "escape", no matter what. You cannot say it to go at a specific place if you want it to go repair, for example, flee to a shipyard is not possible. It makes it very annoying to make them fight in high radiation systems. I had two of my escort fleeing a single fleeing pirate escort, with everybody at zero shields, and had to click like a mad man to get them to destroy the enemy. The same goes with refuel orders. Impossible to make a ship go to refuel where you want once it has dropped under the fuel limit. I even have seen a capital ship stop its fight again a frigate to refuel...

An even better one, now : I was about to attack a pirate base when an attack occurred in one of my nearby system. Two on four cancelled my order to attack a local ardilus that was itself under attack by the pirates... There is quite some work to do on the automatic mission assignments AI.

Go back to 1.03.  Doing that has its own problems, but at least the ships do what you tell them to.

I'm hoping 1.05 is going to finally fix a lot of this.  (The changelog looks quite promising.)