Matrix Games Forums

Perhaps it is just my game settings- but is the game's AI mildly retarded? (I'm playing Shadows, but see the same issues in Legends) I like to manage the foreign policy and intergalactic trade side of things, so I assume (wrongly) that setting the military on automatic will actually serve a purpose. Even if I have massive fleets, the ships almost never attack pirate bases, don't quickly move to defend planets where enemy fleets are headed, and it is one in a billion odds that the game actually decides to invade a planet (and again, even when I have tons of troops built up, the troop carriers don't pick them all up). In addition, when on manual mode, when I tell the ships to refuel, they will go to the planet or moon I select, and perhaps one or two will actually refuel, the rest just spin in a circle and leave- I have to click over and over again to get them to refuel, which takes YEARS in game time. In addition, when on automatic mode, the ships LOVE to take themselves on routes in which they run out of fuel halfway to the destination, meaning they are essentially stuck in space and out of commission. It's kind of infuriating and it makes me wish there was an option to get the fleet commander to commit seppoku for dishonoring the good name of fleet commanders everywhere. I hope I just have the wrong settings, but I've played about 5 games and the same thing keeps happening over and over again.

May I suggest the following options:

1. An option to set the priority to "invade" meaning the game builds up ground forces, troop transports, aerial bombardment weapons, etc. May sound like a cheat, but the trade off is that you would be sacrificing ship to ship combat capabilities for ship to ground capabilities.
2. Max planetary defense priority- an option to ensure that giant ion cannons, armories etc. are built on all colonies as funds permit (I see the setting to "build on new colonies" but if the tech doesn't exist when the colonies are created, it doesn't go back and build them).
3. Prioritize pirate hunting. Again, I'm tired of seeing my ships moving to defend a gas depot when I'm being nickel and dimed to death by pirates.
4. When a fleet moves towards a planet to invade, the gunships need to clear the area first of hostiles. Then the troop transports come in. Yes, I am aware that there are ways to do this manually, but the game should be smart enough to figure out that suiciding transport ships is not a good attack method.
5. Option to prioritize finding and repairing derelict ships. Again, the game will tell you that a debris field has been found, and rarely sends a construction ship out to repair. Yet another game tradeoff (sacrificing building other things with construction ships like mining facilities) for fixing ships (which can always explode, in which you will have wasted your time).

All in all the game is a good concept, and I like it better than Endless Space, which has prettier graphics but terrible gameplay. The difference is that I spent $7 on that game and $70 on this one so my expectations are quite a bit higher. Of the 4x games I've played, this one gets closest to the M002 experience, but it's hard to explain why a decades old game can figure out how to invade planets and defend colonies and this one seems to have so much trouble. Hope I can see some of the above addressed in the next patch!

hm seems like you do not know that your fleets can be set a posture with defend this sector or this system or nearby systems. But you have to manually controll your fleet formations and there orders. Also after that set the fleets homebase in an area which you want it to defend.
For me this works very good.
I wouldnt recommend letting the AI do fleet formation, building orders for ships and bases and also turn the automation of the military fleets off.
Next time bevore you start complaining about a game maybe you first will try to understand how its mechanics work.

Thread-starter did write "Perhaps it is just my game settings..." Given that intro, I did not take his post as a complaint - but more as a 'wow, its a complicated game, and I'm not sure how to get these specific behaviors into my navy... [so while poorly worded - it was a request for help.] Here is what I want to do...' You did give thread-starter excellent advice on fleet posture. Cool.

well in the last part of his post he complains about mechanics which he thinks are missing.
Like the defending colonies. With a propper defending fleet posture in each sector (i even normally have a small defense fleet in each system at the fronts) The KI will do his job pretty well in defending.

Short answer: Yes. To be honest, there's less a player can do economy wise and more that can (and needs) to be done military wise. If you want to set up your fleets so that you're not tearing your head out, you need to do a few things.

Either:
A. Leave it ALL to the AI, which'll be sub-par at best but you won't feel like you're fighting your own units (most of the time).

OR

B. Here's my method for setting up fleets.

1. Turn off automatic fleet formation. If you leave this on, your automated fleets will keep shifting their postures and doing stupid stuff.
2. Only produce ships from the build order screen if you want to build non-fleet freighter escorts.
3. Build whole ship groups together, preferably at the same shipyard, from the military ship/construction yard screen. Group them into fleets from the military ship screen while they're being constructed.
4. (Optional) Name your fleets so that you'll remember where you put 'em. I use a task force system like this:

1st Fleet, TF-1 CWD [Capital World Defense, 5 Caps, 10 cruisers, 3 carriers]
1st Fleet, TF-2 RRT [Rapid Response, 5 cruisers, 10 destroys, 2 carriers]
1st Fleet, TF-3 RRT
1st Fleet, TF-4 OFF [Offensive, 5 caps, 15 cruisers, 5 carriers]
1st Fleet, TF-5 INV [Invasion, 10 cruisers, 5 transports, 2 carriers]

5. Send out your fleets, set their postures. Make sure automation is on. Be sure that there places where they can refuel nearby. Resupply ships are great for providing fleet refuel for newly established frontiers:

The 1st Fleet is meant to protect my capital system, and the two systems in the neighboring sectors. TF-1 is stationed right on my homeworld, with Defensive Posture, System. TF-2 and TF-3 are each station at the other systems with Defensive Posture, Sector.

I have a similarly organized 2nd Fleet stationed around some systems I conquered early in the game, a cluster of habitable worlds around six sectors from core cluster. The 2nd Fleet is larger and has 3 more RRT task forces.

I have a 3rd Fleet with PAT (patrol) task forces made up of destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and carriers to patrol my frontier 10 sectors away. They're support by three resupply ships deployed to nearby gas giants since none of the colonies have the resources to build the star ports necessary to support the patrols. The civilian freighters don't bring in enough fuel for the ships to rely on the colonies.

Even with these precautions, some baby-sitting will be necessary to keep ships from crowding and clogging at mining stations or empty colonies.

Hope that helps! And trust me, organizing your fleets in Shadows is really fun, especially when you see your named fleets zooming off to crush some bugs in the galaxy view.

dotdotdot, I really like your way of organizing fleets into task forces. I'm going to do that for my next game!

Nice. Very.

nice, very nice

You are way more organized than me! I've tried naming fleets by their function, but often end up shifting them around my empire and changing their purpose (which invalidates the naming).