Matrix Games Forums

Whenever I set my ships/fleets to guard an object in a system some of them keep suiciding into nearby enemy armies. I've played around with various settings like Defense posture, various Ranges and set the engagement stance to Nearby targets, though nothing I tried helped.

Sometimes ships ignore nearby enemies altogether. I've got to give manual attack orders, that's too much for me to micromanage.

Any tips?

Welcome to the forums Skasski [:)]

Make sure your running the latest version .11, and try setting a fleet on auto and making sure it has a homeworld in that system. Settings would be auto, defend system and nearby systems, not 100% fail proof but I would say 85% of the time that fleet will respond to enemy attacks in a system, the other 15% would be made up from state ships (escort, frigate etc) as long as you have enough of those the AI will cover system defense to a degree, hence the 15%.

Darkspire

Thanks!

The problem is not lack of protection in general, that's an issue I had at the start of the game and I think I managed to deal with this.

I'm currently at war with another empire. This empire only has one heavily defended planet left. I've invaded and captured another planet in the same system. Whenever I order ships or fleets to guard this specific planet, some of them start attacking the enemy at random, dying in the process. This is something I want to stop. It's starting to get really annoying, hehe.

It is mosttime a question of your Fleet/Ship stances.
For fleets you need to set Fleet AND ship stances, thats 2 different things.
When you want that the fleet just protect a planet
Set the fleet stance to target, the ship stance to nearby enemys, set the homeworld/base to the planet you want protect, then you can put the fleet on auto.

Any ships set on auto will be likely to engage an enemy within the system in my experience, even if they're only set to defend the target. There's a setting in the options menu too that adjusts the default stances of both automated and manual ships as well, and perhaps this would help.