Forcing ships to battle regardless of health?

[MikeSF]

Anyway to make them basically just yell "RAMMING SPEED!!!!!" ? Seems you can set the shield strength to flee percentage, but it annoys me to no end when you get yourself some ancient capital ship (that's a bit slow) but comes with tons of weapons, has the hyper space inhibitor, pirates send their cruiser at your planet and you just salivate that you're going to destroy one of their larger ships only to wipe him down to near no shields, but his stupid graviton beam (or whatever he's using) that hits you like your shields don't exist damages one component and the Capital ship feels like it needs to flee. Click, right click, no for real keep attacking it can't warp away and you can kill it in a few hits, a split second of "attacking" then "escaping" ... and of course the cruiser warps away, then in a second warps right back firing at that base I'm building around a new colony completely negating all I worked on.


Or worse, military advisers actually tell you to attack a pirate base... with your own fleet no doubt, they fly over there, fire a few shots, stay out of range, no problem we got this... oh wait we're "low on fuel" lets go back home. *forehead slap*

[Mansen]

As long as the AI gets to control your fleets through policies it will keep re-applying automation to your ships and have them fly back willy nilly.

You should disable it entirely - set up your own fleets (using the home base, attack/defend, range buttons) and put the AI in a corner.

[Mansen]

A combination of ship design changes and letting the AI control your fleets cause this - You'll want to re-design your ships for suicide behaviour and disable AI fleet control.

[pycco]

in the design screen make the ships retreat never to allow this. it will come at a higher cost than letting retreat though. once a ship has suffered heavy damage it will save its self and you will only have to repair or wait for shields to recharge then use the same ship again as appose to having to rebuild and pay for said ship.

[MikeSF]

This was a capital ship that was "found", the design screen only gives me a shield option when to flee, my shields were still at 60-70% but because the gravity weapon (blue beam?) damaged my ship it wanted to flee.

Ship did not suffer heavy damage it suffered 1 damaged part, this was a capital ship too so there were lots and lots of other parts that could have gotten damaged before it was heavily damaged

In the first case the capital ship was not in a fleet, nor was it set to auto, I would right click the enemy cruiser it'd pop up attacking... for a split second then instantly go back to escaping...

As to the fleet business, I notice even when there's no AI controlling them they still will override what you want them to do in order to refuel, I could understand if running out of fuel in the game means you're super crippled, but I can take the hit in speed loss to stay a little longer and actually destroy the frigging pirate base

[buglepong]

The ship AI is completely retarded on every setting. The only way to use ships is by overwhelming force

[pycco]

ORIGINAL: buglepong

The ship AI is completely retarded on every setting. The only way to use ships is by overwhelming force

great insight here[8|]



see where im talking about in the picture there should be this option for all ships.

[buglepong]

I agree, it should be an option on all ships

[ddTurak]

I think the problem is, is that as soon as ships take even 1 point of damage they try to break contact and run away, even if that point of damage is to armour, of which the ship has quite a bit more than 1. I think there should be another option in the ship design screen where you can set the ship to flee once they take a set amount of damage to their total armour value say, 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4. This would allow you to keep the automation up that preserves your ships while not making them run away in the face of a single graviton beam attached to a tiny escort.

[fenrislokison]

I don't agree. It's a good choice for combat ships (i use it myself) but i'm glad that my troop transports flee the second they get a scratch on their hull since they transport valuable and numerous troops.

Same for civilian ships, explorers and construction ships, i want them to be alive cowards instead of dead heroes [:D]

Putting default selection according to the type of ship might be done, but it's the choice of the default selection is so dependent on the playstyle... it's easier for the developper to just put the same default options for everyone.

For me it got to the point that i sometimes set different behaviors according to the enemy i'm about to fight: sent a fleet with "never flee" against a weaker foe, but send the same fleet with "flee when shields 50%" against a stronger foe in order to soften said foe without too much casualties on my side.

I set different behaviors for ressuply ships as well according to tech available: if i don't have capacity enough to make them space fortress, they're cowards, else they fight to the death (of anyone foolish enough to attack them :p )

[Bingeling]

The design really should have a setting to flee at percentage of armor in addition to the shield percentage. I don't mind them running when a proper component is damaged, but running at full shields and 1 armor damaged is silly.

[Franky007]

The design really should have a setting to flee at percentage of armor in addition to the shield percentage. I don't mind them running when a proper component is damaged, but running at full shields and 1 armor damaged is silly.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSS
I have been waiting for this since the Shadow exp.
But still no replies from the dev!
Please... Please... make it so
[&o]

[Bingeling]

I have waited for it since the first time I encountered a pirate with railguns... So I guess my first game in legends

[ldog]

Yeah, something really does need to be done about this. It all worked great before rail guns and graviton beams, since by the time your shields were breached you were probably in trouble. I don't think the shields settings should be replaced, but they need to add a similar option for flee when armor % damaged.

[MisterBenn]

Guys - check out the Empire Policy screen - scroll down to War and Attacks section. The setting there: Ship Battle Caution Factor can be set to Low/Normal/High/Very High. I don't know precisely how this setting interacts with the retreat options against specific ship designs, but I know that my capital ship with 2 damaged components would only escape from a single pirate frigate until I changed my race's Caution Factor from Very High to Normal. My guess is that the default Caution for a race is High or Very High if the victory conditions for its empire includes things like "Lose the fewest ships in the galaxy".

[Franky007]

Sadly my resupply ship still goes for repair (with 3 damaged armor only),
with Ship Battle Caution Factor set at LOW.

[MikeSF]

Thanks for the support group mentality, now I don't feel quite as frustrated with this game

My problem with the flee percentage is that, they're not fleeing when its 20% they're fleeing when the shields are perfectly fine. Now it could be coded such that damage = bad therefore override all shield IF statements and run away, it could be that if the shield penetrating damage occurs there's a glitch in that it thinks the shields must be zero if damage occurred therefore run. My Ship Battle Caution Factor is set to Low, and still my capital ship (which mysteriously disappeared from last nights save game to this morning... but that's another issue) still run away with 1 damage.

So until they fix things with this I have a few ideas to run by.
1. Set to never run away is the easiest, but might be the most costly. Also not sure if that priority will stay even if the AI automatically upgrades ship designs, could be extremely tedious/game breaking if I have to keep changing that.
2. Mod out all shield penetrating weapons or their effects. This is a more brutal and game changing fix, but I really don't want to play any more as a result of this. A cruiser is harassing a colony I'm trying to grow, 1 on 1 with my capital ship it has zero chance of winning, however it keeps running away when it's shields are at 20%, then comes back very shortly after usually to run away again when the first missile hit knocks it's shields back below that 20%, now as annoying as this is I can deal with it until backup fleet comes back. However that cruiser managed to hit me with a gravity weapon my shields are still strong as ever but that 1 damage makes him run away, cruise destroys the base I was building, and anything in the area. Sorry, that's not acceptable.

[Spidey]

Or use the game editor to kill the pirate pest and pretend it got killed the way it should have been if the AI wasn't insisting on being more clueless than your average Atuuk. [8|]

[GVind]

With design on never retreat and caution in empire settings on normal ship retreats with 2 armor plates damaged. It just automatically changes orders from attack to repair at... command and begins to jump away AND stops firing in the process. With such behaviour graviton weapons and railguns is weapons of choice vs any AI fleet. Puny escort can turn away cruiser as AI will not enforce fighting of damaged ship.

[Tehlongone]

With the fleet under manual control and the design set to "never flee" your ships don't flee when hit by graviton weapons. It's a bit stupid that they flee on component damage when the other setting actually suggests when the shield drops...

I mean gravity damage is unfortunate and unavoidable, not a good reason to flee, but when the shield is drained that may well be a good time to run as then proper weapons can get through. Unfortunately that's just not feasable so all my ships are set to never flee.

Basically it's a mandatory, you go down with your ship, never flee, never surrender!