Since patch 4.0.2 atelast carriers will launch fighter strikes. But they will only do that if the player detects an enemy. They will not launch scout missions of their own to detect. Nor do the campaign ai move the starship squads to search and destroy.
Only thing carriers do without enemies present is to launch one wing of patrool fighters that always fly in a small semicircle towards the direction the carrier ship is facing. no matter if its out of the map. If you do detect ships without using probes they will be dead, or you will be dead before the fighter strikes launched at the new contacts arrives. If i do use probes all enemies will swarm me and i die again unless i sent a sacrificial ship to send tehe probe well away from the main squadron.
So the difficulty of the game is staggering sometimes when you have even forces in a sector but only your player controlled destroyer squad is really fighting against heaps of enemy cruisers destroyers and whatnot. Because your own sides forces stand passively at teh sidelines.
This also totaly ruins the feeling of this being a large scale war you are a mere part of commanding a vessle. Because nothing happens unless you do it yourself. Save some very vague messages between missions of 1 ship destroyed here or there in the same time you would have had to kill half the enemy fleet yourself with 4 ships under your control if you managed to stay alive that long that is. Between missions only ships you flew yourself will have taken any form of damage. Max that can happen in your absense is a rare event KIA of one of your sides ships. This also removes some of the illusion of large scale conflict. So if its intended for us to go up against entire enemy fleets alone then there need to be auto hull repair in the game. Else the campaign AI needs an update.
I also find Quantum jumping unrepresentated. You never need to use the quantum drives because you only get new missions or see new events between missions. And if one of em was an order to move to a new system all squadrons including your own will have made the jump before you can start the mission in the new sector. Also it seems that if an enemy carrier bugs out with quantum jumps the campaign engine AI dosnt take that in account when generating missions :/ I had the cyclops taskforce jump away and instead of tracking it down i were given patrol misions for all my taskforces that were facing the cyclops , in empty sectors
Unless i manualy quantum jumped with my squadron to try to track it down.So this also takes away some from the feeling that this is an overall campaign going on. As you never visualy or actively take part in any movement made on the Galaxy map or sector map between systems or sectors. Some escort fighter missions do include traveling between sectors through Farcasters. But i have not found a single starship mission yet that include any use of the quantum drives or movement between systems or sectors.
So my question is, is the campaign AI bugged? Or is this passivity as intended? I hope its just a bug. Because as far as i can see all the parts are already there as part of the game for having all the above mentioned problems fixed
If they are intended to be fixed.Else i find it a fun game and quite well made
If core problems like the ones i mentioned above are adressed and some of the smaller bugs squashed this game can really go far. Both for replayability and otherwise.