In Developement Fleet Roles

[jstenholt]

We have fleets now! That's pretty cool. But obviously the devs have a long way to go before the new mechanic works properly every time.

One pretty glaring flaw in the current system is that members of a fleet seem to maneuver according to their max speed/acceleration. This means that faster ships quickly outpace other ships in the fleet when given orders. While I'm not saying this is a bad thing (in fact it is desirable in some instances,) we should definitely have a say in how and when it happens.

For instance, currently if my carrier launches drones, and then the fleet is given a move order, the drones will race towards the objective. This would be great for attacking, as the drones probably should be the first to enter combat, but poor for moving a fleet from place to place, as I'm assuming most people would rather their fleet stay together.

A proposed solution would be
A. when giving a move order, all ships will accelerate at the same rate of its slowest fleet member.
B. in the fleet menu ships should be given roles. Currently there is only flagship and everything else, which is problematic Different ship roles would do different things depending on the order given. For instance, if a ship has the role of "fighter" then when given a combat order that ship should rush ahead of the fleet. If an "escort" role fleet member is given a combat order, they should stay in formation and protect the flagship.

An alternate solution would be to give the fleet as a whole stances. Meaning that the entire fleet's behavior could be rotated through like a unit in an RTS. For example, a fleet set to the "defensive" stance would never break formation, whether moving or attacking and a fleet in an "aggressive" stance would move at each ship's max speed/acceleration when given a fleet order.

I'm sure Schema has thought of solutions to fleet movement already, these are just some ideas I thought would be relatively easy for players. Let me know what you think.

 

[Ithirahad]

T1173 Fleets of ships with different thrust values will not maintain formation.
Fleets trying to stay together is apparently coming next update, or something like that. :D

As for the roles stuff, that'd probably be good, but I propose the ability to simply order a fleet to escort or follow another fleet, which would accomplish something similar while keeping the system more nicely encapsulated. (Things are per-fleet, as it works now, rather than assigning different individual entities orders)

Under my system, you would simply order your 'fighter' fleet to escort the other fleet in sentry mode, and so it would break formation and attack. An order to have ships attack while remaining near their flagship (or whatever they're escorting) as a 'guardian mode' would probably be good, though.

 

[Madman198237]

A simpler way to do it is to create something I'm thinking of making a suggestion on: Squadrons! Fighter squads, bomber squads, cruiser groups, battleship lines/combat units, destroyer task forces and carrier groups or task forces. Basically, subdivisions of a fleet. A fleet is all well and good, but it gets better when you create micro-fleets within it to perform different tasks---

Bombers will prioritize the largest (Heaviest) target in a group, while fighters will track the lightweights.

Destroyer groups will target opposing bombers/fighters, and cruisers will focus on enemy ships showing damage.

Battleships take the biggest target there is, and blast it down.


Darnit, I just wrote a suggestion without meaning to. Maybe I'll go post this as a suggestion now xD