Hey, I'm posting late at night after a long, tiring day at work / school. A few slips are to be expected -- though that one is pretty bad.

I tend to go all art of War and Book of Five rings on this game. I have not played any multiplayer yet (hopefully this weekend)

I tend to start with the Carrier because it's upgrades in the beginning can make it a powerful starting ally, then I like the Marza and Kol for later additions, in that order. I have one group (normally assigned to 5) that includes my entire fleet, subdivided into divisions of labor. (fleet's 1-4) If needed I can pull back my entire "imperial" Armada back to one staging point while still using parts of it to harass and harry the advancing enemy. I keep a lot of Cobalts on hand early and in masse they are very effective and painless to lose chunks of them. Scouting is also essential, I keep about 5 Scouts on hand and constantly send them to front line planets and occasionally send a few of them on deep suicide intel missions. My weakness is I tend to spend a lot of time micro-managing fleets to get the desired results in battles, or just in general so my infastructure and tech sometimes suffers (aka I look at the top of the screen and realize I have 10k of creds crystals and metal, then go on a spending spree.) Marza >>> Kol by the way, only the Kol design is definitely sexier and who doesn't want beam weapons of doom?

Like in any battle, computer or not, scouting will win and lose you battles. Take for example the battle mentioned above by Schod. Had he just sent in a scout frig he would have known to divert his smaller fleet to support the main fleet and maybe arrive in time to change the outcome on the main battle. or to pull back and let the pirates fight his opponents fleet and weaken it and then try the same, undoubtedly effective, tactic a few minutes later, catching his enemy off guard providing a different outcome. In any case, no matter how good your plan, it will never survive contact with the enemy so I just try to be as flexible as possible.

its just funny because you've done it SO many times.

I count 3 or 4 different threads where you've repeatedly made this mistake

Give him a break schem, one laugh was good enough.

Anyways, I have the leetest strategy now, but you have to play agasint me to find out

going to a football game after your ally is nice to you and lets you have a volcanic world?

well I dont mean to annoy, I do the their there thing all the time, its not really different.

but it just connotates a funnier meaning. although it means nonsense.

I'll admit that your strategy may be leet, but the term "leetest" so far belongs to me.

Actually, that game went very badly for me, I spread myself to thin. But, yes I am going to a football game



My strategy begs to differ.

hardly, oh he who gets spread to thin.



I learned something about split tactics: they own, especially if you can bring 2 or 3 medium or small fleets together VERY quickly, it can completely catch your enemy off guard.

I have a game recording of this awesome domination occuring. I'll post a video of it later, but my tactics came into play in the last 15 minutes: note: I didnt actually complete the game because it would have required too much effort to wipe up the enemy, and the only planet left of note (due to the 85% penalty of losing the homeworld) was the pirate base, which has no logistics slots.

anyway its a four and a HALF hour GAME! so watch at your own discression.

anyway my strategies dominated, there was one single time I was on the defensive, and that wasnt too serious.

although my opponent did ok for someone new to multiplayer (he made the steamroller mistake)

Actually the reason I spread to thing was because I decided to split my fleets into two medium fleets. Kodiaks > Cobalts, go figure.

yeah, definately. mostly because their damage is damn fine.

Then feel free to jump on it until I quit being a looser.

my big complaint is the way fleet management is done. yes we have the numbers, but i like to asign ships to guard other ships (ex. my flagship). it can take a very long time to get my fleet set up the way i want it, then with one accidental drag select rather then only using my numbers... all those guard orders are gone. its very annoying. id like to see a "lock" feature when assigning a ship to another ship. this would save me ALOT of hasle. right now i dont even bother with fleet micro managment, wich is really sad because if we had a beter fleet managment system, figuring out the best stratagy for seting up my fleet pre-battle would probably become one of my favorate aspects of this game...

in fact, I heard some people complain about down times when nothing happens, when you wait for fleets to go somewhere or arrive somewhere. some kind of system to really configure fleet behavior could be something to do in that time, so that giving orders in the battle concerns mostly unusua or unexpected developpments.

such a fleet management system could work well with priorities, such as setting gardas to guard priority, lrms on attack gauss priority and cap ships and cobalts and so on attack caphip or whatever else priority. and make it taggable to that you can form more than one groupe of the same type of unit i.e. saying a part of the cobalts attacks anything another concentrates on capships. some gardas have priority to stay with the main fleet body whereas others have permission to persue strike craft inside grav well.

so, bottom line, make it quite sophisticated, because at some point before battle there is usually ample time to think about all these issues and setting them so you have more time during a battle to either look or give specialised orders or even do something completely different.

I would like to see better fleet management.
Creating a fleet leader and when that ship moves, the rest will follow in some formation.
Wonder if it is too late to create formation slots so you can choose where the ship will be in formation.

Something to make it easier to arrange for front line ships and keep the support ships in the back. It is hard to keep them in formation.

For one example, I like to have Marza class in front and use heavy weapons. Behind it would be Dunov class with Shield Restore to keep the leader alive.
I have to put them into this order before I jump into the new system. When Marza arrives first, it gets targeted first and a few seconds later, my support ships will arrive.
I see the AI using the same tactic and is basic strategy.

hmm, formations: I know that ships are lining up in formation when the jump and they are actually organising well with the battleships up front and carriers and support ships in the rear.

but is there an option to keep them that way in a grav well? i.e. you jump into enemy territory, want to mova to a certain destination and keep the formation, even if it means slowing faster ships down. if not, I would appreciate it, as its quite annoying if your faster ships get the enemy lines first only to get beaten before the rest comes into range.

Fleets right now don't act as fleets if you don't count the system-system movement. Otherwise there is no fleet cohesion. Packs of same-type-ships start rolling around, that's it. In reality it would be as if all the destroyers from a carrier group went after submarines and all the cruisers went after other cruisers (or something), leaving the carrier on it's own. It never happens.

But AI is in the works so I'm sure this will change.

Actually we're putting in a Fleet Manager...

omg, I cant wait to see it!

  

I would call it more a Tactical Manager, where putting ships into a smart "fleet" is an option.

      

TELL ME MORE!!! TELL ME MORE!!!

oh come on, you HAVE to tell me more MORE MORE MORE MORE!!!

Don't tell us more... just give it to us!