Fleet Implementation

from Sins Forums
So, having been in the beta test without fleets, I'm glad that the devs put them in since it keeps ship management at a much more macro level since the fleets removed the old problem of one random frigate going out to attack an entire fleet, but the fleets in their current implementation are just a step in the right direction, a very small step.

What's done right:
1) Fleets stay together and attack the same general group of ships

2) The Player can modify just about any ship behavior from tightness of formation to attack parameters

3) Fleets are sorted on the empire window and tacked at top

What's implemented but needs work:
1) Ships can be added to fleets, and can in fact automatically join a fleet based on their shiptype but this only works if there is already a fleet for that ship type present in system. If the system the ships are rallied to doesn't have, say a siege fleet, siege frigates will automatically join the combat fleet instead of creating a separate siege fleet. This feature is essential in large games where multiple fleets are being formed and reordered constantly

2) Fleets are dynamic, they can be added to, taken away from, or disbanded. What's missing here is that the only way to add a ship to a fleet if it doesn't auto join the fleet is to hit the create fleet button which disbands the old fleet, and forms a new one comprised of the old fleet and the new ship(s) moving the fleet from the place on the empire window I'm used to finding it at down to the bottom of the fleets list. This can make keeping my fleet's straight difficult since what i think of as first fleet might actually be fleet 8 or 6 or whatever on the empire window.

3) Fleets have a fleet symbol that is easy to locate on the battlefield. Unfortunately This symbol is not something that easily designates which fleet the symbol represents. It took me about 4 hours to figure out that the symbols had small fields of colors in them that were different for each fleet. A better designator would be the current symbol with a number in the middle instead of the starfleetish insignia that is there now. The number would of course designate fleet number, so your first fleet is 1 your second is 2 and so on.

4) Fleets execute commands as a fleet (sort of). Giving a command to a fleet's flagship effectively gives the command to the fleet, however the ships of the fleet lag behind the flagship in their execution of said commands leading to the almost inevitable destruction of a sub-capitalship flagship in a pitched battle due to the fact that the flagship is almost always 2-4 firing cycles ahead of its fleet. Now since a fleet isn't disbanded when a flag is lost, I don't care if the flagship is destroyed in combat, however, the useless waste of a ship is unacceptable to me, especially when my empire and my enemies are essentially even.

5)Health for ships is shown on the empire window. The problem here is that while the health/shields/antimatter of ships/structures is shown on the empire window, the bars are so tiny that a shield that is at 50% looks almost identical to a shield at 100%.

What's missing from the current implementation:

1) Fleets and command groups have no relation to each other. By this I mean that I can create a fleet but I have no way to access it besides selection in the empire window or on the playfield. While the empire window is a great information tool, it can't replace a single key stroke as a selection tool, especially since managing my empire usually leads to my fleets being out of view on the empire window while I manage building/upgrades on distant planets.

2) There is no auto retreat function. Since one of the neccessities of a game of this magnitude is the limitation of micro-management, an auto retreat feature for fleets and important ships within a fleet would be nice so that I wouldn't have to watch battles involving my high level cap ships like a hawk to make sure that my lvl 10 flagship doesn't get raped during a battle.

3) Fleets are not smart enough to separate when say the capital ship in the fleet decides to bomb the planet. In this situation, if my cap ships fleet has combat frigates/cruisers in it, they will simply sit in formation around the cap ship while the planet is bombed leaving logistics structures unthreatened. A much more sensible behavior would be for the fleet to split itself and allow the frigates/cruisers to attack the logistics structures while the capitals bombed the planet, or even better to allow the attack priorities of ships to be changed by the player in game so that if my objective is a raid, I can tell my ships to ignore the planet and destroy everything in orbit first, and if my objective is to destroy the planet and damn everything else, I can order the planet to the top of the attack priorities.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I don't think any of these suggestions require severe code changes, or if they do there is an alternative that would be less coding intensive. Furthermore, these changes would make fleets feel more like fleets rather than glorified CTRL+# hotkey groups.
technical
12,562 views 22 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Totally agree with these points :)

I really don't like how there's no 'shortcut' key for fleets. I'm finding my self creating command groups just so I can link them to fleets right now.

I think maybe the best solution would be to just merge command groups into fleets.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Thats what I was thinking as well, although in order for it to be effective some of the other suggestions need to be implemented as well, only having 10 easily accessible fleets would be a real pain if I had to have my cap ships for each fleet under a different fleet icon from the rest of the combat ships just so that the fleet would keep fighting and moving when caps went after the planet. Right now I only have two effective fleets in my game, and i'm using up 8 or 9 command groups just so that I can easily command them to jump together or fight separatley.
Object Desktop - Get all of our enhancement utilities in one suite
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top



I think maybe the best solution would be to just merge command groups into fleets.
End of quote


I agree.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top



I think maybe the best solution would be to just merge command groups into fleets.


I agree.

End of quote


Grr.. you beat me to it.

*cough*beta grouping*cough*
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
there is a retreat button, but it would be nice to be able to set it to auto cast say when your hull is down to 25% maybe?

remember you do get verbal warnings when capital ships shields go down, and the hull is at 50% ( i think)
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Hot keys aren't just for fleets, you do have your super weapons and your primary construction worlds hot keyed as well, don't you?. No merging.

Making a hot keyed fleet actually continue to hotkey the fleet and not just part of it would be great, and even better would be all units joining fleets when told to, not just ones the game thinks should be in them.(overseers anyone?)
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
yeah, but in a large game, those warnings tend to get covered up by other happenings.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
Good Post I totally agree.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
I definitly agree on a link between fleets and command groups, and I would like to see some type of auto retreat function for higher level capital ships(say auto phase jump to the nearest friendly system at 25% health.). :CONGRAT: 
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
"Fleets are not smart enough to separate when say the capital ship in the fleet decides to bomb the planet. In this situation, if my cap ships fleet has combat frigates/cruisers in it, they will simply sit in formation around the cap ship while the planet is bombed leaving logistics structures unthreatened. A much more sensible behavior would be for the fleet to split itself and allow the frigates/cruisers to attack the logistics structures while the capitals bombed the planet, or even better to allow the attack priorities of ships to be changed by the player in game so that if my objective is a raid, I can tell my ships to ignore the planet and destroy everything in orbit first, and if my objective is to destroy the planet and damn everything else, I can order the planet to the top of the attack priorities."

I encounter this problem frequently, and it too me a while to figure out exactly what was going on. I thought the AI was bugging out, with half my ships just sitting there, instead of moving off to attack nearby-but-out of range targets.

And I agree on the ctrl groups issue as well. It is nice not to require people to manage fleets like ctrl groups if they don't want to, but for a RTS player to suddenly have to try and live without them it is very hard. Yes yes, I know they still exist, but with no way to see all the units that make up a ctrl group and no way to tell what group you are looking at it feels like there was a sort of 1 step forward, 2 steps back taken by passing off so many vital features on fleets instead (formation, escort, area of engagement, etc).

I thought long on this the other day and the only conclusion I could come up with was that it was best to actually -not- use a cap ship as a fleet commander (for just the micro situations you suggest). Some mid-range cruiser, which requires little micro, would seem the best option instead. But absolutely backwards to what one would expect.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
agreed xenpo, although it would be nice if you could set it to retreat to the edge of the grav well at say 40% health and then phase jump out at 25% health.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
I guess my biggest issue is the fact that fleets have some features you would expect as settings for any groups in a modern RTS:
- Distance to engage rules
- Formation (very good when wanted)
- Auto adding of new ships

But in order to make use of them you must also deal with the downsides of fleets:
- Auto subtraction of units (if they get split between wells)
- Cannot stop them from following whatever is stuck as fleet leader (silly that in order to issue a command to my current leader cap I must first designate a new leader)
- Unstoppable leader-escort also often causes ships to sit there and do nothing.

I understand the desire for the devs to make things as simple as possible for as many people as possible, but I think they bound a few too many vital features together on this one. That being said, many MANY of these problems could be fixed with two simple things:

1. Fleets were made hotkeyable
2. There was an options toggle for fleets to not follow the fleet leader (just use the leader to designate what well the fleet forms in, but treat it just like any other ship therein).
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top

3) Fleets are not smart enough to separate when say the capital ship in the fleet decides to bomb the planet. In this situation, if my cap ships fleet has combat frigates/cruisers in it, they will simply sit in formation around the cap ship while the planet is bombed leaving logistics structures unthreatened. A much more sensible behavior would be for the fleet to split itself and allow the frigates/cruisers to attack the logistics structures while the capitals bombed the planet, or even better to allow the attack priorities of ships to be changed by the player in game so that if my objective is a raid, I can tell my ships to ignore the planet and destroy everything in orbit first, and if my objective is to destroy the planet and damn everything else, I can order the planet to the top of the attack priorities.
End of quote


Good post! I believe the devs wanted to keep the complexity level down so it is open to all levels of players, adding the ability to control the behavior to the Siege Frigates in a Fleet that is also composed of a mix of other combat craft, which would be delegated to attacking the logistics or tactical defenses while the siege craft complete their role (belonging to the SAME fleet) just adds a new layer of complexity... not a huge one, but enough that takes you attention away from other happenings.

As a side, attention in this game is really an important point any of us need to come to grips with, the more you attention is taken away by managing your fleets, their behaviors, etc... this causes a ever widening problem for a player, depending on the size of his Empire and also the size of his fleets. The more you distract your opponent the better (i.e. black market/pirates bounties), the more you must manage your empires infrastructure then the more you will be at a disadvantage (except of course those exceptionally gifted savant-like power players).

In my opinion, the aggregation of ships roles would best be served by just creating a second fleet that is composed of siege craft (fleet #2) for example then lets say "fleet 1 - attack craft" and controlling them independently.

Do I understand correctly that you can create a nested 'fleet within a fleet'... :NOTSURE: because this morning I was having difficulty adding additional ships to an existing fleet... inadvertently I believe I nested a fleet withing a fleet, until I removed all selected ships from the fleet and then 're-fleeted' those ships... was the nesting instead my imagination?
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
@GeoRElrod

as far as i know nesting is impossible, I wish it wasn't as I would love to be able to have strikegroups in my fleet, but oh well. As for your comments about the siege ships in the fleet, i don't really have a problem with siege ships being in separate fleets since they don't have any business being on the pointy end of the stick that is my fleet stabbing into the enemy's planet. What I was more annoyed with in that issue was the fact that cap ships also bomb planets and so in order for your fleet to be effective in the mop-up, which is not when you should be focusing on that planet, you have to have capital ships in separate fleets from the frigs/cruisers which just recreates the problem that fleets were designed to fix, which is that parts of your meta-fleet within a grav well would get separated because of differences in speed/attack range and therefore die quickly when a counter-attack phased in. So, the modification of the behaviors was really more for that.

Also, I think you may have misunderstood what I was suggesting. I wasn't suggesting the addition of more micro-management, quite the opposite in fact, I was suggesting that we have a way to tell ships in a fleet what order to attack types of targets so that we could simply set them as we pleased and then forget about it meaning that we wouldn't have to continually monitor a gravwell to make sure our cap ships were attacking orbital structures instead of the planet and that they responded to an incoming counter-attack.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
My biggest issue is with the autojoin. I have a number of fleets and I want to carefully control the makeup of each since I usually do multi-fleet engagements on a world. I'll have a carrier fleet and a couple assault fleets.

There are certain types of ships, like flak and repair ships, that you want a number of with any fleet. What I have been trying to do is build a frigate construction thing for each fleet at different planets. The idea is that if I want to add a few flak frigates to my assault fleet, I'll select the planet which has production assigned to rally on my assault fleet and build a couple frigates.

Where this goes wrong is when the assault fleet happens to occupy the same planet as my carrier fleet. The carrier fleet is just carriers and support ships and doesn't engage in direct combat. As such it pretty much always has more repair ships and flack ships than the direct combat fleets which tend to have a few chewed up in engagements. In this case, even when I select the planet with it's production set to rally on the assault fleet the ships will be constructed, fly to my assault fleet, then notice there are more flack ships in my carrier fleet and go join that instead.

It's completely counterintuitive. Why would I want more flack ships in my carrier fleet? I already have enough and if I didn't I would go build them with the frigate yard that's set to rally on my carrier fleet.

Additionally, building new fleets pretty much has to be done in systems with nothing in them. You start a new fleet with a capship and set rally on it and by default it has nothing else in the fleet. So nothing ever joins it, it joins one of the pre-existing, larger fleets in the system. It wouldn't be so bad to build new fleets in a separate system but sometimes you need that capship on the front lines right away, and even so there's still the resupply problem mentioned above.

On a somewhat related note, it would be nice to be able to set default behaviors for ship types. Repair ships I pretty much want to stay out of combat and just stick close to the fleet. Flack ships I also don't want to ever go out and directly engage, I just want them to hug the fleet to provide anti fighter support since they get shredded going toe to toe with combat cruisers.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
Good post Daishzen,

I agree with your points both commending fleets as an implementation and the ideas of immprovement. Fleets have really grown on me in recent days and i'm finding them more versitile than the old standard group system. As for the group fleet association, perhaps there can be a seperate keybinding section that allows for the player to associate / release groups 1 - 5 (example) with fleets and leave 6 - 9 (example) for normal number groups.

Wilko
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
that's pretty much what I was thinking wilko, hopefully we can get something changed about fleets, as they are now, there kind of an annoyance instead of an asset.

John, I'm not sure about your auto join problem, I do much the same thing as you, but I don't have a problem with ships joining the wrong fleet. Are you sure the planet is rallied to the fleet flagship and not the planet or just some ship in the fleet?
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Am I the only one who designs fleets around capital ships rather than by ship type?
Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
Kordesh, I gave up on focusing fleets on my caps since the caps require more micromanagement than anything else, and I do not want the entire rest of the fleet to stop what they are doing and follow my cap every time I issue it an order :(
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top

I think maybe the best solution would be to just merge command groups into fleets.
End of quote


But I like to hotkey my frig factories :(
Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top

2) There is no auto retreat function. Since one of the neccessities of a game of this magnitude is the limitation of micro-management, an auto retreat feature for fleets and important ships within a fleet would be nice so that I wouldn't have to watch battles involving my high level cap ships like a hawk to make sure that my lvl 10 flagship doesn't get raped during a battle.
End of quote



I don't think an AI is smart enough to make that call.
Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
its easy, you tell it, i want you to retreat when your hull/shields are at x% and/or x%. should also be an option for telling the ships not to go beyond a certain distance from the grav well's edge so that retreats are still possible.