So with the adjustable speed settings in 1.02 comes the ability to experiment with things and figure things out in a timely fashion. After boosting the speed up to 8x and fiddling around a bit, I figured out how fleets work. There are a few sublte things I wonder about in the implementation, but overall it's a really nice system that should work well once you understand what it's going to do.

First,
Auto-Join Fleet - Defined.
When active, the ship will join a fleet in it's grav well WHEN IT ENTERS THE GRAV WELL.

This is important: auto-join fleet does not take effect immediately. The ship only searches for a fleet to join when it enters a grav well. This means if there is a fleet already in the grav well and you enable autojoin fleet the ship will not join it. Also, if the ship is has auto-join fleet enabled and a fleet jumps into the grav well, the ship will not join it. A ship will searches for a fleet to join ONLY when it enters a grav well.



That being said, let me point that that being built DOES count as entering a grav well. Which means, upon appearing out of the factory, if auto-join fleet is enabled by default, the ship will search for a fleet in that grav well and join it.

Most ships have auto-join fleet enabled by default. HOWEVER, some ships do not.

These ships do not have auto-join fleet enabled when appearing out of hte factory:
-Scout Frigate
-Colonization Frigate
-Seige Frigate
-Offensive Special Cruiser - (That is the Cielo Command Cruiser, the Domina Subjugator, and the Severun Overseer)

(All other frigates, cruisers, and capships come with auto join fleet enabled.

Now this does not mean this ships cannot join fleets, you just have to turn Auto-join fleet on manually, then jump them into the grav well with the fleet you'de like to join.



So that's how fleets get created and added too. The ability to manually force ships to join fleets might be nice, but in practice the current implementation will work just fine now that we know how it functions. The one thing I question is that the Offensive Special cruisers don't have auto-join enabled by default. But I haven't used it enough to know why I would want to treat it so special. Furthermore, I bet all these auto-join defaults can be modified by editing some file somewhere. (that's not my bag, I leave it to someone to figure that out)

Some Neat things about fleets:

Choosing fleets- If a ship has auto-join enabled and it enters a gravity well that has multiple fleets, it will choose one to join. And it seems to choose pretty intelligently. I haven't tested it's choosing algorithms too thoroughly, but when I had a fleet of light frigates and a fleet of seige frigats, and then i built a bunch of siege frigs in another system, turned auto-join fleet on, and jumped them into the grav-well with the fleets, the siege frigs all joined the fleet that had the other seige frigs. Which was nice.

Leaving Fleets- You can tell ships to leave fleets manually by clicking the leave fleet button. ALSO, if a ship is in a fleet, and you order it to jump out of the grav-well that the fleet is in, it will leave the fleet. This is a nice feature. That can be used in a variety of ways and also avoids lots of confusions.


Fleet Leaders and Formations- When you create a fleet, the unit you have subselected is the fleet leader. Units will form up in a tight, intelligent, tactically appropraite formation on the leader. That means long range and support units will go to the rear, short range shock units will go to the front. If group jump is enabled, then your fleet will enter the grav well in this formation... which is a good thing that could have a huge impact on the ensuing battle.

If you tell your leader to leave the fleet, the program will intelligently choose a new leader... this is probably the biggest ship in the group. If there are multiple biggest ships it probably just chooses one. This is cool. It menas you don't necessarily have to reform the fleet if you want to switch leaders.


You can set the fleet cohesion to tight, medium, or loose. This effects how from from the leader the members of the fleet will go during a firefight.


You can select fleet members individually and order them around, however if you select the fleet leader it will select the entire fleet. There is no way around this. You cannot select the fleet leader individually.

!!EDIT: As Xogthesinner pointed out, selecting the fleet leader does not select the entire fleet. However, since the whole point of fleets is to make formations around the leader, if you select the leader and give him a move order, this will indirectly give orders to the rest of the fleet. i.e. "I'm Moving! Follow Me!" This may or may not have detrimental effects on what the rest of the fleet is trying to do. (end edit)

The fact that you can't command fleet leaders without effecting the rest of the fleet has been a topic of heated debate, but I think it hints at just how powerful the fleet to is, and just how Ironclad intends it to be used.

Fleets behave very intelligently. The game will take care of most of your micromanagement very effectively if you set your fleets up properly.

A fleet is not a hot-group. It is not a catch all for every ship you have attackin an enemy grav-well. Instead, I think fleets should be used for distinct tactical purposes. If you create your fleets for specific tactical purposes there should be no need to manage the fleet leader of the fleet members individually. You should be able to give orders to the fleet itself and the game will take care of the rest.


I imagine a large scale assault on a well defended world may have at least 3 fleets involved. A planetary bombardment fleet full of siege frigs and maybe a cap ship. An anti-static defense fleet full of long range frigates, some flack frigates to protect them, and maybe a cap ship. And one or more battle fleets full of light frigates and heavy cruisers and cap ships and things.

If you set your fleets up this way, you should never need to give move orders to specific ships. You tell your seige fleet to hit the planet. You cue up a bunch of targets for your long range fleet. And you set your battle fleet(s) to loose cohesion and move them to where the action is. At this point the game reduces hundreds of various purposed units to a handfull of large, specific purpose groups.

It's better than a hot group, because telling your group of long range frigates to attack a missile platform will not send their flack frigate defenders running up point blank to the platform as well. It will automatically make your long range fleet dot he intelligent thing which is hang out at max range and launch missiles while your flacks stay close by and guard.



So that's fleets. It's a brilliant feature with pretty solid implementation.

Several suggestions have been posted i know, but there are three things I would really love to see.
1) Manually join fleet. If this gets implemented, it needs to be a button rather than simply right clicking on the fleet icon. Because I like the ability to have units follow a fleet without joining it.

2) Manually Change leader. Right now changing a leader means reforming the fleet, which changes it's position on the empire tree and cancelling it's rally points. These things can be fixed by resettin the rally points and screwing around with pinning, but it's really clunky and obnoxious.

3) Auto join fleet button on factories. So I can say I want units that pop out of this foctory to have auto-join fleet enabled.... or not. I appreciate why the defaults are the way they are, and it's nice that you don't want my seige frigates getting mixed up with all the rest of my stuff. But I would really like to be able to override the defaults. This way I can more easily and quickly produce a fleet full of seige frigates, etc.



Thanks for reading.