Formations
 

How does the game decide which ships get precident in the front line of a formation? What about the rear? I thought it was alphabetical, but apparently, there's no friggen' rhyme nor reason.

Re: Formations
 

Most people seem to agree, the order in which the ships are clicked to enter into formation is the order of the ships.

That's not a complete answer 'tho. I have tried to manipulate the formation, for example, to get the ship with the point defense in the right spot, and have it not work. Seems to have something to do with when the ship was created, or something even more subtle that I can't track down.

Reselecting which ship is the leader tends to resort the ship formation

Re: Formations
 

Not sure about "clicked order" rule. I tend to think that formation order dependant of ship's date of creation - oldest Last, newest first.

Re: Formations
 

This is how formation order is determined. Leader is the first ship or the ship designated later as the leader. All other ships are placed in slots based on the order that the ships were constructed. The order you add them to the fleet is irrelevant.

Re: Formations
 

Man, everytime I hear this explanation, I just shake my head in wonderment.

SE4 is full of some amazingly great fun, and some amazingly bizarre design decisions...

Re: Formations
 

It is the simplest way of handling it, though not a very good way.

Re: Formations
 

Dumb. I mean, really.

Re: Formations
 

What happens if you have many ships in the fleet which were all built on the same day (from multiple shipyards)? Then does it use the clicked order?

Re: Formations
 

Simple. The order in which the data was created for the ship.

Re: Formations
 

No. It is not done by date, so much as the index number of the ship object. Or some similar mechanism. So, whichever ship was created as an object first would be the first in the formation, then second, third, etc. Only Aaron knows how the game indexes the ships. Maybe it goes in order of the creation order of the space yard queues?

Re: Formations
 

I don't know, Fyron. I just opened a combat simulation to test this atrocity out, and I could reproduce, systematically, a fleet in which the ships were arranged in the order they were added to the fleet.

P.S. The ships were created on the same date.

Re: Formations
 

I just did a combat simulation and added ships in varying orders to the fleet. They were always in order based on number (they were the same type of ship, so the number is the order of "creation"). 0001 was the leader, then the second slot was 0002, then 0003, and so on. Didn't matter what order they were added to the fleet. Note that this was the combat simulator, so for a real fleet you would be able to choose the leader...