Assembling the fleet

[Emperor's Child]

In a PBW game, is it possible to give individual ships orders to "attack" one of your own ships in order to get the ship to follow or join your own fleet? I've a fleet in a sector, several reinforcing ships moving into the area, and the enemy has one fleet that could attck or run. I want to give my fleet orders to attack the enemy fleet, but don't know where it is going to go so I can't simply send my reinforcing ships to any particular spot.

Can you send use the attack ship function to give your own ships orders to basically follow and join your own fleet?

[Ed Kolis]

No, I don't think so.

[geoschmo]

No, you cannot.

You can do give the attack order and direct your ship to attack an ally's ship. In theory you could use this to coordinate attacks between the two of you. In practice a lot depends on the speed of the different ships and player order and it's difficult to pull off consistantly.

But unfotunatly it's impossible to do this for your own ships.

The AI has an order it can use called "Join Fleet", which does basically what you are wanting to do. But human players cannot give this order.

[geoschmo]

Sorry, I forgot one thing. There is a way you might be able to coordinate you attack, but it's not foolproof. If both of your fleets have the same speed you could give them both "move to" orders and pick a spot equal distance from both of your fleets. Even if this means moving one of the fleets away from the enemy at first. Then give both fleets the attack order and they will move together and attack at the same time.

They won't be in the same fleet, so if one fleet is trained and the other isn't, only the ships in the trained fleet will get the combat bonuses.

Also, an important thing to note is this doesn't work right when minefields are concerned. Minesweeping seems to be handled differently then combat, so if you try this and mines are a possibility you need to have minesweepers in both fleets.

And this may or may not be possible to pull off depending on the positions of the two fleets and the enemy fleet, but in certain situations it's useful.

[Emperor's Child]

Thanks!

[PvK]

Another option is to use the Waypoints - you can give your fleet, and the ships joining it, orders to move to a waypoint, and then move the waypoint to give orders to everyone to meet at that point. However, you can't give a waypoint an order to attack even an enemy ship.

PvK