request for Fleet Formation UI change

[Pax]

You know what, I'd love to be able to manually assign individual ships to specific places in a fleet's formation.

For example, an SFB example specifically, the Inter-Stellar Concordium (a.k.a. ISC) uses an echelon tactic; a line or arrowhead of frigates and similar class ships. Then an arrowhead of destroeyrs and the like; then the light crusiers; and so on, down to a single command-level ship.

The front ships, known as the "Gun Line", use lighter weapons --- direct fire stuff, largely; maybe some smaller torpedoes.

Each successive rank in the echelon has heavier, and therefor longer-range, weapons. Thus, there is a certain degree of overlap where firepower is optimised among all ship echelon ranks. Harder to do with SE4, of course, but I'd love to be able to properly form a true Echelon formation.

Or a carrier group, with the carriers to the middle and lighter gun-armed escorts in a protective circle around them.

Dedicated PDC "Aegis" ships spread evenly throughout yoru formation.

Those sorts of things. A simple added UI screen, to be able to manually move ships around, would be nice -- let the defined formations be yoru starting points,a nd if you don't care that much, you never have to manually adjust formations.

...

Another bit I'd like to see is, to be able to have multiple "Groups" in a single fleet, rather than have the whole fleet answer to one, sole leader. That'd be harder to do I suppose; it's possible to manually do so in Tactical Combat, but obviously that's not an option for PBW.

Mixed fleets that -don't- have to break formation woudl bemore possible then; group one is your missile ships, they have max range; group two is yoru boarders, they close in to capture; group three is your gun line, they go to optimal range and bLast away; and so on. all in a SINGLE fleet (for ease of moving it about the map, ofc).

[Baron Munchausen]

It's messy, but there is a way to arrange something like this. Formations will accept ship 'names' as well as classes, much like the build queue. So, you could make a formation with 'light attack ships' assigned to the front row, and 'heavy attack ships' assigned to the back row, and 'missile ships' assigned to the rear. Then make sure to put the right numbers of the right types of ships into the fleet and they should be assigned as requested.

[Gandalph]

I can attest to the Baron's comment. I have created a custom formation and assigned ship position based on design and it did work, quite effectively I might add. It also was a pain in the a** to setup.

[Grandpa Kim]

Originally posted by Gandalph:
I can attest to the Baron's comment. I have created a custom formation and assigned ship position based on design and it did work, quite effectively I might add. It also was a pain in the a** to setup.

Gandalph!! How did you get that to work? I tried and the AI STILL assigned ship positions randomly! I set it up much the same way that you and the Baron described. Can you give more details on your setup?

Kim

P.S. This will not work for PBW because the server does not have your custom formations on file.