Anyone know how to set specific ship positions in formations?

-Thog- · #1 January 5th, 2001, 04:46 AM

I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to sat a fleet formation, and then designate what ships occupy which positions in the formation. I'd like to be able to put my CLAA's in a position to intercept missiles inbound, and put the BB's in the rear of the formation.

Thog

Tomgs · #2 January 5th, 2001, 08:06 AM

I don't know specifically how to do it because I haven't played around with it yet but the thing you need to look at is Formations.txt in the Data directory. That is what specifies what the formations are. As to how to get specific ships in specific places in that formation I don't know. I know someone mentioned that they put their PD ships on the wings of one formation so it may be possible.

Puke · #3 January 5th, 2001, 08:23 AM

yeah, thats me. its possible, but not simple. there are 2 main classes of ship in a formation, those that can break formation and those that cant.

Those that can break formation are usually given dont-get-hurt orders and run to the hills. we wont wory about them (except for their tendancy to run to the OPOSITE side of the map, crossing hostile fire when all the near corners are taken)

anyway, this leaves you with your combatant ships to be placed into the formation. the computer orders the formation by what the order of ships are in the fleet. how do you reorder ships in the fleet, you ask? thats the trick.

you cant. BUT, the computer Groups them by class of ship. so your fleet list may look like:

DN; DN; DN; DN; DN; BC; BC

and your inverted V formation will end up ordered like this (pretend it looks like a V):

6; 4; 2; 1; 3; 5; 7

so you would have the DNs in the center and the BCs on the wingtips. If you want to do something truely clever with your formation, you need to figure out what order your fleet is being put into and then create your own formation based on that. which sucks.

The game is not to bad though, with how it orders fleets. you can usually find a formation that will be at least mostly intelligent, and then you might find it easier to build your ship designs arround how formations work rather than the other way around. play with a few formations in the simulator and you will see how they are setup.

Tampa_Gamer · #4 January 6th, 2001, 02:12 AM

In the default formations file the data part of the file lists each position in the formation and what class of ship can be there. The custom formations I have made change some of those positions from "Any" to "Defense Ship", "Attack Ship," "Carrier" etc. This way it is possible to form a protective group (at least until they make their first turn!!)

jpinard · #5 January 6th, 2001, 01:22 PM

Tampa, can you post this?

PvK · #6 March 16th, 2002, 08:51 PM

Also, you can use multiple fleets, and specify the leader ship, so the other ships in the squadron formate around it. This way you can specify one PD ship to protect all the units around it in its squadron.

PvK

Grandpa Kim · #7 March 17th, 2002, 07:36 AM

Also, on the Gold CD, there is a formations editor (formationeditor.zip). Unfortunately what it does best for me is crash my computer.

So I am entering the ship types by hand. There really is no need to do them all since I only use a few different formations, so it should be no strain for a big profit.

Thanks Thog for starting this thread. If you hadn't I would have! And thanks to all of you with the helpful replies; you guys should be asking for cash!

Kim