Advice on protecting unarmed ships

[mottlee]

Originally posted by Thermodyne:
I have played a few games where I was up against unarmed ships, usually mine sweepers. First thing I do is to make unarmed ships a priority target; that will often kill the mine-sweepers even when you loose the battle. This has a slowing effect on the opposing fleet, as they need to replace the mine-sweepers or risk running afoul of mine fields. Adding a single weapon will defeat this tactic. It looks like this is a mistake that lots of new players make.

Hmmm...Something NEW to remember!

[PvK]

Originally posted by Joe Cool:
FYI, I ran some tests and it appears that if the sweepers arrive earlier in the turn than other fleets, the mines are swept and the fleets that follow that turn do not encounter them. This seemed to work if sweepers and other fleet start at the same location and sweepers are faster. It also seemed to work if the sweepers were equally fast, but started nearer the mine field. When the sweepers were equal in speed and equally distant, they did not sweep and the other fleet was damaged, at least on the few trials I tested.

I think you may have been lucky, and it is based on fleet age or something else random, unless it has been fixed in a patch at some point. In the past however, I have seen minesweepers not manage to sweep a field simply because there weren't enough in a single fleet, even though they were the same speed and given the same movement orders, and no goofy pathfinding made their course split.

For example, one fleet can sweep 60 mines, the other can sweep 40. They move together, but they run into a field of 80 mines, and get obliterated.

It'd be great if it has been fixed, but I didn't know that it had been... and recently I thought I saw someone else lose a ship to mines when it looked to me like they had ample minesweepers (but that might've been a valid timing thing, I suppose).

PvK

[Suicide Junkie]

Originally posted by Slick:

quote:

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Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
The ships will move as if they were in one single fleet for one turn.

Just to be clear, are you saying that if I shift-click 2 ships (or fleets) and move/attack, they will move as a fleet for the first turn even if they have different speeds? i.e. if 1 ship has a movement of 10 while the other has a movement of 7, will the first ship "slow down" and move with the second, and only move 7 for that turn? I thought that shift-clicking was only a faster means of giving out the same order to multiple ships.

Slick.

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Shift-clicking makes a virtual super-fleet for one turn. They'll slow down to let the slower guys keep up and everything.

[LGM]

I am fairly sure I with 1.84 that I had two fleets arrive at a location the same day and the one without mine sweapers arrived first and was toasted. I believe the fleets moving on the same day move in the order they were created. Renaming the fleet will not make it newer and creating a new one will cost you your training bonus, if any.

I usually avoid trying to coordinate attacks with two fleets, as many things can go wrong (such as a rogue enemy ship can bLast one ships engines before it dies, putting your fleet's movement cycle out of synch with the other fleet).

I usually make all my ships armed, even ones that break formation with Don't get hurt, just so they cannot be targeted as Unarmed.

Meson Cannon I is nice cheap, 20KT weapon to turn support ships into armed support ships.

If you are going for armed support ships, I would recommend that you consider 'weakest' to pick them off.

I am not sure if PDCs make a ship classified as armed. With only PDC a ship will be treated as unarmed with respect to breaking formation and running to the corner.