Fleet control

[Sardia]

Can someone explain how fleets work? Sometimes I can control the ships individuality and others, I'm forced to control groups of them. I have break formation on.

[Dan_]

Not sure if this helps. You might need to be more specific.

SE5Manual:
Fleets are groupings of star ships which move as a cohesive unit. Designating a ship as part of a fleet means that you wish for it to remain with the other ships in the fleet as they move. It has long been known that individual ships are easy prey for enemies, but large groups fare much better. Effective use of fleets will help keep your ships alive as they battle enemy forces.

A fleet is actually a collection of task forces. Each task force is a group of ships within the fleet that all have the same job. When you add a ship to a fleet, you need to specify which task force it will join. Within the task force, each ship has a role of either “Core”, “Escort”, or “Picket”.The “Core” ships are the heart of the task force, the “Escort” ships protect the core ships, and the “Picket”’s form an external ship around the group. The fleet as a whole has a formation which indicates where each task force will be located. Each task force also has its own formation which indicates how ships in the task force will move together. Likewise, a fleet has a strategy (how the AI should control it), and each task force has a strategy as well.

Your empire is allowed as many fleets as you want. Each fleet is identified by a name which you give the fleet. You can have as many or as few ships belonging to each fleet as you want. In fact, you can have no fleets at all, or have all of your ships as part of one huge fleet. Fleets are best used when the ships within each fleet have the same goal in mind (and usually the same orders as well). All ships that are in a fleet pool their supplies together and ordnance together. As the fleet moves, supplies are shared amongst the ship so no one ship is without supplies.

Like individual ships, fleets have experience as well. The longer ships remain in a fleet together, the better they learn to work with each other.Experience is gained by using the fleet and destroying ships in combat. The experience will generate bonuses for your ships within the fleet. If a fleet is disbanded, all experience for the fleet is lost.

Ships that are part of a fleet behave identically to all other ships, with one difference when it comes to movement. When a fleet of ships moves, they will stay together. This means that as they execute their orders, they will wait for the slower ships in the fleet. Fleet ships which have movement points will not leave a location if it contains a ship that belongs to their fleet and yet has no movement points remaining. For example, you have 3 destroyers and 2 escorts who belong to fleet 1. They are all at the same coordinates and are given orders to move to a distant system. The destroyers have a movement of 6, while the escorts have a movement of 5. When the ships execute their orders they will begin moving towards they’re destination. When they have moved 5 squares, the escorts will be out of movement points, but the destroyers will have 1 movement point left. Because they belong to the same fleet, the destroyers will not move out of the sector containing the escorts. You would be able to look at them and see that the destroyers still have 1 movement point left, but they will not use it.

The ideal situation for fleets is in keeping together groups of ships that have different movements. If your fleet is a convoy that is protecting some slow transports, you do not want your defensive ships to leave your transports behind. If all of the ships are designated as part of the same fleet, they will do so. It is also good to keep fleet ships in the same sector, and give them the same orders. If they have different orders,you may end up splitting your fleet. Once the ships are away from each other, the fleet designation doesn’t mean much.

You specify which ships are part of a fleet by using the Fleet Transfer Window. You can also get an overview of all of your fleets in the Ships Window.

[Sardia]

I put 3 light cruisers and a destroyer in a fleet. When I send them into tactical battle, I sometimes am unable to control the ships individually. If I give them a move order, it does not follow. I can only move them as a group. Other times, they break formation when I want them to.

What causes this? Is it the designation as escort and picket? Does it have to do with how I select the ships initially?

[Dan_]

I think you can only give move orders to the leader of the task force, so you would have to have that selected. The others just move to stay in formation with the leader. As far as I'm aware, being an escort or picket has anything to do with movement, rather just determines the position in the formation. The way to override this behavior, and what I find works best anyway, is to set the strategy the task force uses to break formation immediately - see strategy settings under empire options. You might need to do this for the strategy the ship designs are set to as well, but from what I've seen the task force strategies override the ship ones. There might be a break formation button or something similar in the tactical combat you can use too. If you do this, by default the ships move to try and keep the range you set in the strategy from their target.

The fleet formation is still handy though as it gives you some control over the starting positions of the ships.

[Sardia]

That's the thing, most of the time, it is perfectly normal, where I can control each ship individually. Sometimes though, I can only control a leader of a task force and it gets really annoying.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that under the capture planet strategy, it has launch all units under combat set to true?
How are you gonna capture a planet if you keep launching away your fighters? And yes, I know troops can't be launched, but fighters are better and more versatile.