Why don't ships obey their $@#$@# fleet orders

capnq · #1 July 21st, 2002, 03:35 AM

Quote:

i never used the custom formations from TDM because i feel they would give me a major edge over the AI.

Interesting. The only TDM custom formation I've ever even tried was the Dark Wing. I don't see any advantage at all to most of them.

Taera · #2 July 21st, 2002, 09:39 PM

Well not all of them, but some are.
Best example is the Barrage, this is the best formation i have ever seen and i dont even want to use it in my single-player games because considering my personal strategies this would be the perfect formation. Maybe.
Hard flanks is kinda similar, and the double-wall is much perfected wall formation.

No, i still do think TDM formations are great. And dark wing never seemed promising to me.

I'd just stick to TUrbine, i am already used to it.

capnq · #3 July 22nd, 2002, 05:26 AM

Must be play-style differences. Double Wall puts half of your ships further away from the enemy than a normal Wall; I can't imagine why I'd want to reduce my firepower that much.

Daynarr · #4 July 22nd, 2002, 10:54 AM

Ok, I think why and when the problem with fleet formations has happened.

I started with this 1.58 Version change:

Quote:

10. Fixed - If a combat piece was in a fleet it would always use the fleet strategy,
even if it had broken formation.

The reason for this change was the problem with AI that would still use formation strategy when it would break formations. This bug was important for AI because it would not be able to use fleets with different ship designs effectively. So just un-doing it wouldn't be good.

OTOH it seems that the patch makes ships ignore the fleet orders completely, even when the fleet formation is not broken. That makes fleet orders useless. This probably can be fixed.

DavidG · #5 July 23rd, 2002, 03:09 AM

I don't think ships completely ignore fleet orders. I often use the wall formation and they do stay in formation. What they do ignore is the don't hurt me orders. And I believe Capture Planet orders which I understand that correctly means a ship will fire on a planet untill all defensese are gone and then cease fire and allow the troops to land.

DirectorTsaarx · #6 July 23rd, 2002, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by DavidG:
I don't think ships completely ignore fleet orders. I often use the wall formation and they do stay in formation. What they do ignore is the don't hurt me orders. And I believe Capture Planet orders which I understand that correctly means a ship will fire on a planet untill all defensese are gone and then cease fire and allow the troops to land.

The Capture Planet fleet order mostly works (at least I've gotten it to work on some of my invasion fleets). What I like is that the game automatically (well, usually automatically) sets the fleet orders to Capture Planet if there's a Troop Transport ship in the fleet. Well, I like that until I forget that a particular fleet has a troop transport and order it to attack a small planet and I end up capturing some useless planet deep in enemy territory, just to see the AI glass the planet on the next turn.

One problem with Capture Planet: if you run out of troops, the fleet won't fire on unarmed planets in strategic combat. Somewhat annoying at times...