Understanding battle strategies...newbie question

[capnq]

The "chess pawn" (hotkey H) is for setting fleet formations and strategies; it won't be active if you've selected an individual ship.

You can make a fleet with only one ship in it, though.

I'm frankly baffled as to why tbontob is getting the results he's reporting; AFAIK, his technique ought to work.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Yeah, sorry all - I got confused; I thought I'd changed strategies for single ships using the pawn button, but I just re-checked and the pawn button only works for fleets. Kinda silly, really; you SHOULD be able to set strategies on an individual ship basis. Not that you'd do it often (who wants to remember that some ships of a particular design have a different strategy?), but still it'd be quite convenient. Especially since we've seen that fleet strategy doesn't always take priority over ship strategy. Of course, many people have noticed that the chosen strategy doesn't always take precedence - sometimes a ship/fleet will just decide to do something they're not supposed to do at all...

I'm stumped on this one as well. The "don't get hurt" orders should have sent your ship to a corner, regardless of armament... unless... did the ship have PDC on it? Or just APB? If it had PDC, once the planet (or the ship) launched missiles, your ship might (MIGHT! - I could be wrong on this one, but someone else mentioned that fighters launched by a planet had a similar effect) have moved in range of the missiles so the PDC could fire, and by the time those missiles were destroyed, more missiles were launched, and moving in range of those made the planet a target for APB... and eventually you're in battle, regardless of "Don't Get Hurt" orders.

Another idea - try making "fastest" the highest targeting priority; the enemy ship should usually be faster than the planet...

[tbontob]

Near the beginning of this thread, Grandpakim says:

One of the best moves I ever made was to go into DefaultStrategies.txt and change the whole works to the way I wanted it. Now any changes I make are mere refinements to a system I like. A big time saver. Oddly enough, the only thing you can't change (except in-game) is the damage percentages-- no entries in the text file.

Anybody know where the damage percentages are kept?

[Fyron]

Empire Options > Strategies > Damage

[tbontob]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Empire Options > Strategies > Damage

Yes, but the issue is in what file are the damage percentiles placed (if at all). Like the raw data for the default strategies are found in "DefaultStrategies.txt" but this file does not address damage percentages at all.

[capnq]

the issue is in what file are the damage percentiles placed

Since they're displayed in a spinner, the defaults are probably hardcoded. I'm not sure where the game stores changes you make during play.

[tbontob]

capnq says:

Since they're displayed in a spinner, the defaults are probably hardcoded. I'm not sure where the game stores changes you make during play.

Another term for me to learn. What is a "spinner"?