Combat

[smitty]

Although I am fairly certain what the responses will be, I was curious if people preferred strategic or tactical when involved in a space battle.

Also a question... I think formations are messing with me. When I move what I assume is my lead ship the others attempt to jockey back into place. Can I override that during combat?

[Fyron]

Set the ship strategies to "break formation". Go into the Empire Status window (crown icon), then Strategies. Click on the Formation tab. It is often best to have all ships in all strategies set to break formation.

I prefer strategic combat because it is too easy to defeat the AIs in tactical.

[PvK]

I usually prefer strategic and then viewing the replay in detail. This is because I almost never play hot-seat, and against the AI, it's not very fair since I'm so much better than it is, and it also takes a really long time to resolve a large battle.

However, I do find tactical fun sometimes. Also, one of my favorite ways to play single-player games is to let the AI run the empire until there are interesting ships, and then just take control of one fleet, and play as a fleet commander and try to make a difference with the AI controlling the rest of the empire.

And yes, there is a way to control each ship individually so they won't automatically move to stay in formation with their leader - you want to break up the "combat group" from the "Options" menu during tactical combat.

PvK

[Master Belisarius]

I play always simultaneous games, then, is not possible to play a tactical combat.
Anyway, the tactical combats always were something boring to me... then, I don't miss it.

[Suicide Junkie]

The easiest way to break a formation is to click the leader (blue flag) and press CTRL-0. This removes the leader from the formation, so the wingmen won't try to follow him anymore.

The formation is useful for getting into position, such as when you are sending 25 ships halfway across the combat map to engage the enemy fleet. You can then break up the fleet once you get in weapons range.

[Ward]

Although I am fairly certain what the responses will be, I was curious if people preferred strategic or tactical when involved in a space battle.

When I bought SEIV I preferred tactical. I was happy I could crush AI. But soon that was no fun and it took a long time. I like to play really big empires and 5-10 combats in 1 round is awfully long time. Then I reviewed strategies and now I play only strategic combat. The only thing I didn't manage the AI to do is dogfighting(to approach, fire and retreat in one round so that the enemy can't fire on you). I believe this is the main reason why human opponents win. Programming advanced tactics isn't that difficult and I really don't understand why the Creators of SEIV didn't spend more time on this. It is one on the most important things in SEIV after all.