I agree that ships in orbit should automatically fleet up to your logistics ability. Ships in orbit already gain an attack bonus and the Omega Defense System provides a HP bonus, so I see no need to provide attack/defense/HP bonuses. Either scrap the Orbital Fleet Manager or have it boost your logistics ability to the ships in orbit (i.e., replace the Hyperion Fleet Manager).

The attacker has too much of an advantage. Attacker Advantages are Exploitable!

Perhaps it would also be sensible to end a fleet's movement after it has attacked an orbital fleet?

Under the current system, it's not sensible to put more than 2 defensive ships in orbit around every planet - it's too costly in terms of maintenance. Thus, planets you're not paying attention to will be defeated in one or two attacks anyway.

Since the proposed change would fleet your ships according to your logistics, plus a significant attack bonus for being orbital, being attacked while in orbit is by no means a bad thing, unless you were going to be handily defeated anyway, in which case it doesn't make all that much of a difference, either way.

Losing 3 ships a turn (or in the AI's case 5-6 ships a turn) is not a good defensive strategy!

I think this is a bad, bad, bad idea.

90% of the time it is better for the AI to NOT have their ships in fleets in orbit.

In my opinion the problem for the AI is when they build a fleet manager because that makes it easier to take out their ships in fewer turns.

It would acually be easier to defeat the AI if all ships were automatically fleeted.

- Livonya

If your ships are so overpowering that the 1 movement point is a greater cost than taking on the fleet, we've got other problems. I don't see why the whole fleet manager thing couldn't exist for ships in orbit, anyway.

P.S. Yes, ships in orbit do repair MUCH faster, but with the new defense that doesn't mean much.

i think this point of view is biased towards very good players. when the AI's ships are about as good as yours, it's better for them to be in a fleet. if all the AI's ships are like tin cans compared to yours, it means your a good player and the AI can't keep up with you. fleet or no fleet, you're still gonna win.

Everyone that's made a statement like that apparently doesn't understand how to use non-combat ships to delay an invasion force. Fleeting my space miner, freighter, and 2 constructors is NOT helpful to the defense of the homeworld.

This whole discussion is really about whether you think orbital combat is a delaying tactic or an actual means of defense. This in turn is really a question of where you tend to keep your good combat vessels. I get the sense that a lot of the "auto-fleet" crowd isn't using rally points, for example.

Except the AI *does* leave loads of ships in orbit. So this simple rules change, which is good for a bunch of other reasons as well (including just plain making sense), also has the effect of making the AI more competitive.

The fact is that without a *major* brain transplant, the AI sucks at manouver. Truly. It is just *not smart enough* to play an effective game of intercepting attackers, so it probably should leave some portion of its military sitting on its worlds to prevent players from simply seizing them all with very high speed transports and such.

I just played a game in which the Terrans were a pretty powerful neighbor and declared war on me. They were rated as #2 military in the galaxy. I flew around and started picking off the defenders around all their worlds, picking off their fleets flying around... and their military rating was still high. My transports took Earth itself. Why was their military rating still so high, I wondered? Then some of my cruisers went on a scouting mission toward one lonely Terran planet sitting way off in the upper right corner of the screen. They ended up in the middle of a HUGE armada. Battleship after cruiser after battleship. Seeing my ships seemed to trigger this armada, which promptly started to swarm all over the place. It took some real effort for me to take it all out. If the Terrans had that thing defending their worlds, or had thrown it at me in an attack or counterattack, I would have been in *trouble*. But it just sat in deep space twiddling its thumbs.

Turns out the far-off planet had some incredible bonus tiles that set it up as a *very* sweet manufacturing world. The Terrans were probably building most of their fleet there. But for some reason they just sort of collected it in space. Well *away* from their planets, but in what some piece of code might have decided was a geographically central part of their empire.

I've never had trouble outmanouvering the AI. Sometimes you can even just use a cheap decoy ship to lure them away.

Like it or not, the more this game encourages tricky manouvers the more the AI is screwed.




I can't think of when it'd matter whether I can take out the AI's ships in one turn versus two or three. On the other hand, there ARE cases when the AI will have several ships that could easily be picked off by one of my raiding parties (free experience!) but that would actually take out at least one of my attackers, or even require me to bring in a full-scale assault fleet, if they could fleet up.

It's not uncommon to have an AI declare war on me when I'm not actually ready for their total and brutal annihlation. In that case, a cheap and easy way to keep them down is to send raiding parties to pick off the non-fleeted ships defending their worlds.

I consider Orbital fleeting a liability in most cases. As someone else mentioned, if you dont have sensor nets in place so you cant see the enemy coming, you deserve what you get.

Since I can see the enemy coming, Im goign to sally forth and knock them out, if Im in the position to do so. If I NOT in the position to do so (they have a superior force), I then want to hold the planet as long as possible until reinforcements get there...In which case orbital fleeting is a liability. I want my ships to act as speed bumps, increasing the number of turns it takes to clear the way for troops invasion.

Not that I ever waste significant ships defending worlds, but thats another thread.

I love it it when the AI builds Orbital fleet managers on their worlds. I just means I can knock that world out and take it over in one turn, as opposed to 3 or 4. With the new speed nerfs, its tougher to clear the space of a "well defended" world in a single turn without one.


Orbital fleeting is for suckers.

Hi!

Have you ever tried to disband your fleet after it destroyed the real ships in orbit, and then attacked those remaining puny defenders with each of your ships separately?

BR, Iztok

Hmm, that's clever, I never thought of it. Meh, maybe it really doesn't matter then.

Don't confuse faster with easier. If the AI ships are crappy then you will will be able to clear them out faster. However, if the AI has decent ships you won't be able to exploit 1 HP rule for 1 on 1 ship battles! How about only combat ships are auto-fleeted in case you have multiple non-combat blockers? Attacker Advantages are Exploitable!

All advanced players agree it is usually better to defend planets with nearby fleets rather than ships in orbit. I only place combat ships in orbit:
(1) to heal or
(2) when I'm capturing the AI planets, if I capture a planet near an AI planet with a troop transport which I don't have enough movement left to destroy


The ships in orbit gain an attack bonus so fleeted in orbit they may fair better then attacking especially if the planet has the Omega defense system. For the most part I agree orbital defenders are a waste but that is the strategy the AI is using and we are aiming to help the AI and new players.

Sure...when Im attacking with fleets. But Since High defense mega ships rule the game, I freqently attack with a single ship. If I need a fleet to take the world, yes, Ill fleet up to punch out the toughest defenders, and split up to take out the weak ones, if thats appropriate to the enemy mix.


But we're splitting hairs here. Orbital fleeting is a complete waste of time. If you are actually in the position to have to defend your world with the ships in orbit to any attacking force where youre in damnger of losing...most likely because youve failed to build proper sensor net and been caught by suprise... youve already lost that battle.


At this point, youre better off scrambling your ships out of orbit so they survive and regroup en masse somewhere else, and just kill the troop transports ( the only kind of ship thats any real danger to you) as they come in, which the AI still doesnt defend worth a damn, despite promises made.


You have to have done so many things wrong to put yourself in the position of getting into a meaninful orbital battle over one of your worlds, your strategy needs evaluated far before the issue of orbital fleets comes into play. The OFM is routinely one of the first thigns I destroy upon taking over a planet, and I can only hope the AI builds them to facilitate their assimilation into my empire.

You know, the mere fact that there's as much disagreement as there is is a rather solid endorsement of leaving it free choice. The AI needs to understand when it's advantageous to build an OFM and when it's not (and no matter what the detractors say, sometimes it's definitely not). Forcing fleeting upon it in all circumstances doesn't solve anything.