Question(s) about intricacies of fleet to fleet combat

Fleet to fleet combat in TA

I'm trying to understand how, in fleet to fleet combat, ships are selected for attack and defense.

For example, I constructed a couple of medium size support ships - one that gives defense to the fleet, another that gives speed boost. I gave them fairly high defense but not much for attack. For some reason these ships always appear at the head of my fleets. I tried rearranging the order using "manage" fleet button but they always stay at the front. Which means that when my fleet engages in combat they are the first to die, which is kinda retarted (I'm sorry to say) because I have battleships in the same fleet that should be taking the brunt of the attack.

So how is this determined? I mean I could understand if the ships with highest attack/defense/hp/etc. were put at the front, or the reverse, i.e. with the lowest values, but I can't spot the pattern. Not only do support ships (with lowest attack and medium defense and hp) get put at the front, but when I have small, medium and large ships in the fleet it seems that the small ones go second (after support), then large, then medium... I mean "huh?"

The other side of it is how are the targets chosen?
I was up against this huge fleet, all of its battleships had low or none defense against mass-driver weapons, and only one had a high mass-driver defense rating. So for some reason all my ships, which used primarily mass-driver weapons, fired only at that one battleship and of course couldn't scratch while being destroyed by the other battleships. The worst part about it, is that overall their fleet had low MD defense and very high beam weapons defense, that's why I sent my MD fleet after them.

So basically I'm just trying to understand how this kinda stuff works.

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The target chosen to be attacked is normally, IIRC, the ship with the highest weapon to hitpoint ratio, with some adjustment for defense. However, I don't think that it evaluates the defense based on effectiveness by type, so if the other ships had high-defense, but of the WRONG type, they would have been evaluated as lower in crunchiness and thus disfavored.

You should have used missiles.

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Yeah I agree it is kinda retarded i mean it would be such a great idea if i could chose in shipyard that ship is build for support so basically it can stay out of the front line same for attack and defense ships. In the other words that option would allow adjusting fleets to our liking. For example just after finishing the project player is prompted with 3 options : attack, support or defense. Defense ships taking hits, attack ships dealing damage and support ships do what they supposed to do which is staying out of fire and supporting. Then i think that could take a lot of time to implement into game, so i just stay out of fire and shut my mouth.

Rgrds,
N.

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

If I remember correctly, putting fleet modules on a ship greatly increases its targetting priority. Think about it - if you were targetting manually, wouldn't you pick these off first?

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Don't fleet noncombatants. If noncombatants are not in a fleet, several things happen:

1. They do not participate in the fighting at all, meaning if your attack goes pear-shaped (or even if you win), they neither lose move, nor are at any risk for destruction.
2. If attacked, the attackers will fight your battlefleet before they can attack your noncombatants. Should you fail to defeat the attacking force, the enemy must still destroy each noncombatant ship one at a time, paying one move per ship destroyed. If there were a fair number of noncombatants, it is likely that many will survive simply because AI ships rarely exceed 8 move and thus an AI fleet could only destroy 7 of the noncombatants, tops (after spending one move to destroy your fleet), and likely fewer if moves had to be expended to reach attack range in the first place.

Other than that, the concept of "attack" and "defense" ships is meaningless: The targeting priority, outside of deliberately malicious attempts to intentionally destroy noncombatants at any cost that a human might execute if allowed to manually aim, favors those with the higher "crunchiness" ratio, logically so: The more weapons you put out of action in a round, the fewer that will be firing at you in the next. Logically there would not be "shield" ships because if the enemy is in range, then so are you. If your attack ships can shoot at the enemy, then they can shoot at you.

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Another technique I use for fleet management: When you have surviving veteran ships that are critically damaged, pull them out of the fleet and rotate them back to the rear to heal, replacing them with new ships. I also tend to use homoginized fleets, so that I don't have issues with which ones are being targeted, other than veteran status. I will typically use only a few current designs at a time: one for ships of the line and another cheaper version (smaller hull) for my backwater planets to build. I haven't used the fleet modules yet.

I would think that for your fleet support designs, you could use a huge hull for hit points and lots of defense, this way if they are targeted first at least they can take a lot of hits while your attack ships pummel the enemy.

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If I was flying a fighter in a space battle I think I would first hit the ship that was protecting the battle ships making them harder to kill...however this is a game and this should be fixed.

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I'm not disputing the fact that it's a smart move to target supporting ships first, it's just that I almost got the sense that the AI for the enemy fleets is smarter than the AI for my fleets. The enemy is smart enough to attack support ships (even though they're not dangerous by themselves) yet my ships aren't smart enough to attack a ship that they could actually damage.

Anyway, thanks for all the advice, I think I'll just stick to my usual (safe) strategy - make sure to always have a ship that can destroy, one on one, the best enemy ship

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