When are fleets useful?

I would like to know this as well. I've run into the exact same issue as the OP.

There is one major drawback thats set by default. Tried to pull back one cap ship, was winning the fight but wanted to save the cap ship. Whole fleet jumped leaving a large number of support craft facing a swarm of angry ships. Sucked.

Fleets dont do anything for me. Infact when im trying to make one single large fleet the game will someitme , on its own, start a second fleet of newly created items.

I've been using fleets heavily. I tend to keep my planets collapsed in the empire view and just have my fleets expanded. I like how ships auto-join fleets, and I like having that one icon to click on to select a whole fleet so I can save my CTRL groups for a few key ships. I never did like having too many CTRL groups in RTSes, though.



Did you tell that ship to retreat? I think that automatically drops a ship from a fleet.

I love the fleet controls... It makes ship management much easier for me, at least in terms of navigation between planets and systems.

If I ever decide I want to pull back a specific ship, I usually find it best just to tell that ship to "Leave Fleet". That way I can pull it back while leaving the rest of my fleet engaged.

I believe any experience values from kills made by fleet elements go to capital ships within that fleet... a HUGE benefit...

Oh wow. I didn't know that. Changes everything. Even if I have to micro retreating ships, that makes it worth it. And ya I told the cap ship to jump, and the entire fleet did.

No... If you kill a unit, all capitols in the grav well get credit (and the XP is split evenly across them).

Fleets are useful because, for the most part, the units in them will stay together -- no need to worry about cobalts running off to solo a turret halfway across the grav well. (I'll frequently use them to create "battlegroups" of some primary ships, and a few support -- flaks, Hoshikos, and cielos guarding a group of Kodiaks or a Capitol).

Huh. That's odd. I've never seen such behaviour in ship combat. In fact, I know for a fact that if you ask selected ships in a fleet to autojump somewhere else or do anything nonfleet related, they form into their own mini, temporary fleet that don't hinder the movement of your main. Yes, the ships will follow the leader if you ask the leader to move, so while I feel compelled to argue the obviousness of that situation, just select another leader for your fleet by "TAB" + "F" + "F" before moving the guy.

And ships moving around to do random things? If you set your ships to engage everything in the gravity well, of course they'll do that. If you really don't want your ships to do anything without your consent, set them to hold position. They'll just sit there and even allow that enemy fleet to waltz by.

In fact, I don't think it's the game that's doing something wrong. There's a good chance some unknown variable that you fiddled with such as asking the whole fleet to move right after seeing the one guy attack by using the ctrl selection instead of drag selecting the ships you wanted to move and the ones you wanted to attack.

Benefits of fleets? Formations are bloody important in a game where the ships move like bricks and the game is made so tactical considerations are nigh nonexistent. Formations are probably the only significant tactical consideration you'll ever need to make in this game since there's no difference in performance depending on ambushing, rear attacks, flanks, or anything really. All you've got is your ships sitting there and watching them blow each other up. At least arrange them so they're optimally placed and so support ships know what to do (which they won't when there are no fleets).

I know for one that when you play with 5 seperate fleets attacking 5 different star systems, you're not going to have the time or ability to manually fiddle with every, single ship. So a minor loss in efficiency is worth it in the big picture.

I thought i heard somewhere that when they are in a fleet you don't need to tell them to attack. The units will auto attack what they are meant to kill.

For example i have a flak frigate, it will target fighters/bombers. So if there is something in the gravity well that a unit is better against it attacks it. Thats what teh fleet thing does, so to tell something to attack someone else then its pointless. But not quite sure that correct, i think so.

I don't think so. My Siege Frigates go straight for the planets/asteroids, and my space superiority fighters go straight for the other fighters. The targeting priority seems to be excellent in this game.

I suppose it is all the follow-the-leader functionality which keeps messing me up. The idea of fleets that auto-form in wells and form up based on classification are nice, but when the leader is going to be a cap ship 99% of the time, and cap ships being one of the few units which it actually pays off to micro it keeps bringing up all kinds of context sequential order of operation issues.

For instance as simple a thing as sending half the ships in a well home, I have to remember the subselection will leave the fleet when they hit the new grav well, unless one of those is the fleet commander in which case I have to order them to move then select a subset to remain, unless they already started their prejump warmup which will casue them to jump to and fro and leave the fleet anyway, etc etc.

Yes, all of it was done for "ease of use", but such escort/follow is no where near as always-wanted an option as the rest of the fleet features given. Especially in the larger battles where wanting just a cap ship to run and save itself (often needed quite suddenly) first requires remanaging the fleet.

I know the fleet system was designed to incorporate bushels of features into as small a package as possible, it is just very frustrating to not only have to worry about moving single units, or groups of units, or fleets of units, but also having to keep in mind whether any of those contained your fleet leader and the ramifications giving it orders will have on the AI of your other ships in the system (or possibly out of the system or en route to the system) as well.

I guess the moral of the story is to center fleets around carriers or missile frigates, since they require the absolute least micro and are not likely to be moved around in any given battle and therefore not interfere with any other tactical orders given. This is very nonintuitive though, one would expect cap ships to be fleet leaders.

Any chance of letting us flag ctrl groups as autoadding members if one of the members is set as a rally point? Becasue it would seem to let us manually control large scale ship movemement without the worry of how individual orders within will afflict the rest of the group. Sure they won't move as cleanly as a fleet, but the grav wells are so small I still question the formation feature and I think that simply allowing ctrl group to autoadd from being made rally points would be more use than having to double and triple think every fleet action before I make it.