Lead ship in a fleet?

from Sins Forums

I dont know if this has been covered already.  i honestly didnt search the forums.  Its just an FYI.  But several times now the computer has selected a cobalt light frig to be the leader of a fleet when a perfectly capable capital ship is sitting right next to it.  The manual says that what ever ship is sub selected will be the lead ship.  What does that mean?  no mater how i tryed i couldnt figure out how to make my Kol be the leader.  It doesnt always do this, sometimes it works perfectly.  Its been in several games now, and almost always when i want a kol to be the leader that it instead selects a cobalt.   if im doing something wrong let me know, other wise could you look into this for the next patch?  thanks.

technical
7,171 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
The lead ship becomes the one with the focused selection (whitest selection box, everything else will be dim). You can tab through the selection until you get what you want, but so far I've never seen anything that's not a capital get selected as the fleet leader if you group select a mess from scratch.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I just posted on this subject in a different forum, so I'll just quote myself, here:
When you select more than one ship, note that one of them will be the "primary selection", and have a slightly brighter selection square around its icon.

If you hit TAB, the primary selection will cycle through all of the ships you have selected.If you form a fleet from your selection, the primary selected ship will be the flagship.

The way I usually do it is just to select the ship I want to be flagship, hold down shift, add all the other ships I want in the fleet, and hit the form fleet button.

If you somehow get it wrong, you can fix it simply by selecting the fleet, hitting TAB to cycle to the ship you want to be flagship, and hitting the form fleet button again.
End of quote
Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
thanks, now i understand. however in game this is very confusing and could probably use some clarification. its a nifty feature that i think alot of people are probably missing.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Next question is "does it matter?". Does the fleet receive any kind of bonus from having a command cruiser or capital ship as the flagship? Or does it simply offend our human sense of propriety to have a light frigate carrying the flag!
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
There's no bonus, it just makes sense for it to be a capital, as per human sense of propriety :P

It's also intuitive, since you only absolutely need to control the fleet leader itself and the rest of the fleet will follow, and since you already tend to control capitals most of all (or I do), it kinda fits together.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
I just posted on this subject in a different forum, so I'll just quote myself, here:When you select more than one ship, note that one of them will be the "primary selection", and have a slightly brighter selection square around its icon.

If you hit TAB, the primary selection will cycle through all of the ships you have selected.If you form a fleet from your selection, the primary selected ship will be the flagship.

The way I usually do it is just to select the ship I want to be flagship, hold down shift, add all the other ships I want in the fleet, and hit the form fleet button.

If you somehow get it wrong, you can fix it simply by selecting the fleet, hitting TAB to cycle to the ship you want to be flagship, and hitting the form fleet button again.
End of quote


Which is a good option for a small fleet, but if you have a couple of hundred ships in the fleet, tabbing through them can be a pain in the arse. And Shift selecting them all doesn't always select all the ships as I found out about a week ago. There needs to be a button somewhere to allow you to form the fleet and then individually select the fleet leader (if you want to) rather than having to mess around with tab and shift.