Creating fleets - Advantages?

What are the advantages other than organization for fleet formation? Are there any bonuses?
Would a group of selected ships versus a selected fleet of the same ships perform any differently?
7,111 views 10 replies
Reply #1 Top
auto focus-fire
Reply #2 Top
The advantage of focus fire is questionable since the more ships that shoot at something, the more damage mitigation the shields do.
Reply #3 Top
The advantage of focus fire is questionable since the more ships that shoot at something, the more damage mitigation the shields do.
End of quote


In a battle i was having tonight, I was the tec with 4 battleships, 3 carriers, 3 battlecruisers, 1 dreadnaught and like 40 kodiak heavy cruisers, against something like 6 enemy cap ships plus a very large support fleet of mixed ships, when focusing fire the enemy cap ships all dropped within like a 40 seconds to a minute, i sustained no losses oddly enough, because the enemy (ai) wasnt focusing on one target, so focus firing does definately have an advantage.

Reply #4 Top
The advantage of focus fire is questionable since the more ships that shoot at something, the more damage mitigation the shields do.
End of quote

YOU FOOOOL!

Focus Fire doesn't increase damage mitigation, DAMAGE increases damage mitigation.

And for reference, a single Heavy Cruiser is able to cap another ship's damage mitigation on it's own. So stop it with the focus fire nonsense.
Reply #5 Top
It's very useful for quick fleet movements as well. If I need to PJ to another planet, with all my ships, I don't need to scroll out or click-n-drag, I just click the icon and I instantly have control over the entire fleet.
Reply #6 Top
You can set the formation to be "tight", in case you have certain abilities that work in a smallish radius like shield regen or repel; your ships in a fleet will try and stay closer to each other. Not so good if the enemy has a good aoe though
Reply #7 Top
YOU FOOOOL!Focus Fire doesn't increase damage mitigation, DAMAGE increases damage mitigation.And for reference, a single Heavy Cruiser is able to cap another ship's damage mitigation on it's own. So stop it with the focus fire nonsense.
End of quote


Except for the fact that the mechanic is an anti-focus fire mechanic procced specifically by events of damage being flagged?

Sure, 1 specific ship may be able to cause the focus fire proc to fire completely, but it's still usually multiple ships hitting one ship that yields the most negative returns from the anti FOCUS FIRE mechanic.
Reply #8 Top
Except for the fact that the mechanic is an anti-focus fire mechanic procced specifically by events of damage being flagged?

Sure, 1 specific ship may be able to cause the focus fire proc to fire completely, but it's still usually multiple ships hitting one ship that yields the most negative returns from the anti FOCUS FIRE mechanic.
End of quote

You obviously have no idea how the shield mitigation works.

There are no 'specific events' that 'proc' shield mitigation.
The mechanism is simply:
- For each X damage, Shield Mitigation increases by 1%.
- Shield Mitigation decays by 1.25% per second.

That's it, and it has NOTHING to do with focus firing at all.

There's two possibilities with the shield mitigation system.
1. You do 10 dps or less to each enemy ships, resulting in shield/hull regen negating a large part of the DPS (and AOE regen abilities completely negating all damage) and extremely slow kills (which will usually result in the enemy running away or killing your ships before you are done killing theirs).
2. You do more than 10 dps, resulting in the shield mitigation reaching the cap quickly (even only 25 dps will cap damage mitigation very quickly) and ultimately reducing the damage done by a maximum of 50%.

Option 2 is far superior to Option 1.



Ships will automatically focus fire whether they are in a fleet or not.
The only problem with the current system is that it will often auto-target enemies of the wrong armor type: fighters attacking heavy armors, bombers attacking light armor, LRM not attacking medium armor, etc.
Reply #9 Top
I like to split my strike force into 2 fleets. One will contain my stand-off weapons - LRM frigates, carriers, etc... The other will contain my close-in sluggers battleships, heavy cruisers, etc...
Both fleets will be led by a command cruiser with designate target ability and both will contain a balanced mix of support ships. I adopted this tactic when I started playing 2 on 1 matches where the AI usually outnumbered me by a considerable margin and now find it a lot easier to manage the battle. I agree with earlier posts that capital ships manually targeted by either of my fleets tend to die quickly. Thus far my experience is single player against the AI.
Reply #10 Top
fleets give you many logistical abilities. For one, you can set a waypoint of your frigate or capital ship factory on your fleet icon. Then any new ship will automatically join that fleet and move to wherever that fleet is. Its also a lot easier to see what all you have in your fleet as it will be shown on the left hand side. Be sure to have "stack" selected so that you just see numbers of vessels. Much easier to look at. You also dont need to seperate different kinds of ships in one strike force to two different fleets. You can simply hotkey certain ships in one fleet. For instance, you can have a fleet of say 2 caps, 10 heavies, 10 flak, and 40 lrms. If you want to manage the lrms seperately you can simply select all of your caps, heavies, flaks, and put them on hotkey 1. Then select your lrms and put them on hotkey 2. Now you can also put your whole fleet on hotkey 3 if you want. Then you can make everyone jump to a system by using #3 (or selecting the fleet icon) and focus fire the components of your fleet through hotkeys 1 and 2.

Maintaining more than one fleet is useful for defending/controlling different zones of your empire.