Station fleet question

[Delta5o1]

If I create a station; will the combat ships I assign also protect the miners and traders of that station in sector? Or do I need to assign combat ships to each miner/trader?

[Rastuasi]

Last time I tried, they only seem to defend immediately around station. I had to assign em to each miner It would be great for the station to keep the combat fleets defending where the miners are, similar to carrier position defense without multiple covered spots .

[Scoob]

They don't they just, in effect, "protect position" around the station. They will attack hostiles, even if said hostiles have not directly engaged the station.

It would be great if they assigned defensive ships to subordinates. X Rebirth actually did this, you would assign ships to a Station and the Capital Ships would patrol the station - in a large square, flying around it consistently, not "wandering" around as in X4 - with smaller ships often automatically assigned to be wingmen for subordinates. It was good, but we had NO control over this behaviour.

It would be quite nice if a station could have a "pool" of ships assigned, that would in-turn, be assigned to protect M-Class Subordinates for example. We'd need control of this though.

I do think it's a significant missing feature, that we have no ability to assign subordinates and have them automatically reinforced from a "pool" of ships or a designated Wharf (player or other faction). I personally used to assign a handful of Fighters and a Corvette or two to ALL station M-Class Miners, to help defend from the inevitable Kha'ak raids that Miners provoke. This is currently a totally manual process.

[Mightysword]

They don't they just, in effect, "protect position" around the station. They will attack hostiles, even if said hostiles have not directly engaged the station.

A problem I feel that would be easily fixed itself if the radius can be extended to beyond 40km. I wonder if this is due to actual engine/performance limitation, or an just an artificial restriction.

[adeine]

I do think it's a significant missing feature, that we have no ability to assign subordinates and have them automatically reinforced from a "pool" of ships or a designated Wharf (player or other faction). I personally used to assign a handful of Fighters and a Corvette or two to ALL station M-Class Miners, to help defend from the inevitable Kha'ak raids that Miners provoke. This is currently a totally manual process.

Have you had much success with that? I've tried assigning escorts to M miners throughout various points of X4's history, and they haven't really saved them in the event of trouble unless I manually micromanage them. They tend to either wander too far away to get there in time, get separated in travel, or engage from a distance slowly approaching without travel drive by which time the M miner is already dead.

[KextV8]

Have you had much success with that? I've tried assigning escorts to M miners throughout various points of X4's history, and they haven't really saved them in the event of trouble unless I manually micromanage them.

Because of the way low attention works, an m miner can be wiped out in one turn by a well rolled random equipped attacker. There isn't anything you can do about this other than never letting your m miners go into low attention. Obviously that is not practical. Escorts can reduce the losses but not prevent them. And for the cost of the escorts you can simply toss an L miner at the problem instead with even better results than an escorted M miner.

[Scoob]

Have you had much success with that? I've tried assigning escorts to M miners throughout various points of X4's history, and they haven't really saved them in the event of trouble unless I manually micromanage them. They tend to either wander too far away to get there in time, get separated in travel, or engage from a distance slowly approaching without travel drive by which time the M miner is already dead.

That's the issue. Subordinate ships seem to either rush ahead of the ship they're supposed to be protecting, or lag behind it. Or, they might rush ahead, realise they're ahead (rarer) then travel back to where their leader was at the time they realised, but the leader has already moved on. It's sorta comical really. Basically, for a subordinate ship to stay in proximity to its leader, when said leader is moving, is RARE.

Eventually, when the ship starts mining, the subordinates usually catch up, so the Miner is protected at that point. However, when travelling anywhere, it's likely NOT to be protected.

Ships with subordinates NOT using highways was added to help prevent M and S-Class Fleets from breaking up, but they break up regardless. Every now and again, I'll see ship move perfectly in formation of distance in-sector, but it's by far the exception. This splitting up of ships has been reported time and time again since the game's launch, but the devs seem to struggle to get it working reliably.

Note: in an attempt to alleviate such separation issues, I've ensured that the leader (the Miner) is SLOWER in both regular and travel mode than the ships protecting it. This made no difference. It's the AI "escort" logic that's broken here. Exceedingly frustrating to see a ship fall to an attacker, when the OVERWHELMINGLY superior fleet that should be protecting it is AWOL.