al_dude wrote: ↑Wed, 12. May 21, 18:13
No point in star rating.
The trick to use destroyers to bomb station is like said above, use fly to. Let it approach a station close enough that it needs not to use its travel drive. It will slowly approach its target and use its main guns at its maximum range.
If it uses its travel drive, they have a tendency to stop right on top of a station, basically dooming itself unless you are dropping like 15 destroyers at once.
Now, that's for in sight combat. In OOS, it doesn't matter.
I can't get this to work. I meticulously spent like 2 hours lining up multiple destroyers using this method and for whatever reason, many of my destroyers just yolo'ed in and died anyway.
The honest truth is that commanding a fleet shouldn't be this hard. Just a few days ago the stupidity of the AI got me raging so bad, I actually like a immature child and posted a horrible rant on these forums about it. A game is supposed to be fun, not rage inducing and I really wish the devs would address this fact.
What finally induced me to rage was that I was in a fairly tight cluster of Xenon stations and I painstakingly managed to coax the Xenon Fleet about 20km away from the nearest station. I then ordered my destroyers to attack the Xenon Fleet. My expectation was they would fly toward the Xenon Fleet but stop short to engage them with their powerful frontal guns but nope. Half of them fly way, way past the Xenon Fleet, directly into the guns of the Xenon defensive platforms to slowly turn around and try to engage the Xenon Fleet. Needless to say they all got shredded in seconds.
I just honestly don't understand why the devs would design the command system and its AI execution this way. It seems to lack any sort of rational sense at all. I mean why can't your fleet, on order of attack, actually maintain formation and jump to, not past, the enemy when ordered to attack? And to the OPs topic, why can't you order a fleet to a position and have them maintain that position and bombard a station without going all yolo on it? It is not fun, at all, that fleet command is so arbitrary and frankly stupid.
I mean talk about immersion breaking. We are taking 4-5 star captains, in command of very large warships and they can't even hold formation, go where they told to go and do simple things like hold X km from the station and fire your long range guns. Grade Schoolers could probably handle these types of commands but not seasoned warship captains. Even outside the immersion factor, the fact that your fleets act so randomly and stupidly is near enough to just make the player throw up their hand and quit the game out of frustration. It honestly isn't fun, not in the slightest.
Also it shouldn't be like the devs don't know that the players feel this way about it. There has to be at least a 1000 posts and comments. This very topic about how to get your fleets to attack a station and bombard has to have come up at least a dozen plus times since I started playing roughly 2 months ago. So why don't the devs address it??
So yeah, fully support that OP on this. There needs to be commands added and honestly the AI entirely re-worked so that, at least at 4-5 stars, captains actually follow your commands with some degree of consistency and accuracy.
As far as it making it too easy to take out stations, that is a separate issue that can be address by changing the way stations work or how the enemy AI defends stations. I mean maybe the way for an AI to defend a station is supporting it with ships, i.e. an active defense instead of just guns on the station acting as a passive defense. Maybe the stations guns should have extended range to prevent enemies from just being able to sit an bombard them to death without risk? I mean a stations power generation capability should be many times that of a starship so give their main guns extended range. In any case, that can be solved in a different manner and I don't really care how as long as they make fleet command into something less painful and rage inducing.
