https://i.imgur.com/k4ihKJg.png
The detection range of the ships seems to be a little more than 40 km. The vertical ellipse, the dotted one, was aligned with hexagonal cells and covered 10 cells, meaning that each cell is 4 km in height and the blue circle fits pretty well within the dark red cells. Maybe the range is actually be 45 km.
In the next measurement I told my ships to attack enemies. There are other ships so the dark red "vision" cells cannot be used to measure the area. However I used Paint to draw a lighter blue circle on top of the attack circle and moved it such that the Dragon Raider was at the middle: I actually positioned the Paint circle by aligning its anchor points (top, right, bottom and left) with the vertical and horizontal lines around the ship. Hard to explain but easy to undertand if you do it.
]https://i.imgur.com/LadOXWY.png
My Dragon Raider fleet had not detected the enemies, which were within the 40 km range (other times they are closer to the enemies and still do not see them) and I had to tell them to attack. Based on this it feels like the detection range of the "patrol" command is smaller than the detection range of the "attack targets in range" command, smaller than 40 km. And yes, if my Dragon Raider gets sufficienly close it does attack the Khak (just haven't measured that yet), so this is not an issue with Global Orders.
Do we know the actual detection range of ships in a patrol? It feels like that (less than) 40 km range is too small for a patrol to be effective. Or at least it should respond to my other ships being attacked by flying there. That would be more in line with what I would expect a patrol command to do.
Here are two modifications I would like:
- Patrol and collect the collectibles dropped during combat.
- Draw a circle around ships to show their detection range.