The AI Fleet management is soo bad man...

[Bozz 💀]

I've played around 400 hours now and honestly they are many things about the AI fleet management that is just completelly broken, ort I don't know what I'm doing...
I put most of my fleets on Defend and they all going into ennemy territory to raid bases and whatever... while our borders get crossed by the ennemy empire fleets stations get destroyed and colonies get taken... It's horrible.

I want my defense fleets to only defend my territory, not go into ennemy territory, I mean that's what defense is supposed to be, even if they are no ennemies incoming I want them to stand in my territory and wait for someone to attack because if they go on an attack mission and someone attacks us they will be too late to defend or out of fuel...

I just want AI to defend while I use manual fleets to go into ennemy territory and finish them off.

Same for bombardment, my fleets all of a sudden stop bombarding and go hunst ships... I mean if I tell them to bombard I don't wan't them to do anything else or I would not have told them to bombard...

[DarkM4773r]

Darn, such an awful in-game experience. I told a patrol fleet to patrol their system and then they went "derp" and warped to a neighboring system instead.

[Navy~]

Hey, do you have the "military attacks" in the military tab set to auto? Try to set it on manual, your defence fleets will still intercept the incoming fleets, but they will not be auto asigned to "military attacks" from that list of targets (shift F12).

[SgtScum]

I know its a pain but you have to go into the fleet templates and set them up how you want with the conditions you want then save it so you can use it every new game. Default ai fleet behavior is well, not optimal. But once you get it all hammered out your fleets will more or less behave like you would expect. Even with that you should always stash a few manual fleets at locations that can easily get to hot spots and back up the ai plays.

[Kitsuka]

Military attack orders and your diplomatic stance/policy with every other empire and pirate determine how your automated fleet behaves.

[SgtScum]

Yep that too. There are multiple layers that goes into how your fleets position via automation. Say you have several border empires two of which you are friendly with trade pacts and set to ally on the diplomacy screen with one that hates your guts and is set to conquer or undermine your defense fleets will primarily position near the hostile border.

[DrPhiloponus]

Looks like you have some settings wrong. It's not easy because there are much interwoven mechanics. I played for 700 hours now and have no problems with AI fleets not doing what I want.

[Bozz 💀]

hmmm thanks guys, will look into that, most of this I did not know ^^

[DrPhiloponus]

Originally posted by Bozz 💀:

hmmm thanks guys, will look into that, most of this I did not know ^^

What helped for me was turning off all automation and then turn one features on to see what it does then off again and the next on. But probably you need to be a fanboy for that. There are also decent steam guides and You Tube videos.

[jorgen_cab]

Yes... the games automation is very complex which is both a strength and weakness. It means that you can make it do almost anything you want but it will take some time and effort to understand how it work.

It is not a game for their faint of hart that is for sure.

People usually complain about the lack of automation in other games and the minutia of running large empires in most 4x games, that is exactly what this game tries to fix and actually do quite well.

The problem is that if you want good automation it will be very complex as you need to accommodate some many things for the player to control together with automation AND have it do what the player expect it to do at the same time.

Automation is not just a switch you through on and then the AI understand automatically what you want. You have sort of program it with the many different switches in the game so it behave the way you want it too.

It is a very good suggestion to turn automation on one by one to see exactly what they do and how they work. There are many levels of influences in different places that decide how a fleet operate such as fleet templates the fleets automatic settings itself, diplomacy screen and policies. You must decide what parts you want to control yourself and what parts you want the AI to control and then try an guide the automation to behave the way you want and not expect it will behave the way you want automatically.

[Bozz 💀]

I'm 350 hours into the game, it's sure one of the best 4x space games I've ever played.
I think I will try to do what you guys suggested, already saw some guides to help me improve.
Now gonna look closer into the automations.