Stop the auto formations, they actively hurt you

[h45yang]

Just give the option to have formations stay at exactly what I manually set it as.
I don't need my fighters to auto form giant 20-ship wings, who the hell thought that was a good idea?
And when I manually cancel formation, I can actually see them target properly, only to have them literally revert in front of my eyes due to auto-forming into new formations.

Fights now have become a microfest of selecting my units, cancelling formations, and ctrl boxing over and over again. This is significantly worse than even cycling through unit abilities.

[h45yang]

Another serious suggestion is manually triggered formation size reblancing and/or subdivision.
E.g. if you have a group of 5 and 11 fighters, rebalance so they're 2 groups of 8,
if you hit subdivide, maybe go from 2 groups of 8 to 4 groups of 4, and then again to 8 groups of 2.
Perhaps instead of dividing, rebalance so the total number of groups goes up by 1.
e.g. 2 x 8 -> ~3x5 (1 group of 6) -> 4x4 -> 5x3 ( 1group of 4) etc

[h45yang]

Additionally, it might help to have a "select formation of this unit" hotkey combo.
E.g. if you capslock+click on a unit in a selection, it'll select all of its squadron.
or if you have some number of units selected, double tap B to select the union of their formations.

Also, if there were some good way of understanding which units are grouped together into formations within a selection would be nice.
For example, if you select 10 units, and 3 of them are in a wing, 5 of them in a claw, and the remaining 2 are part of a wall (including 3 unselected), it would be nice to tell some or all of that information from the UI at a glance.
(e.g. symbol for formation type,
|with a numerical indicator like 2/5 to indicate 2 out of 5 in the formation are selected,
put the ones in formation adjacent to each other, and add a border)

[Dante]

This drives me nuts too. If it weren't for that, the combat would be good enough, but I just can't make the ships do what I want without individually selecting them and issuing attack orders.... horrible micro.

The worst part is, even when you do want a formation, there's arbitrary size limits on it.

Put a bunch of ships in a sphere formation and tell it to guard something big? Instead of adding more points to the sphere like in HW1, the game will literally make additional sphere formations and overlap them so there's multiple ships trying to cram into a single point.

Or when I had a bunch of caps in a wall formation.
Or at least I tried to. Two of them decided they were going to be the start of a second wall formation.
It's retarded.

[Flushing]

Originally posted by h45yang:

Just give the option to have formations stay at exactly what I manually set it as.
I don't need my fighters to auto form giant 20-ship wings, who the hell thought that was a good idea?
And when I manually cancel formation, I can actually see them target properly, only to have them literally revert in front of my eyes due to auto-forming into new formations.

Fights now have become a microfest of selecting my units, cancelling formations, and ctrl boxing over and over again. This is significantly worse than even cycling through unit abilities.

For the time being, you can set to "no formation", which seems to work best for frigate and capital ships.

For fighters and corvettes, it's good to move in a formation, and after or right before your first volley, to switch to sphere formation.

[Flushing]

Originally posted by Dante:

This drives me nuts too. If it weren't for that, the combat would be good enough, but I just can't make the ships do what I want without individually selecting them and issuing attack orders.... horrible micro.

I agree. One workaround is to set your ships to Guard core targets with Aggressive behavior.

The result seems to be that they will actually fire at targets within the effective range of what they are guarding without you needing to manually call targets. And, they will return to their original location.

Do it on things like mothership, capital ships, and resource collectors.

I get that you shouldn't have to do that and it should be their default behavior, but it works pretty well.

[Dante]

Originally posted by Flushing:

Originally posted by h45yang:

Just give the option to have formations stay at exactly what I manually set it as.
I don't need my fighters to auto form giant 20-ship wings, who the hell thought that was a good idea?
And when I manually cancel formation, I can actually see them target properly, only to have them literally revert in front of my eyes due to auto-forming into new formations.

Fights now have become a microfest of selecting my units, cancelling formations, and ctrl boxing over and over again. This is significantly worse than even cycling through unit abilities.

For the time being, you can set to "no formation", which seems to work best for frigate and capital ships.

For fighters and corvettes, it's good to move in a formation, and after or right before your first volley, to switch to sphere formation.

Not in my experience.
"No Formation" is what I want. What I get is a custom formation instead.

Let me explain. If I put a bunch of frigates or something in 'no formation' and issue an attack order, if I then deselect and re-select the group, boom, they are all in a 'custom' formation.

No, 'no formation' doesn't work. At least I can't make it work.