Understanding Fleet Commands and Default Behaviors

[Sticky]

Best way to explain the Fleet commands that you assigned a Lead Ship. After you assign them a Role to play you only control the Fleet Leader. And the Fleet Leader controls the Fleet, unless you intervene.

Before you add a ship to a Fleet give the ship a Default Command to do when he is not doing anything else. Like Protect the Fleet Leader, or Follow him. If you do not do this, After the Fleet Leader has completed his orders the Subs will fall into their DEFAULT BEHAVIOR. This is why so many get mad when the little ships dock and do nothing, they are just following their DEFAULT BEHAVIOR. Little ships should be set to Protect Their intended Ship By default.

After you set the Default behavior you are ready to assign them to the Fleet in a role best suited for them, Defense Attack or Intercept. Then the lead ship will take control of them when you give the leader a command, Or if you don't command the Lead ship to do anything the Sub's will follow their DEFAULT BEHAVIOR.

For example if you have properly setup a fleet ( you have surpassed a majority of people that are learning how to play ) If you tell the lead ship to Fly too the Sub's will follow their DEFAULT BEHAVIOR... If you tell the Fleet leader to Attack... He will take control of the fleet and the Subs will function according to their roles in the fleet.

You do not have to have all the ships in the fleet in the Fleet ( like all the little fighters ) you may want to have some of them in their own fleet and just stay docked to a carrier ready to be deployed by you at your dispense. Safer for them in some cases not to be in space.

Also if you have ships in a fleet you can still command 1 or all of them to do something out of the blue like place a Sat or some Laser Towers on their own. And if you command the fleet leader to do something like attack you may want to hit the Recall Subs or they will complete their task before joining back with the fleet.

Another Very important thing to keep in mind if you give a Fleet or Ship an order to Fly too, and you give him a command attack before they complete the Fly too, they will complete the task in the order they were given. UNLESS you remove all orders on the Fleet Leader and Recall subs if they were not doing their normal job. You can also click on the Fly too order on the map and remove that order and they will go to the next following order. When all orders are complete they will fall back on their DEFAULT BEHAVIOR.

Another Thing I DO is if a ship has Turrets i set turrets to Attack All Enemies, ( NOTE IF YOU CHANGE TURRETS OUT AT A EQUIPMENT DOCK OR SHIPYARD you need to reset the turrets. They may still shoot if set to defend after someone gets hit but if an enemy is close enough i'd prefer to shoot him FIRST.

[Sajuuk]

Just remember which ones have turrets set to attack all enemies when in range of a station. It can set off a chain reaction with friendly fire going after a criminal. Not an issue when OOS though.

[Sticky]

Good Point i have had my Bohemoth start attacking a criminal at a station and Turrets do have a quick command to hold fire but he was dead before i did enough damage or had time to tell turrets to hold fire.

[rodionivanov]

im too lazy to read , make a video

[Sticky]

Sorry i am almost there debating where to start is the issue being there is so much to learn and to much to teach. Might be Several Short Videos about certain topics might be the route i take.

[rodionivanov]

yes please , cause from what i kinda understand that fleet commands work cause thats what ai uses. i just would like to know the compositions.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Sticky:

Sorry i am almost there debating where to start is the issue being there is so much to learn and to much to teach. Might be Several Short Videos about certain topics might be the route i take.

I think doing a series on fleet management and tactics would be great and definitely help folk enjoy the game more. As you say there's a lot more to how this game works than meets the eye at first.

[chronobomb]

I set all my fighter 1 by 1 to default: protect ship. I switched them from defense to attack groups and it changed their default to many different behaviors. I wasn’t going to change them again 40 times.

Interesting thing is they changed to behaviors the pilots didn’t have the skill for. Because they were grayed out I was unable to change their behavior back to protect when I tried.

[Sticky]

Originally posted by chronobomb:

I set all my fighter 1 by 1 to default: protect ship. I switched them from defense to attack groups and it changed their default to many different behaviors. I wasn’t going to change them again 40 times.

Interesting thing is they changed to behaviors the pilots didn’t have the skill for. Because they were grayed out I was unable to change their behavior back to protect when I tried.

I will not say that having skilled fighters is not completely necessary, it is my belief that having even the fighters to 2 star pilots is adequate for taking orders from the Fleet Captain. 3 Star or above Fleet Captain is best in all cases. The Fleet Captain decides the formations and commands the Fleet.

In a way Fleets Captains are much like having a managers on your stations, you just assign the ships a role at a station and the station manager does what he wants to do with them.

But none the less the absolute worse thing i tried was setting a ship up in a fleet that is capable of docking to the ship he is protecting making the bigger ship stop and wait for him to complete docking, All this while in battle, the funny thing was the little ship would dock undock dock undock repeatedly.. In this particular scenario i Ordered the Fleet Captain to Fly to a place away from battle because it was getting too hot. The Fleet captain was recalling Subs to complete the Fly too command, but would get attacked and the Fighter would launch again.

This is why it is important to set the default behavior of the little ships before adding them to a role in the fleet. It will not let you set the role of default behavior after you add them to a fleet. But perhaps not all the ships need to have their default behaviors set, just the ships capable of docking. you can still manually command the little ships to dock even go repair in a far off sector while in the fleet and having their default behavior set to Protect Ship. After they repair they will fly back to the lead ship (when all orders are complete) and protect it with no issues.

Here is what would happen though if you do not set default behavior and told a ship to go repair. After he repairs he will wait at the dock until he is recalled by the Fleet Captain or manually by you.

But Default Behavior maybe some do not fully understand exactly what that is they are setting. This is why i really need to work on the Video. With that being said i'll till try to get something today.