Ship defend ship order

[thekins]

Simple problem
I have a mining ship
I have a ship that i want to defend the mining ship
I tell the defending ship to defend the mining ship

the defending ship does nothing and watches the mining ship die
when the mining ship dies the defending ship then goes OH THAT SHIP IM GONNA KILL IT.....


What is the proper order to tell a ship to defend a ship?

[Dr4g0ncl4w]

i assume you are using the "defend for commander option", maybe you wanna try intercept instead.
though i'm not sure about fleet stuff, since it seems to bug out at times, at least at times i do notice ships that are in a fleet do not always follow their leader but at times sit 100+km away doing nothing (though no fights happening at that point, just a simple fly to order)

[Xenomorph]

A dev some come by and answer this. It'd be logical.

[Lucifer69]

It's easier to just set up repeat "attack all enemies in range" commands in the sector you want to patrol in. You just have to make sure the "bubbles" overlap a bit. This way they immediately target all enemies that pass through the bubble. If you have enough ships patroling, they can reliably shut down enemy attacks. This is what I use most of my Osaka and Katanas for. Just big guns boats shutting down gate access and cover miners.

That, or you can exclusively mine with large miners, and leave the mediums as transports between stations (on repeat commands as well). The large have enough turrets and shields to eat pirates and fighters.

At least until the various bugged commands get some much needed updates so that they work.

[thekins]

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

At least until the various bugged commands get some much needed updates so that they work.

Man I gotta be honest i wont hold my breath i dont think a single fleet option has worked in any X game to date everyone just had work arounds/mods to make the game work

Ahh well i guess my assumptions were right tho almost zero of the commands i tried did anything in terms of attacking a ship besides defend area but thats only a 40km bubble.

I picked up a mod called fleet reaction and while its still janky and honestly kinda bad it does actually work the ships do go in and try to defend other ships

The only problem is they are absolutely brain dead and turn off their travel drive like 3-10km away and slow boat in... The entire Xseries AI is pretty pathetic. I wish they would stop adding useless commands/buttons and just do something simple like
oh you know
KILL EVERYTHING in THIS sector... if its red go to it and make it dead
instead of this lol wait till the ship i want you to be linked to is nearly dead then try and come in from 4 sectors away oh and dont use travel mode.

[Lucifer69]

The problem is you don't understand. The is no AI in the game. At all. No X game has ever had AI. I really wish people would stop calling it that.

There's scripts. Lots of them. And here's the issue. One script depends on another, which depends on another, to all fire in order, and the many things each one has to check for. Change one tiny thing in one script and the whole system risks breaking.

Anyways, it's more accurate saying everything has to follow rules, with the rules having flaws. Such that ships and stations can some times ignore the rules. Kind of like real life actually. Some people ignore them, some don't care, others find ways to not have to follow them. Makes me wonder if this mechanic is actually put in the game. Lol.

[thekins]

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

The problem is you don't understand. The is no AI in the game. At all. No X game has ever had AI. I really wish people would stop calling it that.

There's scripts. Lots of them. And here's the issue. One script depends on another, which depends on another, to all fire in order, and the many things each one has to check for. Change one tiny thing in one script and the whole system risks breaking.

Anyways, it's more accurate saying everything has to follow rules, with the rules having flaws. Such that ships and stations can some times ignore the rules. Kind of like real life actually. Some people ignore them, some don't care, others find ways to not have to follow them. Makes me wonder if this mechanic is actually put in the game. Lol.

Anything other than basic functionality ie fly here attack that doesnt work or rarely if ever works
I would say its not them putting that into the game its flat out incompetence.

Modders make the game work better (this is true of a lot of games) but not to the point that the x games fail

[Daddy Shark]

Originally posted by Lucifer69:

The problem is you don't understand. The is no AI in the game. At all. No X game has ever had AI. I really wish people would stop calling it that.

There's scripts. Lots of them. And here's the issue. One script depends on another, which depends on another, to all fire in order, and the many things each one has to check for. Change one tiny thing in one script and the whole system risks breaking.

Anyways, it's more accurate saying everything has to follow rules, with the rules having flaws. Such that ships and stations can some times ignore the rules. Kind of like real life actually. Some people ignore them, some don't care, others find ways to not have to follow them. Makes me wonder if this mechanic is actually put in the game. Lol.

That's what an AI is. A bajillion scripts all running together.

[Lucifer69]

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. The closest thing we have to that in real life is machine learning as of now. You can train a computer to do one task, up to the point of generally being better than a human, but this isn't true AI.

We are still years away from general/ strong AI. A system which not only can match or exceed a human in everything, but one that can even improve itself. So no, this is not AI at all. Not only is it massively incompetent, it cannot "learn" from its own mistakes or adapt to the player.

That would be pretty cool though.

[Sabaithal]

Some of the "command" options don't work as intended yet, as far as I can tell. For S/M ships, that would be the "defend" option. You'd be better off setting S/M escort ships to intercept instead. They will proactively engage anything that gets close before the ship they are protecting gets hit most of the time.

For L/XL ships on the other hand, do not use intercept. Ships won't do jack if assigned to intercept. I would use defend for them instead, as they seem to intercept anything that tries to get to close to their escort. Attack is good to, depending on what you want to do with the fleet.

[thekins]

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

Some of the "command" options don't work as intended yet, as far as I can tell. For S/M ships, that would be the "defend" option. You'd be better off setting S/M escort ships to intercept instead. They will proactively engage anything that gets close before the ship they are protecting gets hit most of the time.

For L/XL ships on the other hand, do not use intercept. Ships won't do jack if assigned to intercept. I would use defend for them instead, as they seem to intercept anything that tries to get to close to their escort. Attack is good to, depending on what you want to do with the fleet.

I didnt mention it but yeah i tried both of those cases both times the ship died while the defender/interceptor watched and laughed while it died then were like woah YO THERES A XENON SHIP HERE GET ITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

[Lucifer69]

I kind of feel like a lot of people are running mods without understand the full scope of what some of these mods do. Especially mods that actively manipulate the scripts in the game in an effort to improve things.

This gets even more complicated with code in the game gets shuffled from an update completely breaking those mods, or other changes elsewhere. Then people come here to complain.

Me personally, the fleet commands mostly work for me in vanilla. Attack seems to only work when the lead ship is actively targeting something, defend seems to not do anything until something gets in range and actually attacks. Intercept seems to work for me, I have fighters consistently run out to kill Xenon who are over 10 km away from my Asgard.

What I wonder is if people are actually setting up wings or just mass assign every ship to one command? As in, pick a lead fighter. Then assign one to defend him, one to attack with him. Then assign the lead to intercept for a carrier. 2 ships per leader. Then however many of these groups you need. Corvettes and Frigates I mostly use for defense of my destroyers, the destroyers being all set to attack.

It's not a perfect system, and at times I do see them just sit there. They do however work. The key is only giving the commander of the fleet orders, not the ships in the fleet. Patrol is the command that is definitely jacked. Setting ships to defend a miner seems to not always work though. Not sure what that's about, but that's what my Behemoths are for. Cover them in flak turrets and set them to repeat attack all enemies in range. My miners are safe as kittens.

[Flavalicious]

Intercept for Commander works way better then defend. Defend requires the protected target to be hit, usually hull damage before the fleet reacts. Intercept is far more receptive and will trigger from just shield damage. Only draw back is sometimes they will lock onto ships not actively attacking, but this isnt normally a problem unless they decide to tag a destroyer or something else big.

[Lucifer69]

Idk about that, my Jians intercept targets faster than the turrets on my Asgard does. Before they are in range, the Jians have already moved after them. And yes, they are set to defend the Asgard. It doesn't always work that well though, but it does work. I'm pretty sure the only time my Asgard has taken damage is when I rammed a Xenon I with it.

I still stand behind my comment of the system not being as broken as people are saying it is since it seemingly works just fine for me. Even miners do a good job once you actually place probes. Patrol is the only command that doesn't do much of anything. Autotrader is right behind it, if the trade fails for a variety of reasons you'll have to manually empty the cargo most of the time.

It does seem to be a problem with defending miners for some reason though.

[Sabaithal]

Patrol works, it just doesn't do what people assume it does. Ships will wander across the sector, seemingly at random, but they have a strong tendency to gravitate towards stations. They might gravitate towards capitol ships as well, but I need to test that further.

They will attack anything hostile they come across. They will NOT respond to active distress signals.

However, this needs further testing, but I have noticed that fighter squads assigned to patrol (anything slower than fighters or some M sized ships is too slow to be useful for patrols) have a tendency to patrol areas that often come under attack, if applicable.

Again, that needs further testing, but I've noticed in multiple sectors when engaging either KHK raids or SCA destroyers that my fighters have a tendency to show up before the battle is over most of the time.

[Lucifer69]

They literally sit in the same spot.

I have a Tokyo, 4 Jians, 10 Gladius, and a Katana all assigned to patrol my main sector. I first ordered them to fly to an area on the edge so it's easier to keep track of them, then removed all orders and gave them patrol individually so no fleet shenanigans are at play.

Not a single one has moved in nearly 35 hours of game time. Closer to 55 if you count SETA usage. There's Asgards, stations, and many L miners. They don't gravitate anywhere. I've even tried it on a gladius in a sector with a single station and one Asgard. Still nothing after 30 hours.

So.... yeah, patrol is jacked. They don't need to wander around, just move to each station, follow miners, or monitor gate traffic. That's literally all you need them to do. As such, just setting up a repeat attack all enemies in range actually works. Just make sure to overlap the bubbles and have enough ships spread out so you don't have a long wait for one to be in range.