FIX the PATROL order please

[Jay aka Demy]

Im need a advice. How to give a order to my FLEET to defend something or defend themselves... patrol is broken.. what about Police order? Protect area? Or some patrol mod from workshop

[Dracon]

Yeah definitely needs fixing. Technically the Police license also doesn't do what the text suggests, but since it's apparently intended, the only thing that would need fixing is the text,

[Sesikee]

Absolutely on this.

I don't bother with patrol. I just set up alerts when KHK or Xenon show up then send one of my fleets in the sector to go smash it.

Now, patrol seems to work just fine for the NPC because they have their own fleet and they attack any reds, regardless of where they're at in the sector sooooo would be nice if the same can be applied to my fleets.

[TonK]

So for now doesnt exist any "automated" solutions how to defend sector??

Simply... i have few miners in sector.i wanna just one fleet there who be defending my ship in sector(not only my ship, whole sector)... Enemy ship (fleet) is spooted- my fleet charge them immediately. Dream for now? thx

[kaneeden]

Originally posted by TonK:

So for now doesnt exist any "automated" solutions how to defend sector??

Dream for now? thx

yes dream for now :-p
There is this mod, "reaction force" many people are using but it seems broken with the latest version when you attach subordinates so i would wait until this is fixed. can be any day now so.
edit: I have to add that originally the devs intended that once a ship on "police" setting is spotting an enemy the ships in the same sector on "patrol" should also come to help fighting these. But it doesn´t work in my opinion very well because the patroling ships are only going to check for those emergencies when reached their nav point before going to the next and not aborting their current destination. So in reality we see this police ship dying before the big destroyers even notice that there is something going on. So maybe this is going to be adressed in vanilla soon™

[The Big Brzezinski]

Two things we could use. First, patrol routes. Patrollers fly through a recursive sequence of points and attack any enemies they come across. Second, a "Defend Subordinates" role for stations. Ships thus assigned would rush to intercept for any trader or miner from their station that comes under attack (not harassment, if they get away on their own they don't need help).

[Bozz 💀]

best patrol command is making a repeat order for your fleet, and then choose several spots where to attack all targets, works best for me.

[Cythal]

Originally posted by Bozz 💀:

best patrol command is making a repeat order for your fleet, and then choose several spots where to attack all targets, works best for me.

Agree absolutely. Repeat orders is now best with many things you want automated. Effective Patrols like you said using attack objects in range. No targets move to the next.

I use up to 4 fleets, each with all three defend, attack and intercept subordinates. In there are some fast fighters to pull things from travel drive.

Also, Rules of engagement needs to be set appropriately, to make sure civilian ships do not escape.
Xenon = Ruthless
Khaak = Ruthless
Yaki = Ruthless [careful here, a small fighter fleet do not do well against the Yaki fleets, TER mission dependent reputation].

and, if needed
SCA = Ruthless [But can cause attacks on SCA stations if you don't want to clear them from the sectors like heretics end you may own]

Alerts for any military ship in owned sectors. If it has Marauder in its name as well as some other similar ones like Pillager, Raider, it is bound to be SCA, right click and set to hostile and carry on doing what you were doing. Also hidden SCA ships have ??? as the owner in ship info. Not sure if this is always true though. The set to hostile is not forever though i think as it seems to come off after a while if the ship has not been taken care off.

[HexCaliber]

Police and Patrol both work as designed, it's simply that they do not behave in the way some players expect.

Patrol has the assigned ships fly around the sector and attack any enemy ships or stations that come into range, they will not respond to enemy beyond that range.

Police has the assigned ships fly around a sector and scan ships for illicit goods, they will attack them if they refuse to drop any illegal cargo. Exactly the same as the NPC police ships. This will only work after you have setup a list of illicit goods in the global orders.

You are better off assigning small medium traders and miners with fighters for defence. Alternatively you could assign several ships to protect an area, each with overlapping zones of control. Useful in sectors where miners may be focused on a smaller area. And as already suggested setting up patrol routes, by using the new repeat command and set up a number of "attack enemy in range" commands around a specified area or along a set of waypoints.

[TonK]

Thank you very much guys for that tips... my last night was very flustrating :-D im new in game and lost most of my miners and fighters in patrol fleets, beacause two or three micro enemy fighters doing everything they want :-/ this bring me almost to start now... so for now is patrol comand useless (just fly to point B from A with closed eyes). I go setup and test some repeat orders! cheers

[Dracon]

Originally posted by HexCaliber:

Police and Patrol both work as designed, it's simply that they do not behave in the way some players expect.

Patrol has the assigned ships fly around the sector and attack any enemy ships or stations that come into range, they will not respond to enemy beyond that range.

Police has the assigned ships fly around a sector and scan ships for illicit goods, they will attack them if they refuse to drop any illegal cargo. Exactly the same as the NPC police ships. This will only work after you have setup a list of illicit goods in the global orders.

You are better off assigning small medium traders and miners with fighters for defence. Alternatively you could assign several ships to protect an area, each with overlapping zones of control. Useful in sectors where miners may be focused on a smaller area. And as already suggested setting up patrol routes, by using the new repeat command and set up a number of "attack enemy in range" commands around a specified area or along a set of waypoints.

Going by your own comment they don't work as designed at all, because they don't actually patrol but stay in the middle of the sector, doing nothing at all for a lot of people.

Police only works in your OWN sector btw, the text inclines that you can police other factions sector too though, if you have the license. This is however not true.
While players can scan faction ships, civilian ships will complain.

Since this is intended, the text needs a fix ;)

[TonK]

Originally posted by HexCaliber:

Police and Patrol both work as designed, it's simply that they do not behave in the way some players expect.

Patrol has the assigned ships fly around the sector and attack any enemy ships or stations that come into range, they will not respond to enemy beyond that range.

Police has the assigned ships fly around a sector and scan ships for illicit goods, they will attack them if they refuse to drop any illegal cargo. Exactly the same as the NPC police ships. This will only work after you have setup a list of illicit goods in the global orders.

You are better off assigning small medium traders and miners with fighters for defence. Alternatively you could assign several ships to protect an area, each with overlapping zones of control. Useful in sectors where miners may be focused on a smaller area. And as already suggested setting up patrol routes, by using the new repeat command and set up a number of "attack enemy in range" commands around a specified area or along a set of waypoints.

Originally posted by HexCaliber:

Police and Patrol both work as designed, it's simply that they do not behave in the way some players expect.

Patrol has the assigned ships fly around the sector and attack any enemy ships or stations that come into range, they will not respond to enemy beyond that range.

Nope... One little Khaak fighter destroy 3 of my 5 ship in partol(5x fullequiped nova)... my fighter fly in broken formation, to slow (about 200m/s), wtf? And that one little sh*t kill one by one fom behind and my fleet continuing in "patrol"... when i spoot that, i must manualy set thoose last two fighter with right click to attack... fuu, pain

[Cythal]

I have seen patrols work sometimes. It depends on the sensor range of the ships in patrol as said. If an enemy ship comes into the range, they will chase the enemy to attack. However, i think it works well with setting whatever enemy you have to Ruthless under engagement rules.

In my own sectors, patrol ships do move around. Sometimes one of the subordinates get stuck in place doing nothing. I just remove all orders and reassign the patrol. Sometime remove all order and assignments, recreating the fleet and then reissuing patrol default command also works.

I hardly patrol faction sectors as I tend to build most of my stations in sectors I own. so perhaps there may be issues with player patrol command in faction space.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Bozz 💀:

best patrol command is making a repeat order for your fleet, and then choose several spots where to attack all targets, works best for me.

I think this is by far the best solution as the game stands.

I know what many players expect is that they can put a fleet in a sector and it will immediately respond to any enemy encroaching anywhere within the sector and dispose of them, but it doesn't work like that because ships will only respond to enemies that come within radar range which is 40 Km as standard.

One could argue that if you have full satellite coverage of the sector your ships should be able to see any enemy and be able to attack it immediately, and there is obviously come merit to that argument, but for now they don't.

I suspect one of the reasons is that if the game was changed to allow for this then the NPC factions would have to be programmed to put up their own satellite networks, which they don't do now, so that they too could deploy a sector defence fleet and have it immediately attack any enemy encroaching within the sector (as at least anywhere satellite coverage was present).

This then poses two further game play problems:

1. It would mean that the players own fleets would be immediately set upon whenever they flew into an enemy sector thereby creating brick wall roadblocks in certain sectors. It is currently possible, with sufficient scouting and surveillance, to get a fleet through a hostile sector safely. It would obviously change game play significantly if that was no longer so.

2. It would introduce a new game concept of "satellite wars", i.e. one would seek to take down an enemy's satellites so as to enable your ships to pass undetected through enemy territory or to mount surprise attacks. Again the NPC factions would have to be programmed to do that too on the principle (which X4 holds to) that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

"Satellite wars" would thus create further issues in that NPC factions will have to be programmed to take a dim view of satellites anywhere (for their own ship's safety) resulting in the constant destruction of the player's own trade and surveillance satellites. This would be a super major PITA and is most probably why satellites are AFAIK not attacked at all in the game even by enemies at present.

So my 2c on this is that like virtually everything in X4 if you change something a bout this game, even if it seems sensible, there will almost certainly be unexpected knock-on effects that might not be sensible at all.

You always have to ask yourself when thinking "I would really like to able to...." whether you would actually like the NPC factions to be able to do that to you too

[Sesikee]

Originally posted by HexCaliber:

Police and Patrol both work as designed, it's simply that they do not behave in the way some players expect.

Patrol has the assigned ships fly around the sector and attack any enemy ships or stations that come into range, they will not respond to enemy beyond that range.

Bullcrap because the NPC attacks reds that are far out their range within the given sector. So you're flat out wrong that "patrol is working as intended."

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Sesikee:

Bullcrap because the NPC attacks reds that are far out their range within the given sector. So you're flat out wrong that "patrol is working as intended."

Do they? Personally I have never seen them do that. Conversely I have often seen them completely ignore enemies outside of their radar range which I happen to be able to see via satellites.

I have seen the Xenon in particular send reinforcements to bolster defence when I am already engaged with some of their ships, if that's what you are referring to.