Patrol Fleets + Satellites

[Julius Seizure]

Is it possible to set up a patrol fleet that will react to any hostile ships within a sector? I have tried setting my test fleet to Patrol & have placed a number of satellites down, but they still fly around randomly.

Not sure if I'm missing something or if it's not possible

Thanks

[conrado.lacerda]

Not possible.

However, when you get enough rep with any faction (27 or 28), their patrols will respond to attacks on your ships.

[Julius Seizure]

Thanks - that's a shame would be nice to have similar auto functionality with my own fleets. No doubt there's a mod for that, will have to try some out once I finish with the vanilla game.

[Dunkler Messias]

Not in Vanilla. Normally ships doesn't see the areas revealed by satellites. They mostly react to enemies in the scanner range of their ships. But there might be mods which will add a feature so ships will react to hostiles near satellites.

But yeah, patrols will fly randomy through the sector and ignore any hostile ships, even if they are attacking your miners nearby. If they are not in the scanner range, "they don't exist".

[「Hliey」]

The devs want you to micromanage every single battle, no matter how small or insignificant. They don't want the game to "play itself" so we have nothing to deal with Kha'ak incursions, pirates ect. Save for manually micromanaging ships to respond across your galaxy spanning trade empire.

Should you want a mod for it in future, "response fleets" fills the gap.

[Dunkler Messias]

Originally posted by 「Hliey」:

... so we have nothing to deal with Kha'ak incursions, pirates ect.

Well, at least for the Kha'ak you can just destroy their outpost or even the nest to prevent them from spawning for some time.
Pirates on the other hand will just spawn anywhere, doesn't matter if you destroy their stations. At least one could terraform project on "their" planet, but that is 1. endgame content and 2. a pretty annoying one since it is so far away from established trading routes.

[「Hliey」]

Originally posted by Dunkler Messias:

Well, at least for the Kha'ak you can just destroy their outpost or even the nest to prevent them from spawning for some time.

Well, of course. But I mean the endless attacks every few minutes from the Kha'ak until you do. Paralysing you from doing anything else until the station is destroyed, if you even have the means to early on, or it still takes ages early on without being able to buy/build loads of destroyers.

Meanwhile, you're losing M miner after M miner in the early/mid game, slowing things down and forcing me to focus only on the Kha'ak, responding to Kha'ak attacks and stopping me from do anything besides that.

And before the reply comes, not necessarily from you but; yeah yeah, blah blah, spam L miners only.

[Wraith]

Well you can still mine without L miner

For example kha’ak don’t spawn attack gas miner and ice miner

[The Big Brzezinski]

I think police function something like this. I had police fleets at one point organized in several squads of three fighters mimicking the commander. I think I observed that if one came across a threat like a Xenon ship or unmasked pirate, every police unit in the sector would converge on it.

It's still now terribly helpful, though, even if that's what was actually happening. You can only police sectors you control, and doing so risks angering visiting factions when they refused to submit to scanning, which has repeatedly led to their police attacking and destroying my innocent miner and trader ships. I've had to personally go and eliminate such rogue police squadrons at times.

My patrol fleets organized along the same lines have been more successful. The suppression of the Duke's Buccaneers has been one of my pet projects. In each of the five sectors they operate, I have a fleet made up of several mimicking patrol squadrons. These fleets include squadrons of destroyers, corvettes, and fighters, plus an auxiliary ship for repairs. Even though the squadrons all patrol on their own, they all still benefit from the auxiliary's presence because they are part of the same overall fleet.

[Gladius]

Of course, you can set up patrolling. But satellites are completely unnecessary for these purposes. In order for patrols to work the way you want, it is better not to use the “patrol sector” command. Then, as you described, the ships simply strip randomly around the sector in the hope of catching hostile ships, and most often they find no one. It is better to order them to patrol a specific area and fly along the trade routes you need by repeating orders. If you can’t figure it out yourself, I recommend a guide from YouTuber named Immi. The video is called "Ways to deal with Pirates." Have a good game!

[Daemonjax]

Pretty sure the "patrol" order is just for show. Like a parade. Unless they fixed it at some point. We can use protect position, but it's max radius is 40k. That's still pretty big. I usually bring it down to somewhere between 5 to 20.

[Apex Artist]

Well, the best you can do is gate block for enemies. So a crew at each sector entrance. Doesn't help against Kha'ak that spawn/originate within the system, of course.