How to manage your ships in battle?

[Mithror]

What's the best way to mange your ships in battle? Say you have gathered your main attack fleet at the entrance of the planet you want to attack.

- How do you send your ships through? All in one bulk, certain ships before others?
- When you arrive at the planet, where do you send which ships?
- Do you use attack move a lot or do you just move ships closer/further according to their range?

Somehow, when I enter a system, the entire planet goes after me, so there are hundreds of ships flying at my fleet. I generally attack move my blob the near the entrance I came out until I have destroyed to bulk of the forces that come at me. Though often I lose patience and just attack move them from guardian post to guardian post. Or if I'm really impatient, I destroy the OCS and watch where the bulk of the forces go to and send my fleet there.

I find myself doing very little positioning, but that is mainly because I'm having a hard time figuring out which ships I need to postion and where. If the AI is just throwing everything it has at me, it's kinda hard to create specialized assualt groups to deal with them because they usually consist of very different ships themselves.

Also, would a better strategy be to try and blitz guardian posts and then retreat, repeating until only the wormhole and OCS are still standing? And only then moving in with my main attack fleet?

Do the same tactics apply when assaulting the AI homeworld? How do the core worlds react to an attack at the homeworld?

[PineappleSam]

1] The AI eyes

In my current game I have a fairly substantial fleet (1500 ships of various marks) and a few special vessels. If the planet has an AI eye I'll start the assault by sending a small number of ships to take it down... ideally something cloaked, fast, or highly armoured so I can get in and out with minimal casualties.

I've been wanting to get hands on a golem so I captured an armoured one early one, and it has been tasked to fly in and pop the eye on any planets I come across with one. Assaults from there then split into two versions

2a] The planet has super-weapons I want.

I'll send in the portions of my fleet immune to the weapon, along with *distractions*. In my current game this involves autobombs and Z shredders... although some shredders will stay back, as the ones I have were just from a popped Z-reserve box and their children. I'll try and take out the command centre as quickly as possible and then move in forcefields and a colony ship to capture the planet... with the forcefields moving to protect the super-weapons and anything else like advanced factories of fabricators I want protected. I leave ARS to fend for themselves though.

2b] The planet has super-weapons that I don't care about

The golem or anything immune gets sent in and tasked to blow them up.

2c] The planet has no major weapons

Nothing special happens.

3] and then...

The rest of my fleet then comes in as a blob and gets ordered to take out the big threats with shift + right-click while the Z shredders and anything else that can't hurt buildings get stuck into FRD mode. My priorities are:

First: Zombie guardians
Second: Gravity guardians
Third: All other guardians, usually in descending order of DPS
Fourth: Starships
Fifth: Z-Reserves, if I can support them
Sixth: Guard posts outside forcefields
Seventh: Guard posts under forcefields
Eighth: Fleet ships
Ninth: Forcefields

4] The end

From there I'll either pop the command station and colonise, move on or sit still for repair. If the planet isn't worth taking but will still function as a gateway to the AI I'll take down the wormhole guardians to avoid the constant damage.


That's my standard plan, but I have some exceptions. If there's a superfortress then I've found a couple of spire rams will take them down, and before the golem when I came across a well-guarded eye I found that rams again solved all my problems! If the planet has several hundred ships wandering around then I'll send in the Martyrs and corral as many as many enemy ships as possible into one spot before detonating the Martyrs in sequence... starting with engine damaged ones*.

I'm about to take on the AI homeworlds though, so I suspect different tactics will be needed. I'll let you know how it goes!


-Pineapple


*No engine damage in the new update though!

[Echo35]

I find myself caring less about position, with the ranges as long as they are, and more about fleet composition and what targets I'll attack first. I find it more useful to split off ship types and attack what they're good against (Send the fighters after the bombers, send the bombers after the AI Eye or Golems, etc) than figuring out exact positions for everything. Like I said, ranges are relatively huge in this game, so it's not as micro and nit picky as a more traditional RTS like Starcraft may be.

[Suzera]

Use full ship caps all the time every time except maybe against mk 1 or 2 worlds. By midgame, I am just blowing things up with respect to speed for the most part (except AI Eyes first) because losses are all replaced pretty much immediately as they die. When the planet is done, I am back to full ship caps already.

I'm probably going to commentary my next video feed of the game (and soup up my settings again for better quality hopefully) so I can make that clearish if you want more micro details. It's hard to list it all out.

Common priority targets to microkill first:

1) Attack boosters
2) Tractor guardians
3) Starship killers

[Mithror]

Hmm, I'm kinda the same, where I only attack when I have full ship caps, except for like Mk I and II planets. However, when I finish capping planet I usually don't have my entire ship cap built yet. I always wind up being in the red for a rather long period of time.

Do you built Mercenary ships btw? I try to build them whenever I'm having a positive flux of income, but that leaves me dry when I need to actually build my own ships, so maybe that is a reason why it takes me longer?

[Suzera]

I never ever EVER build merc ships. If I am full resources, it's because I forgot to attack stuff for a few minutes. Worst case, a lot of the crystal goes away during attack waves because turrets cost loads of crystal, and having it saved up for that helps a lot in recovery.

Merc ships don't count as ships. They're like warheads. Too expensive to use. Merc ships in resources, warheads because of AIP cost.

[Echo35]

Do you built Mercenary ships btw? I try to build them whenever I'm having a positive flux of income, but that leaves me dry when I need to actually build my own ships, so maybe that is a reason why it takes me longer?

I've used them on occasion, for example, when there was a very powerful AI planet that I needed to take and the only ship at my disposal that was particularly strong against whatever ships the AI had were merc ships. Otherwise they're too expensive. I also used to build them when I had a ton of resources and maxed fleet counts, though now that Parasites aren't broken anymore, I find that happening less frequently