How to not play Hereos of might and magic 3 tactic?!

[Wingsofdomain]

This is when I wanna say: "Basicly the title says it all". 'cause I really beilive (and hope) that you don't understand what it is.... So I am going to explain to you how I play Hereos.

1. You put all forces on the same hereo.
2. You kill everything that stands in your way cause your force is more pwerful than anything else since you have, unlike the computer, koncentrated all your troops at the same place.

I am not a RTS player I am a "click the same buttom repeatetly unti you win"-gamer (as you describe FPS games). So I have never adopted any other strategy.... So how do I play AI wars?

1. Build ships to cap.
2. When you attack bring all your fleet (whole your fleet?)
3. When attacked bring back whole your fleet

This is a problem when you have 8 planets in a chain with the homeplanets at one edge and the planets you wanna conquer and progress with on the other edge.... Cause I move whole my fleet through 8 planets whever my homeplanet is attacked or I wanna progress with the conquering. We are right now playing with crossplanet attack too, which....erhm... makes it kind of hard defending 4 different planets on 2 edges of our realm.

So I wanna know how you ....urm start playing sensible? or how you forget this "put all forces together" thought without just getting pwnd. Actually I don't excpect any really good answers but I want to open a discussion, and see what comes to the surface. So share your thoughts!

Additional points (not nesecary to read):
*The AI eye hasn't stoped me from using this tactit since I easly snatched it with bomberstarships and cloaker starships. Although the AI eye has changed but I have not played since
*In hereos you also wanted to lvl up your main hero so you gave the same hero all the battles too. Played like this in all hereos of might and magic games.
*When speaking about the crossplanet function it's also a late version when the AI waited outside a wormhole waiting for the FF to go down on human planets. So they attacked whenever I moved the bombarstarships.
*I Haven't been playing AI wars BECAUSE my brothers computer kind of exploded....and I play AI with him. So thats the reason why I am not updated. Although the hunger for playing the game is too strong....I have to be active at the forum.
Edit: * Apperntly, I am not alone with this strategy...this is what I read 5 sec later after I posted this thread:

Yeah I'm still learning to play strategically and not just 'select all ships, click on bad guy' so this may be a tool that is better wielded by a more experienced player.

[BobTheJanitor]

If you want to use less of the 'everything in a blob' tactic, it can help to become friends with the "L" key. Select ships, hit L and you now have half the ships. Hit it again and you have half of those. It makes it easy to get a group of ships to leave behind when you're going elsewhere with your fleet. I usually try to leave 50-100 ships on any border worlds while my main fleet(s) are off doing other things. This is enough to handle smaller waves with my turrets helping, and if it's not enough at least it slows them down enough for me to pull back other forces.

[Wingsofdomain]

If you want to use less of the 'everything in a blob' tactic, it can help to become friends with the "L" key. Select ships, hit L and you now have half the ships. Hit it again and you have half of those. It makes it easy to get a group of ships to leave behind when you're going elsewhere with your fleet. I usually try to leave 50-100 ships on any border worlds while my main fleet(s) are off doing other things. This is enough to handle smaller waves with my turrets helping, and if it's not enough at least it slows them down enough for me to pull back other forces.

True.... I actually do use it and since I started with it it has actually helped. Btw Shift+L gives you a third of the ships.

[Echo35]

If you want to use less of the 'everything in a blob' tactic, it can help to become friends with the "L" key. Select ships, hit L and you now have half the ships. Hit it again and you have half of those. It makes it easy to get a group of ships to leave behind when you're going elsewhere with your fleet. I usually try to leave 50-100 ships on any border worlds while my main fleet(s) are off doing other things. This is enough to handle smaller waves with my turrets helping, and if it's not enough at least it slows them down enough for me to pull back other forces.

LOVE that hot key. It's absolutely vital for some things.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah my only problem with it is that it tends to prefer to get one of everything within your selection. Which sounds fine, except it means for units that you might only have one of, like starships, that they end up in the selected group. And since I primarily use it to chop my forces down to a small guard force for a planet, I always have to remember to manually go back and select the starships out of that group to move them over to my attack fleet instead. But that's just me; other people are probably more attentive.

[ShadowOTE]

With me blobbing is usually a combination of 2 things

1) I don't like hitting multiple targets at once, since it splits my attention
2) Usually I'm only focusing on one strategic objective at a time

As a result, I usually send most of my fleet to whatever I'm planning to hit at any given time, and generally keep my ships in the blob unless I need to do something special - bombers to hit an AI Eye or a special forces, for example.

[Sunshine!]

What would you do in a situation where you have multiple objectives, but limited time?  That's one good way to learn how to split forces effectively. 
Here's a scenario: there are 500 mk4 ships on a planet, and you need to destroy the warp gate, and the AI eye (and there are 3 guard posts on the planet).  You have mk2 ships, so there's no way you can take on the enemy in a head-on confrontation, so you've dropped a Mk3 EMP on the planet and now have 120 seconds to complete your objective.

For me, I will assign all my ship types to different control groups - fighters (1), bonus1 (2), frigates (3), bombers (4), bonus2 (5), etc., and send each control group after a different objective.  Mixing the forces isn't usually the best idea, because the frigates will slow everything down, and there's not really much point in sending fighters with bombers to attack a forcefield.  If I have starships, I'll distribute them as-needed in the groups, but as a general rule light starships, and flagships will go with the frigates (They're slower than fighters and bombers - they may go with one of the bonus ships if they match the speed better/the situation needs the bonus ship to have the muniboost), bomber starships go with the bombers, dreadnoughts and raid starships are their own control group, and riot starships will usually form their own control group and hang around near the bombers in case things take a bit too long.  Zenith and Spire starships I don't usually get a chance to unlock.  IIRC Spires are fast enough to go with either bombers or fighters, but the huge range difference makes grouping them not that great of an idea.

When it comes to defense (I always play with schizophrenic waves), these control groups are necessary for me - if you hold down your FRD button and right click on an enemy ship, your selected ships will hunt down that specific AI ship first, and then move on to others.  I'll assign my fighters to FRD hunt the enemy bombers (if the enemy has melee ships, those are actually priority, and I'll probably assign my bonus ship to hunt down the bombers instead), frigates FRD hunt the enemy fighters, I usually keep my bombers out of the fight (expensive and time consuming to rebuild, with short range and get eaten very quickly by enemy fighters), and bonus ship(s) hunt enemy frigates if the fighters aren't hunting melee ships.  It doesn't so much work to blob in defense because your ships are all suffering from each other's weaknesses - your blob is going to suffer from low speed (frigates), making the short ranges of your fighters and bombers much less easy to work around, which means you're going to take more losses to your fighters from enemy frigates before your fighters get in range (because your bombers can't get to them), which means more bombers get through, which means problems for your fixed defenses.

[ShadowOTE]

When I do have to split my attention, I usually make use of the pause button - it's not that I can't, rather that I prefer not to

As far as defending with a fleet, normally I try to take a good choke and put my fleet under some mid to high tier FFs, then surround the (hopefully only) wormhole with a ton of turrets and leave my fleet a bit back to hit anything like raptors that slips through. Then again, it really depends on the situation - sometimes that doesnt work, in which case I do tend to split my fleet by ship class so they can hit targets they have bonuses again more effectively.