Troop Commands

[Entrenched Homperson]

Whats the command that turns your units blue. I'm playing with someone online and they keep using it and it looks cool. Sometimes more useful then FRD.

Also I must have activated some advanced feature that gives me all these stats about the game as a giant tooltip that wont go away, it says in big letters COMMANDS and under another heading GAME TIME and a bunch of numbers and the music track and stuff.

Sorry didn't know where to post this but tryin to figure this out.
 

EDIT: Why do I have such terrible grammer? I have to pay attention to what I type.

[Ixiohm]

Yes, this game has a rather insane amount of cammands, hard to keep track of them all

The context window with COMMANDS and GAME TIME is the debug window, press F3 to close it.

The outline colors of ships that I know of are:
blue - Group move (G + right click)
red - Free roaming defence mode (V + right click)
yellow - Attack move, very usefull when taking of guardposts on enemy planets (X + right click) 

You can look up all these commands and a lot more under the 'View Controls' button in the game menu (Esc)

Happy gaming

[BobTheJanitor]

I always though of FRD as more of a purple, or hot pink. Group is clearly teal. And for attack move... let's go with lemon yellow.

I forget if i had a point when I started typing this.

[Entrenched Homperson]

Lol, It appeared like group move was really useful. MasrhalGykov had Sentinels and just moved them around space, decimating all in their slow, infinite range path.  My armored golem just provided "Cover Fire" lol.

[Red Spot]

Groupmove is a very potent tool, but it usually requires some purpose, which would often also be the reason why I would turn off auto-kiting (eg: when you have shieldbearers).
That said, there are about as many reasons to rush cheap units ahead of the more expensive ones.

[Panopticon]

Yeah, group-move is a situational command that can really be a benefit. One way I like to use it is to keep bombers and frigates together. That way the frigates (or any other slow, long-range unit you want to use) can cover the bombers on their way to the target while I use my fighter class ships for screening maneuvers.

This isn't always useful though, sometimes you need to get as many bombs as you can on target as quickly as possible.

[fiorenzospa]

Hmmm... interesting... I never used group-move. I think attakmove + autokiting works pretty well. The units move to the longest range they can fire and automatically my bombers and frigs stay far from close range enemies...

[BobTheJanitor]

Auto kiting has some buggy bits. Every time I turn it on, I like it, but then I end up turning it off because I find another way that it messes up certain units. And also some units like to kite back into the next guardpost over and bring some more friends to the party. 

[Red Spot]

It is simply not an 'auto-magic' feature, it requires a bit of micro.
It is you that has to set your fleet up in the first place, auto-kiting just keeps a distance between the unit and its active target, not all foes.

[BobTheJanitor]

When they're kiting backwards too far and picking up more threat, there's not a micro way around that. They're going to go out to that range, and that's it. The only fix is turning off the kiting behavior. Maybe if the kiting box allowed you to set all ships with max range less than X will kite, but currently it's for all ships with greater than X range. Since the problem specifically comes from long range ships... there you go.

[Entrenched Homperson]

There's no way to Micro? Couldnt you just order your ships to go somewhere else that didn't have a retreat trajectory pointing at a guard post? Draw a line between your units and the active target and where that line lands is where those ships are gonna go.

[BobTheJanitor]

Fair enough, you could constantly tell them to keep moving away from a guard post or what have you. That's a bit too much micro for me, though, since you're going to have to do it every time they pick a new target. I'd still really like the option to only have ships with a range of X or less employ kiting behavior so I don't have to worry about my missile frigates or other slow, long range ships getting so spread out.

[Red Spot]

If you do the following, where your ships are the 0, you should stop using auto-kiting

aaa
x0x
bbb

You ships cant go anywhere, so if you target an 'a' your ships will just be humped by a 'b'.

When you attack a box like this

xxx
xxx
xxx

Make your ships stay on side of the frag, dont cut corners*, and use the "Z + X" combi to see the AIs ranges in order to position your ships to take as little beating as possible.


*When you cut corners you basicly get the difference as illustrated below, you allow your flanks to be targeted.

0xx
xxx
xxx

or

0
 xxx
 xxx
 xxx

[Entrenched Homperson]

That range button has too uses.

1. Show extremely useful data about the ranges of myriad threats in a system.

2. Do it for extended amounts of time to lag your friends computer 

[Red Spot]

2. Do it for extended amounts of time to lag your friends computer 

It has a nice effect on defensive planets ...