Unit spacing, Attack boosters and you.

[Magitek]

Were the ranges on attack boosting ships modified after the spacing changes?
It seems .. difficult to get good usage of many starships attack bonus for smaller vessels. Basically, they need to be within melee range; kind of hard to setup while attacking, perhaps starships should bunt smaller vessels rather than try to find its place in a crowd, same with the repair station.

Perhaps a range boost with maybe, a limit on number of boosted ships would prove to be more effective in fleet battles?

Does anyone make good use of this mechanic? You can kind of cheese it into great effectiveness by ordering units backwards and forwards over the starship but its not my idea of uhh.. strategy.

also.. are there defense boosters? I haven't noted any yet. Would love to see some, or what I need to capture to get them.

[ldlework]

Group move.

[Magitek]

Hmm.. group move is alright if you continue moving, or going backwards and forwards like I had talked about earlier.

Unfortunately, even using group move, they do not maintain formation. At the end of the movement(and during), the attack booster will be squeezed out. I'll admit this actually works quite well if you put the waypoint much further out though; this way they take alot longer to change formation. Thanks for the tip.

[Kjara]

Part of the problem is most of the boosters have huge collision radii, meaning that they are unlikely to fit in the middle of a stopped group of units.  Perhaps we should have starships only collide with other starships?  Could argue that, everything else is so small in reality it would be moving around and between the huge starships.

Could then use the same logic for mines, and fix that problem as well.

[RCIX]

I always set my units to group move so they aren't picked off one ship type at a time.

I do like that idea though, but a couple of points:
 * Things aren't "colliding" right now, they just move out of the way...
 * What happens if you want to select some ships that are "under" the starships?

[x4000]

I'm not sure what "spacing changes" are being referred to, that hasn't changed in a looong time.  However, the ultimate solution to this is going to be the ship collision priorities, you can look those up in the forum if you want to add thoughts there -- this has come up before.

The munitions booster ability of the starships is really just an ancillary thing, a sort of nice to have, not something that is intended to be used as the primary function of the ships.  Munitions boosters themselves have a smaller radius and a better range, as that is their primary function.

[Kjara]

If its intended to only be a minor benefit, then its too powerful if you micro it properly.  Double damage is a huge boost.  Perhaps starships should have much larger boost ranges then they currently have but have smaller boost amounts.  Then you wouldn't have to micro, but they would still be worse at it than the dedicated units. (Mothership line 1.5x, raider line 1.25x?).

To be clear by collision radii I mean the amount of space that must be clear for a unit to stop in a location.  Starship's "size" is much larger(as they are bigger ships) which means if there isn't a huge gap in the middle(which will likely be randomly filled in by other ships before they get there) then they will displace to one of the edges.

[x4000]

Given the difficulty of such microing, I feel like the benefit is not out of line.  The rest of one's fleet would be languishing in such a case, so it will probably balance out.  But, as I said, the collision priorities thing will be the fix for this, when that arrives.

[Oewyn]

2 zenith starships and 2 spire starships give plenty of boost radius, enough to keep most of your fleet in +3 - +4 territory...  Highly recommended, and very re-usable unlike boosters which usually get picked off as your fleet gets smaller.