I'm playing in a 40 planet one, just to get a feel for things. I plan on doing a 80 planet one next, and up a difficulty or two, 3 has been pretty easy so far.
Awesome, that's really cool. I'm glad to hear from people who are playing the smaller maps (less than 80), since that's a recent addition and not something that I've extensively tested the balance of myself. Glad it's been pretty reasonable and fun -- in an 80 planet map, as you might imagine, it is much harder just to
find the stuff you want to capture, let alone capture them.
I've hopped over three planets so far, and just found one of the A.I.'s core command stations. Not certain my current fleet is up to the job, but going to try anyways. Those cutlass's make short work of things when you've got Mk III and IV ones, they burned through a quarter of an ion cannon in about 30 seconds. They all died doing it, but that's pretty handy.
Sweet, sounds like you're being very effective in general there. Nice work!
Interesting, I could see that happening, but the only things in the system were the 4 Mk I cruisers. When I was giving them a move order to go through the Cruisers, once they got close they would stop completely. If I get attacked again by cruisers somewhere, I'll see if I can duplicate it. In mixed battles they've been working perfectly.
Hmm, okay, this must have something to do with their preference to not attack stuff that they will just kill themselves on, or something along those lines. When you give your cutlasses move orders, by the way, they will not attack enemies until they reach the end and then retarget. This is by design, since if you wanted them to chase and kill enemies you'd just leave them alone (or I guess put them in attack-move mode or free-roaming defender).
I have another hypothesis to try on you: can you check that planet where this happened, and see if there are any cloaked ships there? As in, probably mines? You should be able to see their count on the galaxy map intel summary, unless it was something that decloaked and attacked you at the time. Cutlasses should not react to cloaked ships unless those ships decloak, but it just occurred to me as something to wonder about, if it turns out this is a bug. I doubt you'll find anything, but thought I'd ask while you are still in the same scenario.
Speaking of which, I love the way ships choose who to attack in this. It's fun watching them all move on to a new target because the old one, while still currently alive and kicking, has 100 missiles enroute to ruin his day.
Haha, awesome -- yeah, Keith's suggestions on this front were really good, I think this really ups the feeling of power that players have. Glad that's a hit!