Redirection Rally Posts question

[Fleet]

Say I have two planets that each have a redirect rally post directed at the other. (or three, forming a circle). Does this mean that any ship entering any of those planets will rally to one of those posts, and enter the loop? I really like the idea of setting up a space dock to pump a ships that will cross-planet-patrol, but am worried that my forces i'm using for manual offensive purposes will get caught in the mix.

[x4000]

Yes, any ships entering those planets enter that loop in that case.  To get a ship out of the loop, just give it a manual order on that planet.

[Fleet]

I will just go ahead and predict some future general complaints. I can see issues where I'm on offense, but when I send ships back to my world I don't want them running off to other planets! I just want them to stay back so I can heal them up and resend them in. Or maybe I just wanted to regroup.

Or...really any case where I just want to move some ships to a planet in preparation for a general offensive. I often just select a whole planets worth of diverse ships, and send them to a planet a few hips out, where I will mount my offensive. In the meantime, I have a whole empire to manage, and will check back on my ships later and send them in to battle. I don't want them running off because I am maintaining the endpoint planet as part of a cross-planet defense network.

Lastly, imagine if I wanted to get all the scouts at a planet. I go to galaxy view, order them all to one of my outskirt planets. However, I would have to catch each one as it comes in to stop them from flying off, since they are coming from many planets (are very spread out).

Am I making any sense? I just see this as causing headaches.

[x4000]

Bear in mind that this isn't a golden bullet solution to everything sort of feature.  It's used for sending all incoming ships from one planet to another.  If you don't want to do that, don't put one on a planet.  That might sound argumentative, but I mean it seriously.  The circular looping thing is by far a secondary function of this, and is something that is bound to be riddled with logical issues for most use cases beyond a few simple ones: anything more complex is just out of scope for now, and I don't even consider it broken. 

The core purpose here is to basically forward all mail to the current address, so to speak; when you've had all your ships sending to frontlines planet A from further-back planets B and C and D, it's a pain when you move your frontlines to planet E.  This lets you just plunk down a redirect on planet A pointing to E, and then you don't have to mess about on planets B, C, or D.  That's the core use case -- anything else beyond that is really secondary, sort of like setting up airlocks in minecraft, eh?  You can use the mechanic here to do some interesting things, but that doesn't make it as robust as a true patrolling/guard system, which this is not.  This just lets you naturally do a bit of parody of true patrols.

[Fleet]

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I think I was taking the system way to far. For my purposes it will need to be developed further; the system, as it is, does exactly what it is designed to do, and it does not do what it is not designed to do.

Thanks.

[x4000]

At some point I would like to set up "closed loop" patrol systems of some sort, where you have to assign ships to do patrols, etc, but that's a way more complex feature (as you basically pointed out), and needs a ton more design, thought, and time.  And I'm not 100% convinced of the utility of that, anyway, as ships move slow enough and the spaces are large enough that FRD is a more graceful way to handle most circumstances, I suspect.

[Lancefighter]

theory states that rally points forwarding to another rally point should create indefinite patrols, is this not true?

[Signata]

Yeah, I'm not sure if patrols have any use in this game given the advanced warning for any major incursion. Patrols make sense in RTS games where you don't know where or when an attack will happen. It's useful to spread your patrolling force thin across a broader range of territory, rather than attempting to fortify every possible incursion position with an equal force. With this game, you generally know where and when something is going to attack in terms of the planet scale; and within the planet, like you say, if advanced warp sensors aren't in play, FRD does what patrol would do otherwise.

In effect, command stations act as patrolling units. In most RTS games, a patrolling unit is your sensor. It tells you where an invading force it is and what its composition is before it gets destroyed by the invasion. You can then prepare and adjust your defences accordingly. In this game, CCs by their nature inform you of where and when. Most other large scale invasions are a direct consequence of human action. The destruction of a counter-attack, or wiping out a enemy orbital command. You know it's coming because you caused it, having fleet ships flying around in a loop isn't going to tell you anything more than you already know.

[Vinraith]

Yeah, I'm not sure if patrols have any use in this game given the advanced warning for any major incursion.

Between hybrids, hostile enclaves, preservation wardens, CPA's, and border aggression I've had games where there were farm more unannounced enemies than announced ones threatening my borders, I suppose it all depends on how the game is set up and how you play it. That's to say nothing of people that play without wave warnings, of course.

[Signata]

True, not everything pops up in the little warning box, but that wasn't really my point. In a typical RTS, you have this: Your base(s), your enemies base(s), and a lot of dead space in between. There is no penalty for patrolling deadspace, beyond the certainty that your patrolling units will probably die if they catch sight of an invasion force; that's why you use cheap units to patrol, or better yet, cloaking units if the game has them. We already have that: scouts. Even if it takes a bit of a push, you can usually get a scout +1 beyond your border line. It doesn't need to move around, it just sits there monitoring status and any abnormal accumulation will be obvious in the galaxy chart. Beyond that, we have perfect vision within our borders. Each planet is guarded not only by full sight, but in many cases the ability to detect when and where. Not always, but at the worst we at least know something is happening.

So: given that information: what is the point of moving ships around *within* borders? They are not adding any additional recon information, and their movement could very well mean they are further out of position than they could have been had they not been moving around, when an Enclave shows up.

I don't know. It just seems to me that if you are playing a setup that encourages surprise attacks, it would do much more to tech better sight (cloaked scouts) and anything that will increase the mobility of your forces: Spacetime Manipulators; Logistics stations; Spire Telewarp Transports; etc. What good does slowly moving ships around in a circle do to improve the situation? Even if they *are* milling around in enemy space, what is the advantage of doing that over pushing a scout in and sitting quietly?

[Vinraith]

It seems to me it would allow you to protect more space with fewer ships. As it stands I have to leave a posting of 50-100 ships (at a minimum) in any system with a wormhole to a hostile system (de-gated though it may be). That wears down the fleet pretty quickly, especially in games where I have a lot of exposed surface area. In my current game, for example, easily two thirds of my worlds see regular minor incursions even though the actual announced waves have all been channeled to a single system. I'm betting I could cover those same systems against minor incursions about as well with a roving patrol of a couple hundred ships, which would save me a LOT of fleet cap for other purposes.