Discussion: Per-fleet-member standing orders

[kmunoz]

I do it by selecting the ship icon from the Planet tab. It's often difficult to find croutons in the icon soup.

And if the Planet tab showed more than just the icons it would be so much more useful, especially for this.

[I-KP]

I'm going to throw my hat into the ring in favour of this suggestion once again.

I've been playing the game quite a bit of late and time after time I'm finding myself getting increasingly frustrated with not being able to change the default behaviour of a ship line without also ordering the entire fleet to behave that way.

'But you can do that now!' I hear you scream. And you can, it's true, but only for the ships that are alive right now. All reinforcements switch back to the Flagship default standing order.

Extra flagships is one partial solution to this. But it's another flagship to drag around, it probably mucks up the XP (I say probably because who knows what the XP system does), and it doesn't allow for adhoc tactical flexibility.

Given the way I play, this proposed ship line level standing orders function is far more flexible than having custom flagships available. It also solves a large chunk of the problem that custom flagships were created to solve, only more elegantly.

[Kraiz]

What a lively discussion.

I typically only do this level of micro-management on harder targets (Mk.IV+).  Send X units to attack a guard post, send Y units to hit a different guard post, retreat before angering the AI and wiping a fleet.  Rebuild, re-deploy, rinse and repeat until the planet is whittled down.

As for ship-line-level standing orders, I'm neutral.  I think it'd be nice for some niche circumstances, though I'm not sure if those niche situations warrant the development time required to implement the change.  I can understand the need to keep X unit out of the way, or have Y unit in group-move while the rest freely move about as they please (Swarm-style units).  And I'm sympathetic to those who find the custom flagships a bit clunky to use for this use case.  So, I'm on the fence.

That said, though, if custom flagships are the solution to this issue, I'd like to draw attention to this change from the upcoming 1.004 patch:
  Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships

If using more fleets is the method we should use to gain more granular control over ship behavior and standing orders, it seems counter-intuitive to have a mechanic in place that penalizes using that method.  I understand the change's purpose, but if I'm organizing ships into multiple smaller fleets to gain the level of control I want, then I could very well trigger an AI eye purely because I've organized my forces more than the AI would prefer.  Or, put differently, I could have 100 ships and not trigger the eye with 1 fleet, but organizing those 100 ships into 3 fleets could then trigger it.  I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of this change (prevent the player from stacking loads of low-unit-cap fleets to circumvent the eye mechanics), but this is a situation where I feel like two ideas about how the game should work collide.

All of that out of the way, I'm still a newbie, here, so take my $0.02 with a hefty amount of salt.

[I-KP]

That said, though, if custom flagships are the solution to this issue, I'd like to draw attention to this change from the upcoming 1.004 patch:
  Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships

Perhaps amusingly, I see this thread's suggestion as being a partial solution to the Custom Fleets fuss and clutter!  

I get why they're there, I do, and I appreciate that reasoning, but I only use them for Stealth fleets in games where I don't find a Cloaked flagship fleet (which has so far been only once out of six games played on the same map settings).

To me Custom Fleets feel like an awkward solution to problems created by the inflexibility of the new Fleets system, that introduces weird mechanics that seem discordant with other areas of the game. I don't want to prattle on about them. I just find them to be an inelegant solution is all.