Control Groups argh argh argh.... (lol and formations)

Doesn't the game already have all that?

no, it has neither of those options (to my knowledge, i will double check the auto join) no formations for sure, just cohesion and attack range within fleets; formations would improve it greatly, nothing fancy just a few simple ones like in homeworld 2. And because of it, i find myself less engaged in battles.

Perhaps someone can intersect. I thought ships were supposed to automatically align themselves into formation or something....

looked for the auto control group option and i am pretty sure its not there... and its most deffinately not a default game setting

Reply: this is the case, however i find that user selectable formations could better suit more tactical battles, and would be better for certain combat applications haha... it could easily be placed over the current system with the automated formation selected by default and make the game much more fun!

Edit: example: being able to select whether the big ships stay in back with midsized ships and fire from a distance, while the smaller ships take on everything up close; or everything stays together with midsized up front big in back, small meshed into everything; or big in front mid in middle and small in back (these are essentially all of the formations in homeworld 2, and their functions.)

Use tight cohesion and the fleet will hold its formation tighter (heavies in front, carriers rear etc). If you have auto join fleet on, rallied ships will automatically join the fleet they are rallied to when they arrive in the gravity well.

Other formations are not currently planned but haven't been complete ruled out.

thanks, i realize that newly built ships auto join fleet, but i want them to automatically join the control group of the rallied leader which doesn't seem to happen

If you have them on auto join to the fleet and have the fleet leader bound as control group, will it be enough?

Maybe if you'll describe how you then try to order them around (battle micromanagement?) the veterans can point out other ways to accomplish the same.

i guess it will have to do, yeah. i hate the feeling that the rest of the fleet might take longer to initiate an action then the control group (especially jumping.)

i realize that more fleet tactics can be accomplished through a lot of micromanagement with the current system, but i haven't quite reached that point yet, formations seem like they might help.

Yeah, you can't do this. There were also some technical issues to displaying the same ships in more than one place on the empire tree (like fleet/control group).

In general, everything in a fleet is tied to the fleet leader, so you really only need to hotkey the leader for the basic commands. If you show it to move, it'll move and the fleet will follow, if it jumps the ships will follow also.

It becomes a lot easier then to hotkey ship groups within the fleets for ship-specific orders. As you mention the control groups don't auto update as more ships join the fleet, but if you use control groups for ship types (all cobalts in 1, lrms in 2, etc), you can just alt+click on one ship to select all of them, and re-do the control group.

Yeah, you have to remember that fleets (and fleet manager) apply only to ships that you have made into a fllet. If you have a cap and set that ship as the rally point for a factory, all the ships you build will join the fleet. But, if you want the convenience of a single key choice, you have to highlight ALL the ships and do ctl+#, then they will jump in a group, but they won't show up in the empire tree. We've arg<<< discussed this quite a bit. We voted and the devs won. Kind of like to 2004 elections in the US.

pek

kind of like the 2000 elections too, haha

Ooops, that's what I meant.

pek