Effective Formations in FleetOps

posted on June 14th, 2009, 3:10 am

When playing the original Armada II, there are several effective formations (Assault Wall etc) that allow frigates, artillery ships, and support vessels to follow behind capital ships and cruisers at the same speed and in the same direction.

I am new to FleetOps, and whenever I play the AI on hard, my fleets end up taking much more damage than they should simply because micromanaging each of the individual classes within the task force is made difficult without the help of automatic formations.

In addition, the micromanagement itself is limited by the number of hotkeys I.e. You only have 10 hotkeys, of which two are used for Starfleet Command/Cloak Generator/Hyperspace Artillery and Starbase Tachyon Scanning. This means I have 8 hotkeys to use for fleet groupings. It's easy to use 5-6 hotkeys within a single fleet, so this approach means that controlling anymore than 2 fleets is made very difficult.

Is there something I am missing? I tried pulling off the Norway spam and the Norway-Canaveral-Intrepid-Sovereign-Excelsior/Ambassador combined attack and both times had devastating results simply because the Norways and Intrepids managed to outrun the Sovereigns and Ambassadors and ended up getting killed.

Any help or advice on keeping ships aligned and in formation (speed and position) would be greatly appreciated.