Formations or lack of them

posted on September 12th, 2009, 8:23 am

allright, for some reason ships behave rather different from A2 when assigned in formations. In A2, when they were set to medium movement autonomy, they could move inside the formation but never broke it. In FO, they ALWAYS break formations, sometimes even on low movement autonomy. I've lost countless ships because of this. It's like you have to babysit each fleet in part, to see whether some dumbhead ship captain decides to take an entire enemy fleet by himself. Can this be corrected?

posted on September 12th, 2009, 9:11 am

I doubt it.

If you check individual ship behavior, you will see that sometimes, you click on one direction and the selected ship does a ninety degree turn, starts moving and goes from A to B in what's not the shortest route. Some ships seem to follow partially the construction grid for moving towards the desired point. Some ships even do a 360 degree turn before moving, which is cool, but useless.

Also, if you click too close to a formation, some ships start following one ship of the formation. This behavior is easily seen when you have several shipyards and send all the ships to repair. The affected ships come out of the yard, and ignore the dropping point, no matter if it's the default or a designated one. They go to the shipyard where the "leader" ship is when it finishes repairs.

If you add those (and other) behaviors together in a formation, well... You don't get a formation.

I think it's related to the pathing. But just for the human players, the AI pathing is usually very good.

Speaking of formations, I miss having some more.

posted on September 12th, 2009, 12:14 pm

But this didn't happen in A2. So there should be a way to correct this, at least in theory.

posted on September 13th, 2009, 10:00 pm

It would seem that formations need... some work.

I used to love them in A2 mainly because they looked cool.
Now I don't really use them in FO (except perhaps column when it gets really tight), but I so wish that wolfpacks could be created with the "wedge" formation - unfortunately, it looks like it's a 1-3-5-etc. wedge, because three ships set to that formation immediately form a straight line XD

posted on September 15th, 2009, 7:27 am

true, formations are still on todo an old burden