Retreating logically

from Sins Forums

I've included a little illustration to make this suggestion a little easier to follow. I don't know how many of you have run in to this situation.

 

  1. You're engaging the enemy fleet somewhere. In this illustration it's a fortified world. You're constantly building reinforcements from a nearby factory and they're rallied to your assault fleet.
  2. Even with reinforcements streaming in, you decide to retreat. You've decided to cut your losses, you need your ships elsewhere, the reason isn't important.
  3. Because of the way rallying works, some of your reinforcements (without micro, of course) will end up jumping IN to the well that you're currently trying to leave, and die horribly because everything else is jumping/has already jumped OUT.

 

Solution 1: Micro. This works, but it's annoying.

Solution 2: Change the game so that ships join the fleet they're rallied to on construction, so that when you give a retreat order (a manual move, of course, it won't currently work with retreating) reinforcing ships will inherit the new move order and rally to the DESTINATION instead of the current location.

 

Also: It would be nice if all ships in a fleet inherited the destination from the fleet leader and stuck to it. Sometimes if a fleet leader gets hung up while retreating, ships that have safely retreated will jump back to the fleet leader. I didn't tell them to do that, I told them to retreat! Retreat means disengage, not randomly jump back in to a losing battle.

 

PS. This is a non-trivial request in terms of the modifications required, so please voice your opinions (positive or negative) so the devs get a good estimate of how people feel about this idea.

11,363 views 20 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

So instead of the rally just being a move command to wherever the fleet is at the time of completion, you want it to be dynamic essentially a follow command? I usually rally to planets so I'm not sure how the current system works. 

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Right click the rally button to cancel your rally order? Just select all the units by clicking that arc and set them to move out of the system. Isn't that micro intensive.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Does it do that if you set the rally to one of your capital ships? Shouldn't that stop the issue if you retreat your cap?

 

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Basically, you want to be able to target an individual ship/fleet with the 'rally to' command.

I approve!

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

You can already rally to individual ships though...

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

I've thought this to myself many times before.  Absolutely support.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Volt_Cruelerz, reply 6
I've thought this to myself many times before.  Absolutely support.

I say no just to punish the player who isn't paying attention to their queues and rally points.

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

All you have to do is have the factory build location/ rally to you fleet leader and where he goes...........

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting wbino, reply 8
All you have to do is have the factory build location/ rally to you fleet leader and where he goes...........

Yeah, rallied to fleet leader. That's exactly the circumstance that I run into these problems (tried to indicate that with "rallied to fleet" and the big yellow fleet icon). Ships rallied to another ship will insist on trying to go to where it IS instead of where it's going... which can mean jumping in to join a retreating fleet, which is a bit dopey.

 

Quoting Rovert10, reply 2
Right click the rally button to cancel your rally order? Just select all the units by clicking that arc and set them to move out of the system. Isn't that micro intensive.

It can get a bit annoying because there's usually a stream of reinforcements. So you have to grab the ships between wells and at at least the next hop out. Plus, this extra micro defeats the spirit of rally points and fleets, which is to make managing groups of ships easier.

Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

Yes, this bothers me a lot.  You have my support.

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting TheEvidence, reply 9
trying to go to where it IS instead of where it's going

The small window of time where the incoming ship would be jumping to to the flag ship even as its retreating seems fairly small to me. As far as annoyances go I think I'd rather them fix the jumpy empire tree and a host of other things first...

Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting GoaFan77, reply 11

Quoting TheEvidence, reply 9trying to go to where it IS instead of where it's going

The small window of time where the incoming ship would be jumping to to the flag ship even as its retreating seems fairly small to me. As far as annoyances go I think I'd rather them fix the jumpy empire tree and a host of other things first...

I'd like to see that fixed too. But this issue strikes me as something that can feasibly be corrected without a large dev time investment. I mean sure, it's more involved than tweaking numbers, but I can do a back-of-the-napkin code sketch for it.

 

The empire tree issues aren't just a whole other can of worms, I worry they may be an entire shelf full of cans. :S

Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top


Also: It would be nice if all ships in a fleet inherited the destination from the fleet leader and stuck to it. Sometimes if a fleet leader gets hung up while retreating, ships that have safely retreated will jump back to the fleet leader. [...]

I always get that when using wormholes. My fleet leaders are usually carrier or colony capital ships, and since those tend to stay at the back of the fleet, chances are that the rest of the fleet will go through first before my leader does. As a result, the ships that have traveled to the other side will constantly attempt to go back until the leader has made it through. :dur: derp

Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top

I approve solution 2...this is absolutely annoying as hell...

Granted, it's partially my fault for playing internet spades while managing my fleet....

Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top

Well I guess one thing they could do is if a factory is rallied to a member of a fleet then when the ship is constructed it automatically joins that fleet without having to jump to that fleet's location. That way, an order given to a fleet would also be given to the new ship.

Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top

I've run into this so much. IRRITATING.

Derp, I just got to the retreat site.

Derp. Wait, where's my flagship?

Herp. I'll just jump back to it, ignoring orders.

Derp? Was that the flagship I just passed in phase space?

HERKADERKA! OH FU--

Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting nautiidarkside, reply 13
I always get that when using wormholes. My fleet leaders are usually carrier or colony capital ships, and since those tend to stay at the back of the fleet, chances are that the rest of the fleet will go through first before my leader does. As a result, the ships that have traveled to the other side will constantly attempt to go back until the leader has made it through. derp

I've seen my ships hyperspace back to another planet because the leader hasn't jumped yet. Then the said ships jump right back to the planet to follow the leader again. It's absurdly derpy.

Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top

Yes, I can see a problem when you had lot of factory and build so many ship (happan in TEC), would be nice whole factory once order here and there rather than click one by one factory and try to memory it.