Ground Combat issues

yeh, it's the same with space ships. they sit there getting pounded until dead. is the AI just plain useless? they have working weapons but don't use them. they're in range [cos i have 'show range' set to 'on'] but do nothing.

why is this? surely in this kinda game it's expected that your fighting units use their weapons? i click on attack and nothign happens. they get within weapon range and just sit there lettign enemy attack them. if i turn on aut attack they soemtimes attack but usually one at a time. what is the point of having a TF or fleet when the ships in it attack one at a time? hardly tactical as it's just attacking until enemy ordinance runs out when ALL your ships should be attacking.
it is gettign very frustrating.

This is very frustrating, and the worst part of it is watching the ground troop spin in circles. I landed a group of 30 troops on a planet that only had 8 militia units. You would think this would be an easy victory, but not when only 3 of your troops decide they will engage in combat. The battle ended up with me having 3 troops and them having 6. They didn't continue to slaughter my units because they ran out of supplies/ordinance. Talk about frustrating, the next time I landed a bunch of troops, I didn't even tell them where to move or what to attack, and they did alot better.

is this issue gonna get resolved? it seems that it's such a HUGE problem that your units don't or won't attack where they're told yet are we the only ones getting it? MOO3 was kinda cool with the 3d space combat [especally modded with huge fleets] but lost it with that whole 'macro management' excuse going on.

i just sent in a 20 ship fleet of 2 task forces against 2 tiny satellites. each sat had one missile launcher.
guess what? my fleet lost the battle with just one ship left.
now, bearing in mind my ships are shielded, have arm lev 6, missiles level 8 , direct fire cannons level 8, ECM lev 2, fast engines, against sats that are level 1.
TWO level 1 sats against a level 5 20 ship fleet that has 4 drone carriers, 6 missile ships and 10 cannon armed ships and they wiped it out? there are no fancy cloaking devices with this empire. it's on its last legs. one planet left.

wtf is going on?

the combat engine is knackered. surely somebody must be able to fix this in a patch? are most ppl avoiding using realtime combat or something? i kinda enjoy this side of thigns and if this part of the game is too bugged to handle it then the devs should justr bin it and tell us it doesn't work.

grrrr

For now the best I've found is to set up troops with "Short Range" or "Point Blank" strategies and let them do their thing at 1x speed. Altering the speed seems to make them forget what they're doing somehow.

Troops which refuse to move as ordered can be given "baby step" instructions to go. It takes many such orders, but they're more likely to comply.

I suspect the troops are having trouble understanding the map. They behave as if there are many invisible obstacles.

It's no wonder the strong AI empires have so much trouble wiping out weak enemies. They don't have us to help them cope.

The game's still fun and it's getting better. I'm not used to seeing so many patches - usually projects like this are abandoned and the customer is just ripped off. I'm really hopeful about SE5.

I'm not sure exactly what your problem is synchrow since you don't list enough info, but in general both tactical and strategic combat does work. There are a few bugs here and there, at the moment seemingly concentrated around firing on planets and running at high time rate multiples, but it works more than it doesn't.

I'll list off some things to look at:

* Orders. There's a complicated hierarchy of orders, and it is entirely likely that the defaults are not going to be what you want, or be useful at all. Drill down and explore exactly what your settings are for which order to prioritize targets, when ships should break off from attacking or break task force / fleet formation, how much firepower to allocate to targets, and so on.

I recommend giving both group performance orders to your task forces, and individual orders to ships; sometimes these will be the same, but sometimes you'll want a lone ship to behave differently.

Personally, when I'm actually doing Tactical combat, the first thing I do is break all task force and fleets, and then turn off all auto-move and auto-target. I'll drag-select ships to move as a group when appropriate, but the whole point of Tactical is to be able to take individual control at a finer level of detail. I try to have things set so I don't *have* to do this, however; most combats are resolved with the Strategic system.

* Ordnance and supply. If you don't have missiles for your launchers or bullets for your cannons, they're so much dead weight; this is what ordnance covers. If you don't have enough fuel to run your engines or shields, you're a sitting duck; this is what supply covers. Make sure you have enough capacity on your ships (and units) to last the battle, and that they're properly filled up.

If you're operating offensively, you'll need to dedicate some sort of infrastructure to keeping your forward units supplied; there are different ways to address this problem, but it has to be handled. Logistics wins more wars than tactics.

* Design optimization and targeting. This integrates somewhat with orders. A lot of the weapons you list cannot target satellites at all, and in general weapons that can target sats tend to be much shorter ranged. It is possible that the combination of your orders for what sort of distance to stand off is keeping your ships outside of their effective range on anything that can target or actually hurt the sats, yet is still within the sat's ability to range on your ships.

If you're in Tactical mode, remember that the red range circle is the theoretical maximum range of the longest range weapon on your ship (typically a missile launcher of some sort), whether it can or will be used for what you're doing or not. You usually have to be inside the circle by some margin for even the long-range weapon to work; and if you're dealing with a ship with both missiles and guns there's no easy way to tell how close you need to be for the guns to work except by trial and error. Also note that since sats are quite hard to hit, even if you're theoretically within range for your guns, they may have such a low chance of hitting that you need to get *much* closer; and each missed shot uses up ordnance. That's one reason why point defense weapons have such a significant bonus to hit.

* You need to specify what version of the game you're running, and particularly if you're using any mods and what version of the mods you have, plus any changes you've personally made. This is an *incredibly* modifiable game, and while in general that's great, it means on the one hand that it's all too easy to break something you didn't expect while making what you thought were simple changes; and that mods can end up being effectively entirely different games as far as gameplay is concerned, even if many of the terms and names remain the same. Also, starting a game in one version and then upgrading during a game can have very unpredictable results (as can upgrading mod versions, or of upgrading one but not the other).

Good answer Jdunson. I have not had much experience with hands on tactical combat, but your post will probably help me enjoy it more/avoid getting frustrated when I do try.

First off, check to make sure that individual ships will function properly in a battle - test them in the battle simulator. Test, test, test - absolutely best way to fine-tune your designs if you have a variety of tech to work with.

Ships, fighters, drones and troops should automatically seek out & engage the enemy, as well as fire on them.

If not, make sure they have:

1) supply
2) ordinance
3) weapons
4) engines
5) give them ship/unit/troop type, classes, and strategies (optimal works best if you are new)

Once you have gotten the ships to function properly in combat (they shoot at stuff and move), then you might want to test out fleet battles to make sure your fleets work properly.

IMPORTANT:
My biggest thing I learned to do is make sure your attack ships are set to 'break formation' as soon as battle starts, otherwise they will be locked into formation and generally won't engage much because the enemy ships sit outside the range of their weapons. This is most noticeable in the early game when your low-level weapons technology drastically limits your ships' range.

You can change the unit strategies by going to the button with the crown and scrolling to the bottom - you can add and edit all of the strats used by your ships & units. If you're good enough, you can program your ships to fight without you hardly taking command yourself.