Formations - picket, escort, and core

Believe it or not this "almost" actually works.

Picket engage First
Escorts engage Second
Core engages third (depending on settings)

Now this is good for protecting a carrier, carrier being the core ship.

A fleet of 10 dreadnoughts could be put in wall formation, all set for core, for offense and lay down a defisating wall of fire.

All in all it is a nice thing to have.

I always set "break formation" in my combat strategies. If You want to find the exact place of the ships in formation, check "formations-taskforces.txt" file. You may find pickets in the rear of your formation.

Actually I am still having trouble trying to determine how to set leader in the formation

The fleet formation works the same as the task force formation, except instead of individual ships in formation its the task force.

Phoneix is correct in his statement. Still no clue how to set the leader though

Still can't find how to set leader? SOB :.(

Leader is the first one listed in the core of that task force leader of the fleet is the first task force leader

Not sure about is ships break formation if the leader dies

try doing a forum search
i don't remember which, but one of the old ahnd told me that the leader is automatically set at the..
i htink it was either oldest or most experienced, ship in the fleet.

It sutomatic.

It would be nice if the ship designated as leader says leader.

I always like to know who is in command... Their the ones shot first.

Ships gain 20 xp for staying alive a turn, between 0.01 and 0.04 xp per ton of damage or kill they score, 3 xp per population killed.

lose 40 xp per turn of being mothballed.

threshold for elite status is 5k xp, so the colony ship will reach that status just sitting in space in 400 turns, then you can rescue them and hold a triumph for them.
.......................
I thunk therefore i wuz.

fleet and ship facilities will add xp per turn too

Bah I should have done this a long time ago: my Formations_TaskForces.txt

IMO, it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to set up Core/Escort/Picket properly. The 2 custom formations I've added reflect the fact that you can't choose who your Leader is, so one is where the Leader is at the back and the other is the Leader at the front. Same principle for both though: heavy defence at front to soak damage, direct fire in middle, seekers and carrier at back.

Task Force Leader = oldest ship as recorded in the game's registry. Experience has nothing to do with it, though usually there is a vague correlation between 'age' and 'experience' - if none of those ships have seen any combat.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Interesting line up txt. However I still would like to decide which of my capital ships lead the formation.

Rilo - not really. All the regular formations are still there so the AI should have no problem adapting to it - merely that they're closer together than stock. For a human though, there are 2 extra formations for further efficiency.

And yes, I too would like to have a choice in which ship is the Leader of a formation. Heh, I'd also like to be able to have asymmetric formations be included but when I tried that 2 months ago it simply wasn't accepted. Reported it back then, but no idea when it'll be fixed. It's nowhere near as urgent as the "units launched into an existing group don't have supplies" problem.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.