Fleet and Task Force Strategies

This is a good question, and I'd like to know the same answer. Though, strategically speaking, if you turn off the retreat orders (strategy), they'll just circle around space for a while without breaking fleet formation.

If you click on the empire statistics icon (the one with the crown). There you can change the strategy settings and if/why a retreat order is given. I found that carriers like to run away after launching its units, but you can select an option that tells it to stay close to the attacking ships, etc. There you can toggle a fleets retreat options/triggers.

I think this is a safety feature. The "lost cause" retreats don't work at least 90% of the time. There's another feature that lets you define how ships retreat. It has "stay near planet" and "stay near base" and a couple of others.

The reason this is a safety feature is that many ships and weapons can't target sats and some can't/don't target WP's by default (as I recall). They're just sitting ducks if they hang around a well-defended planet during the invasion.

But in most cases this doesn't apply.

Fleet break-up is very annoying, and I haven't yet found a satisfactory way to prevent it that will work well in all circumstances.

I think you can make the other ships stay with the troop transport if you really must by putting them in the same task force and toggling the strategies not to break formation. Note that if you have an "optimal range" ship in the group you must alter that strat. If you have "short range" ships you must alter that as well. Formation breaking is done on a ship-by-ship basis.

The fleet strategies, as far as I can tell, only apply to the movements of ships while they are in formation, and nothing else.

Have you seen "stay near planet" and "stay near base" working as expected?
Last time I tried it, it did not work.

So WP's are for defending the planet from orbital threats? I really have no idea what they are for.

"Sometimes" This is difficult to arrange in Strategic combat (although not impossible), but sometimes the easiest or most effective way to take a planet is indeed a "hot drop". This is particularly the case for valuable planets, such as enemy homeworlds or planets with useful facilities you can't build yourself, where the current (IMO flawed) targeting makes it very difficult to defeat close-in defenses (particularly WPs) without heavily damaging or glassing the planet.

The key is to consider carefully what the defenses are you'll be facing, and to make sure each one has either a counter, a mitigator, or a distraction. I'm going to refer to a troop ship optimized for planetary capture in the teeth of heavy defenses as a "drop ship"; these are quite possibly not built along normal lines, including probably built on a military hull such as a cruiser.

Counters would be things like heavy point defense on your drop ships to counter mostly missile-armed WPs or sats; master computers to counter crew-damaging weapons, and so on.

Mitigators are defenses that only last for a short time, but against a tough target the job of the drop ship is to land troops; after it's empty it's expendable. More armor or shielding are the obvious choices here, but things like ship layout to put the mission critical parts at the back come into play. Combat speed mitigates everything to some degree; the fewer turns of enemy fire you have to withstand between coming into range and dropping the troops the better. Seriously consider designing your drop ships on the hull that you can give the fastest possible combat movement to, even if it's a bit more expensive that way.

For a drop ship, the mission critical parts are the engines and the cargo bays; everything else is support overhead. Even some of the cargo bays may be expendable. In Afghanistan, the Soviets used multi-purpose HIND helicopters that combined troop capacity with combat ability. The tougher the target / hotter the landing zone, the fewer troops they'd put into each chopper, so that shooting down any given chopper wouldn't slow down the attack as much. This concept works pretty well in SE; design your drop ships with the capacity to take a planet solo if it has only light anti-ship weapons, but against heavily defended targets split up your troops amongst multiple dropships. Those now-empty cargo bays are effectively ablative internal armor.

Distractions are just that; giving your opponent (full AI, human-adjusted battle AI, or tactical human) something to worry about - something they think is a higher priority target than your drop ships. Consider what the default targeting priorities are, and make sure your drop ships are low on the list. If you think they prioritize "Largest", make sure your drop ships are smaller. If they prioritize "Most Damaged", make sure your drop ships start out undamaged, and (possibly by playing around with shipyard upgrades) deliberately send in some still tough but pre-damaged ships to be sacrificial targets.

In games where I have captured enemy ships (via ship boarding or intelligence sabotage), this is a good use for them (also obsolete ships if you're falling behind in upgrades); in tactical combat send them screaming in at the planet a few squares ahead of your drop ships, but with targeting cleared so they don't actually shoot at the planet (if there are remaining orbital defenses they can be busy shooting them up from close range). The close-in defenses will range on them first, start doing damage, and due to the way targeting orders usually work will continue to pound on them while your drop ships due their duty.

Careful attention the above details will allow your non-crystalline race to capture that huge planet full of Solar Generators in a triple-star system without cracking a single mirror, and other useful tricks.

The corollary to the above is to make sure your targeting priorities actually match what you want them to be. For instance, the default Type structure will shoot at minelayers before drop ships; this is rarely what you want to do in a defensive scenario. I recommend creating a special strategy for "WP Defense" that allows you to be specific on exactly how your Weapon Platforms are defending your planets.

I use both ways. jdunson's method is in keeping with history. Marines have always been expendable in the eyes of the brass, and always will be. The Chinese, some Soviet generals, and Ulysses Grant believed in simply sending more men than the enemy has bullets.

Use enough troop ships and you'll get through. But I prefer well-armored FF's or DD's to carry troops in these situations. Cargo capacity need not be very high at all, and if you get in fast it gives the enemy less time to shoot you down.

This shouldn't be standard procedure. It should be reserved for planets which are too tough to get after with a fleet and a couple of slow "normal" troop ships. Antarian's methods are the way to go for average and weak planets. Keep moving planet to planet, and don't give 'em time to recover.

And Lector Rae, WP's can be death on ships. In BM they also have a surface role because their PD's can target troops. I don't know if this is the case in stock or the other mods.

I've had trouble out of both beam weapons and seekers mounted on WP's. But they count against the planet's cargo capacity, so smaller planets can't have too many.

My tactics are subject to change if/when I get the chance to play some humans. I try not to count on the AI's stupidity too much so I won't form bad habits.

As for Hinds, turns out the concept is flawed. They can't put armor on the blades, so it's not really the flying tank they intended it to be. Aim high with a HMG, and down it goes. Another lesson from Afghanistan, which for some reason doesn't get much publicity.