Guide for defining Combat Strategies

Hi Masek,

I'm not sure if a self-contained strategy guide exists, it might be worth looking at the SE5 wiki pages. I'm unable to access them from work unfortunately. I can give you some pointers though:

The strategy options are at the bottom of the Empire Options screen (Shift-O) - you need to scroll the left pane down right down to the bottom to find them.

By default (certainly in the Balance Mod, probably in stock too) all the preset strategies have the option "Break Formation Immediately" set to True, which means that no matter what formations you set inside your fleets, those ships will not stay in formation once combat begins, and all your ships that break formation will revert to the strategy set against their design rather than what the fleet may have had set. If you want ships to stay in formation, consider creating a copy of existing strategies and changing the option to break formation.

In a lot of situations, forcing ships to stay in formation is not the best thing to do. If the formations are large, the outer ships take a long time to reposition around the leader if he turns, and you probably won't concentrate fire on the enemy as well as you might. Of course feel free to experiment because there are huge amounts of options inside the strategies.

Note that ships will not follow their design type strategies on "break formation" as they did in SE4. They will continue to follow their task force strategies. A good practice it to group your task force by design type. For example, you might stick all your missile ships in a task force with the strategy set to max range. Some ship types like PD ships can be spread across to optimize their PD contributions etc.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod