A Fleet of One

capnq · #1 August 11th, 2007, 09:00 AM

I just had an unexpected result in a PBW game. I was trying to temporarily override a couple individual ships' Default Strategy by putting each ship in a fleet by itself. When these ships entered combat, they followed the fleet strategy for the first round, then reverted to their original ship strategy. (This was particularly obvious because the fleet was set to not fire on planets, but the individual ships did anyway.) This behavior seems to contradict the FAQ:

Quote:

2.10.2 Ships do retain original strategies after being retrofitted or captured - you can overcome this by making a 1-ship fleet and giving it new fleet orders.

(BTW, these were my own designs, not captured ships.)

Has anybody else run into this? There's a note later in the FAQ saying that the changelog for an upcoming patch implied changes to the way strategy worked, but there's no further mention of what (or when) the change was.

douglas · #2 August 11th, 2007, 01:28 PM

If the fleet's strategy is set to break formation, the ships revert back to their individual strategies. If the fleet's strategy is set to Don't Get Hurt, that particular strategy happens to be hardcoded to break formation after one combat turn regardless of your formation settings.

TurinTurambar · #3 August 11th, 2007, 05:22 PM

Right. The only way to get a ship to retain a fleet strategy differing from its own, is to make sure it doesn't "break formation".

capnq · #4 August 12th, 2007, 08:05 AM

Quote:

douglas said: If the fleet's strategy is set to Don't Get Hurt, that particular strategy happens to be hardcoded to break formation after one combat turn regardless of your formation settings.

Thanks, I didn't know that. These one-ship fleets were using a custom strategy I made up called "Blockade", but I think the first movement priority was "Don't Get Hurt".

That hardcode makes it rather tedious to set up an effective blockade strategy.

douglas · #5 August 12th, 2007, 12:10 PM

I'm pretty sure a strategy set to not fire on planets would work as long as Don't Get Hurt isn't involved. If no valid targets for the strategy are present, however, and the ship happens to wander into (or start in) weapon platform range of the planet it'll just randomly meander about at 1 square per combat turn in random directions while the planet shoots at it until its weapons are gone and the hardcoded "Don't Get Hurt unless ramming" provision for unarmed ships comes into play.