Fleet target priority on reinforcing enemy entities.

[Valmarki]

Edit: Reread this after cooling down and realized it's laid out in a rather emotional and less than ideally constructive way, redid the whole thing so it's actually readable and hopefully thought-invoking.

I just lost a war because of the fleet AI's desire to charge towards new engaging enemies, be it fleets or starbases.
The battle was extremely even, it could have gone either way, but then one of my ships entered engage range of the system starbase. In that second, somewhere between a quarter and half my fleet dived towards it like their mother's lives depended on it.
The starbase was effectively harmless in the grand scheme of the battle, there was no logical or tactically sound reason for the faster ships to disengage the enemy fleet and leave the bigger ships facing the enemy fleet alone.
The result was enemy focused fire upon my heavier ships who quickly were destroyed, and my faster ships were getting nowhere with the starbase and were quickly cleaned up as a result.

I would love to suggest some sort of behaviour or strategy button for the fleets battle phase, something along the lines of prioritizing already engaged enemies and finishing them off before going after new threat.

Maybe a fleet strategy policy choice, or a combat behaviour button on the fleet interface would be an answer, something along the lines of
"Focused targeting" "focus on previously engaged hostile entities before going after new enemy contacts". Perhaps better for scenario's where you need to finish off enemy ships as fast as possible in order to either survive or do as much damage as possible before you are defeated or forced to emergency jump out.
Another choice might then be "Oppurtune targeting" "ships will more heavily prioritize targeting size-appropriate targets when selecting enemies to fire upon".
Or (my personal theoretical favourite) "stay together / Deathball" "Ships in the same fleet will stick together even when engaged by new enemy fleets". Thus at least no one is being left out to hang.


Thanks for reading.
Excuse me while I go repair and rebuild my fleets.

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

If a fleet enters engagement range, it will attack. By not attacking reinforcing ships or starbases, those ignored entities will be attacking your fleet while your fleet doesn't fight back.

 

[GhostDanny]

Trust me, you DON'T want your ships to ignore any enemy fleets in the same system.
And even outposts do still have a missile launcher, so they always have some threat, unless you have PD and the enemy doesn't have any other PD targets.

 

[Valmarki]

You are avoiding the specific situation entirely.
If you have three 70k power fleets that are are engaged with an awakened ascendancy's single fleet of 210+k power, you do NOT, under ANY circumstance, EVER, want your fleets to not only move towards the 10k starbase, but moving towards it while committing Perdition beams, Neutron launchers, kinetic artillery and Giga cannon fire away from the enemy fleet!
That firepower is better spendt upon the almost stupendously bigger threat that actually has the firepower to end your fleets.

ANY admiral of ANY fleet EVER, and I dare say YOU INCLUDED, would unhappily yet dutifully ignore that starbase entirely, at LEAST until you got a sufficient fleet power lead, and especially so if staying put and ignoring the base gives your fleets a fighting chance to live, or at least do even more damage to the enemy fleet than engaging the starbase would ever enable.
And no one wants, or even speaks about ignoring enemy ships or starbases entirely. Under no circumstance should a hostile ship or starbase be able to killyour fleets at will without you being able to fight back, we certainly don't want that bug to return.
But diverting your anti-tank missile from the tank in front of you in favour of a dude with a potato gun half a kilometer down the road is stupid at best and utterly self-defeating at worst!

It works the other way too! If the starbase is the main threat and it's currently at 20% hull integrity, ignoring it and going after a fresh fleet who just ran into engagement range and diverting firepower from breaking the starbase and disabling it entirely is a bad call in EVERY scenario!

 

[Scyobi_Empire]

If you have three 70k power fleets that are are engaged with an awakened ascendancy's single fleet of 210+k power, you do NOT, under ANY circumstance, EVER, want your fleets to not only move towards the 10k starbase, but moving towards it while committing Perdition beams, Neutron launchers, kinetic artillery and Giga cannon fire away from the enemy fleet!

Those weapons target the largest ships in range. An Outpost (in my tests) at level 3 is fired at after Battlecrusers are destroyed by large weapons.

ANY admiral of ANY fleet EVER, and I dare say YOU INCLUDED, would unhappily yet dutifully ignore that starbase entirely, at LEAST until you got a sufficient fleet power lead, and especially so if staying put and ignoring the base gives your fleets a fighting chance to live, or at least do even more damage to the enemy fleet than engaging the starbase would ever enable.

Small issue, outside of a Progenitor Hive, the admirals will never have full control over every ship in the system as they're confined to one ship and can't communicate to upwards of 80 ships all at once while also commanding them all to do different things while some ships could have damaged systems preventing communication due to enemy fire. It's why weaknesses are found in defence lines, each person in a ship in a fleet has their own mind.

 

[Valmarki]

Small issue, outside of a Progenitor Hive, the admirals will never have full control over every ship in the system as they're confined to one ship and can't communicate to upwards of 80 ships all at once while also commanding them all to do different things while some ships could have damaged systems preventing communication due to enemy fire. It's why weaknesses are found in defence lines, each person in a ship in a fleet has their own mind.

Small issue, huh? I believe there is a saying along the lines of "little strokes fell great oaks".
I also dare say that significantly decreasing the chance of winning a 210k fleet power battle when you initially at least had a chance, is no "small" matter.

And if we are going to add arbitrary and mostly irrelevant arguments to this; I may as well start speaking about how our suns light takes four hours to reach neptune. The battles rage over literal days. sometimes even months.

You want to tell me that no one, including the ships own sapient combat computers, can't tell that spending DAYS of battle time going after a way out of range starbase, or a small reinforcing fleet, is a stupid move that will tip the battle even further into the hands of the enemies?
Are the admiral's reaction time so horribly slow that they just can't react in time to stop their fleets from splitting up, even when it happens over several days? Even weeks??
Can't they see that as soon as a new fleet is being engaged and the fleet splits up, not only is firepower being taken away from the enemy fleet already engaged because the smaller ship sizes are moving away and out of weapon size range. But because of friendly ships moving away from the previously engaged enemy fleet, enemy firepower is being focused on the larger ships lagging behind the faster ones, effectively leaving them behind to be crippled and destroyed more swiftly?

Rolling back on the sarcasm here for a bit, I realize even attempting to program the AI to manage that many different fleet behaviours and judgement calls simultaneously would undoubtedly be a nightmarish undertaking, if not outright impossible to do well.
Ultimately I will just have to take into consideration that engaging a new enemy space entity, be it fleet or starbase while already engaged in battle will cause my fleets to displace in the new enemy's direction so I shouldn't take fights I might lose because of this (stupid) AI behaviour.

Maybe a fleet strategy policy choice, or a behaviour button on the fleet interface would be an answer, something along the lines of
"Focused targeting" "focus on previously engaged fleets and ships before going after new enemy fleets". Perhaps better for scenario's where you need to finish off enemy ships as fast as possible in order to either survive or do as much damage as possible before you are defeated or forced to emergency jump out.
Another choice might then be "Oppurtune targeting" "ships will more heavily prioritize targeting size-appropriate targets when selecting enemies to fire upon". like they do today.
Or (my personal theoretical favourite) "stay together / Deathball" "Ships in the same fleet will stick together even when engaged by new enemy fleets". Thus at least no one is being left out to hang.
Better versions of these could undoubtedly be theorized, still I hope I am making my thinking clear enough. It would at least give us a little control of our fleets targeting and movement behaviour in battles.
At the very least I could happily blame myself for using a bad policy or fleet strategy for the scenario rather than being pissed at the AI for making what I think is a through and through stupid move.

 

[GhostDanny]

I think you don't want fleets to ignore enemy ships, but focus more on the fleet they're already fighting.
And not split up, so much. Which is particularly annoying with strike craft.

Attack the fleet at hand first, before moving on to the next fleet or reinforcements.
Actually the reinforcement ships, should already join the fleet you're currently fighting any ways, so no need to divert to them, they'll come to you.

 

[Valmarki]

Trust me, you DON'T want your ships to ignore any enemy fleets in the same system.
And even outposts do still have a missile launcher, so they always have some threat, unless you have PD and the enemy doesn't have any other PD targets.

You're not addressing the scenario I provided.
When you are already engaged in battle, ignoring a new fleet or starbase will sometimes be the right call so you focus on taking out the enemy firepower you are already contending with entirely before dealing with more. A starbase with 0% shields, 0% armor and 20% hull is, as far as I know, still operating at 100% weapons capacity.
Obviously you don't want your fleet to divert firepower away from the starbase then, you want the starbase GONE so you can deal with the reinforcing fleet without taking excessive losses.

Kind of like eating. You want to take a bite, chew it, and swallow it before putting even more food into your mouth. If you just keep shoving food into your mouth without swallowing, soner rather than later you can't chew properly anymore and you risk choking on it.

But the AI doesn't allow for this kind of behaviour or prioritization, and it will sometimes lead to excessive losses, or even tip the scale of a battle, even an entire war, entirely.

 

[Valmarki]

I think you don't want fleets to ignore enemy ships, but focus more on the fleet they're already fighting.
And not split up, so much. Which is particularly annoying with strike craft.

Attack the fleet at hand first, before moving on to the next fleet or reinforcements.
Actually the reinforcement ships, should already join the fleet you're currently fighting any ways, so no need to divert to them, they'll come to you.

Yes!
Ignore is perhaps a bit too deterministic a term for what behaviour I actually desire for our fleets, fair enough.