Patrol Route Assignment

[Namfuak]

With the new piracy mechanics, we are supposed to use the Patrol feature to assign a small trade protection fleet to our trade routes. This is great, but it means that any time we need them to do something else, like deal with a pirate fleet or go to war, we need to redo all the patrol routes. The interface for doing that isn't very good, but even if it were it is tedious to put them back on the same route that is likely to never change very much. It would be helpful if we could set up patrol routes separately from fleets, and then assign fleets to a patrol route.

It would also be helpful to be able to tell fleets to sit in a zone until the piracy value is zero (or even a particular number), right now it seems like you need to have them go to the starbases on either end of the route so that they don't spend so little time in the last systems that they don't actually reduce the piracy value.

 

[AsidMjolnir]

It would be nice if it allowed you to set up particular patrol routes, as I've noticed in one case the trade route doesn't use the shortest, most direct path, and yet ships do, leading to the patrol route only touching a couple of the systems on the trade route.

 

[LuiDeLucca]

Exactly, we need a way to set up custom patrol routes. Right now if I set patrol A to B nd then shift a C point, it does A to B a lot of times and then B to C, not A to B to C many times. Also it would be nice to upgrade the fleet without loosing the route. And a separate outliner for patrol fleets sounds awesome.

 

[DukeLeto42]

I'd also like to see piracy suppression spread evenly over the whole patrol route, rather than only the system ships are in. That means patrol routes longer than a couple jumps won't inevitably have piracy go above protection values

 

[AsidMjolnir]

Agreed. Sort of like the pirates knowing "Oh, hey, the navy will be in this area, we should maybe stay away."