Using the escort functions you can set a specific contact as the threat axis, so your escorts will maneuver to keep themselves between your main body and that enemy contact. You can set different threat axis for different escorts. You can also protect ships, such as a tanker perhaps, by setting the angle to 180 degrees so that ship will attempt to maneuver to place itself on the far side of the main body from the contact you designate as the threat. Finally, you can set up scouts, perhaps 30 degrees either side of the line of advance, and have them maintain position a few million kilometers ahead of the fleet.

Steve

I started putting up some meson-based point defense ships (I had some quad turrets already researched, with some high range+tracking speed firecontrols) for use in an escort role.

Well, one turret ain't enough to justify all the shielding, engines, fuel storage, armor, and crew needed for an antimatter area defense escort traveling at 16 kkm/s right?  Sadly, sticking two on there means I have a 10,000 ton escort.

As a secondary idea, I'm toying with the concept of making really cheap, sub 5k ton ships, if I have to cut to triple or dual cannon from the quads that is fine with me.  The question is: do I have to train these suckers?  They'll have paper thin shields and will be treated as disposable-- I don't want to train disposables!  I normally train fleets up to 100%, but the escorts are separate from the main fleet, so they won't hamper the main flee'ts movement.  Will they have big delays flying in fleet formation even without training?  Otherwise, I'll just craft the area defense cruisers to have four duallies on em and leave it at that.

OK so I've been digging through fleet command windows here.  I think I have noted a few more features that I havent used.  First, escort.  The threat axis is in the direction of the fleet destination.  So you can set up some PD craft to escort at 60,000 km, theres easy buttons to click and select these things on the F12 window.  Suddenly area defense is viable without needing lots of clicking.  

Does anyone use the escort functions?  Would you like to post some tips and tricks?

Escorting opens up a few interesting strategies I might play with.  I tend to build my main PD ships ships pretty large-- generally 4 full-sized quad gauss turrets.  I've noted that in recent games, while the aliens like to hit my giant active sensor platform (he pings loudly) they also seem to really target the 16kton PD cruisers heavily.  In an escorting area defense mode, this would constitute a weakeness, as they wouldn't have the support of the rest of the fleet and the full attention of their brethren.  However, if one were to install a cloaking device on the ship, the escort ships would be less likely to be targeted at extreme ranges.  Missiles would more likely target the core of the fleet, and let the cloaked area defense do their duty.

Using the escort functions you can set a specific contact as the threat axis, so your escorts will maneuver to keep themselves between your main body and that enemy contact. You can set different threat axis for different escorts. You can also protect ships, such as a tanker perhaps, by setting the angle to 180 degrees so that ship will attempt to maneuver to place itself on the far side of the main body from the contact you designate as the threat. Finally, you can set up scouts, perhaps 30 degrees either side of the line of advance, and have them maintain position a few million kilometers ahead of the fleet.

Steve

OK so I've been digging through fleet command windows here.  I think I have noted a few more features that I havent used.  First, escort.  The threat axis is in the direction of the fleet destination.  So you can set up some PD craft to escort at 60,000 km, theres easy buttons to click and select these things on the F12 window.  Suddenly area defense is viable without needing lots of clicking.  

Does anyone use the escort functions?  Would you like to post some tips and tricks?

Escorting opens up a few interesting strategies I might play with.  I tend to build my main PD ships ships pretty large-- generally 4 full-sized quad gauss turrets.  I've noted that in recent games, while the aliens like to hit my giant active sensor platform (he pings loudly) they also seem to really target the 16kton PD cruisers heavily.  In an escorting area defense mode, this would constitute a weakeness, as they wouldn't have the support of the rest of the fleet and the full attention of their brethren.  However, if one were to install a cloaking device on the ship, the escort ships would be less likely to be targeted at extreme ranges.  Missiles would more likely target the core of the fleet, and let the cloaked area defense do their duty.

Yes, I used to do it that way too. and was sick of having to set the tender's default orders all the time. Having everyone in the fleet have geo sensors make it a lot less troublesome.

Not to mention, since I use the same design for independent grav-survey exploration, having geo sensors lets them check out the habitable worlds immediately when exploring a new system without having to wait.

How do you ensure that the Jump Tender always remains as the parent fleet? Unless my memory is faulty, I had the problem where Aurora randomly assigned which ship is parent fleet and which isn't.

actually you're right. The parent fleet isn't always the jump tender. It still works though since the whole point is for them to gather in the same spot. In that case it will be one of the GEO ships instead. Can still just hit assemble and go.

Well, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek actually. Not really a specific "trick" with the Naval Organization tab (thought they're in there), but in more a general way to manage large scale surveying without micromanagement hell.  Surveying (especially geo-surveying) is fiddly so I like to set things up so I don't have to issue a bunch of orders to lots of TGs; or have too many designs.

In my current game, I've got two designs: a jump-capable exploration cruiser that has both Geo/Grav Sensors (this is important). And a small commercial geosurvey craft. The exploration cruisers generally operate solo with 'Survey Nearest Survey' location orders. They've also got geosurvey sensors so they can check out interesting looking planets for ruins (with a sensor probe first), but generally leave the mass mineral survey tasks to the Geosurvey groups.

My geo groups consist of one of the EX cruisers to act as jump tender, plus 5-6 of the GEO ships.

Default orders are: 'Survey nearest body', and 'Follow higher fleet in system'. Using 'transit and divide ships' as the transit order into the target system, which passes the default orders down to the sub fleets. So each ship goes and surveys, and then when they're all done they gather around the EX cruiser again. Hit the 'assemble' button and they're off to the next system. Only have to touch them to move them to a new system, and I don't have to constantly fiddle with default orders. That's why it's important that the tender also has Geo sensors, so it can accept the same defaults as the GEO ships without event log spam. Now it doesn't have a parent fleet so it does complain about that default order triggering; which is your signal that they're wrapping up and need a new destination system.

Now if only 'assemble sub-fleets' was a conditional order it might be possible to arrange it to queue up several systems in a row. Even still, this method keeps things sane and I can mostly ignore surveying except for interesting results (and enemy contacts of course).

How do you ensure that the Jump Tender always remains as the parent fleet? Unless my memory is faulty, I had the problem where Aurora randomly assigned which ship is parent fleet and which isn't.

I'll bite, how do you organise your survey fleets?

Well, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek actually. Not really a specific "trick" with the Naval Organization tab (thought they're in there), but in more a general way to manage large scale surveying without micromanagement hell.  Surveying (especially geo-surveying) is fiddly so I like to set things up so I don't have to issue a bunch of orders to lots of TGs; or have too many designs.

In my current game, I've got two designs: a jump-capable exploration cruiser that has both Geo/Grav Sensors (this is important). And a small commercial geosurvey craft. The exploration cruisers generally operate solo with 'Survey Nearest Survey' location orders. They've also got geosurvey sensors so they can check out interesting looking planets for ruins (with a sensor probe first), but generally leave the mass mineral survey tasks to the Geosurvey groups.

My geo groups consist of one of the EX cruisers to act as jump tender, plus 5-6 of the GEO ships.

Default orders are: 'Survey nearest body', and 'Follow higher fleet in system'. Using 'transit and divide ships' as the transit order into the target system, which passes the default orders down to the sub fleets. So each ship goes and surveys, and then when they're all done they gather around the EX cruiser again. Hit the 'assemble' button and they're off to the next system. Only have to touch them to move them to a new system, and I don't have to constantly fiddle with default orders. That's why it's important that the tender also has Geo sensors, so it can accept the same defaults as the GEO ships without event log spam. Now it doesn't have a parent fleet so it does complain about that default order triggering; which is your signal that they're wrapping up and need a new destination system.

Now if only 'assemble sub-fleets' was a conditional order it might be possible to arrange it to queue up several systems in a row. Even still, this method keeps things sane and I can mostly ignore surveying except for interesting results (and enemy contacts of course).