I rarely ever asked for tips because I like to figure everything out by myself, but this time it is dire. I recognize that carrier operations will vastly improve in 2.0, but for the current version I still would have liked to make the basics work at least.
In my current game I am attacked by very fast beam attackers which forced me to use fighters, and lots of them. Things were fine when they were just orbiting a planet in their respective formations, but now that they eventually have to be loaded up to carriers, serious issues show up again.
Previously I abandoned another game because I discovered how cumbersome the current process it, and that game was very fighter focused.(a WH40k Tau fleet) I thought I could perhaps do it now, but again I find no option to make it work in a reasonable fashion.
Overview of the 3 core problems:
- Fighters don't retain organization. The new sub-fleets would be optimal for this job, but currently you can't use this mechanic for fighters, because docking a fighter fleet to ships or stations just lists them all at the highest hierarchy level, destroying the order of the fighter fleet. As a consequence you also cannot launch or detach them all at once, so if you have a still reasonable 50 fighter planes, you now have to go through them one by one upon launch, having to rebuild the entire squadron by hand.
- Drag and Drop implementation is incomplete. There is no shift click to select multiple objects, and once an object is dragged, there is no scrolling the list. This makes weapon assignment problematic, but also rears its head with a long fighter ship list. E.g. if there are some fighters in the middle of the list, you cannot get them out by drag and drop, since the target fleet isn't visible on screen, and scrolling doesn't work while dragging.
- Dragging to another fleet is not a launch. If you try to circumvent above problem by for example naming the target fleet similar to source fleet, so you can at least drag and drop the first or last ships in the list, you will instead discover that this bugs out the docking mechanic. Although you can still fly these fighters around, they technically still count as docked, which upon trying to target and open fire will bug out the game.(symptoms are "report window vanishing/not rebootable/gone" and "can't copy attack orders by usual means/ fleet open fire")
These points in combination mean that the only way to actually start a parasite (as far as I can see) is by clicking "detach". So if this is really all you can do, if you want to start a squadron of 50 planes to attack an enemy, you would have to click detach for 50 individual planes, and
then order each plane/fleet to join into a fighter group and advance time to get it done.
So many clicks, and on every reload and attack run, you would have to do it all over again, madness.
In VB6, aside from squadrons etc. being in the game already, you could also direct individual ships/fleets en masse by copying orders from the leader, so this last procedure would at least have been bearable. If only shift-click was a thing (or any way to select multiple objects at once), all this would also already be much less troublesome, since I could just detach all needed fighters from a hangar at once into one fleet.
I spent time looking and looking, and I can't find a way to make -not just fighters- but all things hangar related work in a reasonable fashion. Maybe someone has a trick ready that I overlooked, but it seems the available tools to toy around with are very restricted to begin with.
/
Since the fighter troubles will be obsolete with the update to come, I didn't want to make a whole thread about it, so it is here.
