Ship Combat Question

from GalCiv2 Forums
Is there anyway to control what ships your ships should be attacking. I can't stand it when I go into combat with two large ships and maybe a small fighter or something and the first thing my fleet does is attack one of the enemies fighters rather than focusing on one of the large ships that is doing all the damage. Whats even more frustrating is that the computer fleet usually IS smart enough to attack my larger ships and decimates them while my ships are putzing around with some stupid fighters.

Any help here or is it just how it is. If so it needs reworked, because currently it is very unsatisfactory.
8,547 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Have you read the manual? Page 48. It states fleets will target the most lethal but easily destroyed ship first.

Attack and defense rolls are based on the fleet's stats, and hit points are based on individual ships. In practice, it works pretty good.

Tony

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Well I didn't read that part of the manual I suppose, I spent most of my time reading the economics part of the manual. Regardless of what the manual says, it seems that my fleets seem to target the most easily destroyable ship first and then move to the most lethal one. All in all I don't like how that works, stategy would now infer that I create a ship model with a ton of attack power and no defense, then group it with some ships that have a balanced set up. In a battle the opponents fleet would hone in on the attack power vessel thus allowing for the ships that are slightly harder to kill more time to destroy the remaining fleet. The result is that essentially you could build a high power medium class vessel with no defense as fodder for the rest of your fleet.

Sorry but that is just poor logic and lacks in strategy, as you have no control in the strategy of a fleet battle. A game that had excellent strategic was Imperium Galactica II. Most other aspects of this game I found ehhhhh, but in space combat you could actually apply a small amount of strategy when the battle started as you could tell your fleet what ships you wanted them to fire on first, second, etc. Currently I am seeing very little strategy in the combat portion of this game, leaving the strategy to research and acquiring planets and resources and how you go about that, but once that is done its a simple matter of building up the war machine and putting it to work.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Diremede, that is how combat works, but the sacrificial lamb idea doesn't work. Without any defenses, your lamb will be shredded much faster than a ship with some defenses, meaning that what was a 3x3 fight will become a 2x3 fight very quickly.

If your ships are focusing on the fighters, you'll probably find that the fighters aren't lagging that far behind the larger ships in terms of weaponry or the larger ships have more formidable defenses. In fact, I've never seen the AI build a fighter with any defenses. Because of the way hull sizes balance out in GC2, a medium hull isn't that much more powerful than a small hull until you've got some of the more advanced techs, so often taking out the small ships is the effective way to whittle down the enemy the fastest.