Aeson
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Joined: 8/30/2013
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Yes, automated unfleeted escorts are largely a waste of money for player-controlled standard empires and there is not that much value to having an escort accompanying a ship at hyperspeed rather than just securing the points of departure and arrival. Automated unfleeted escorts are somewhat more useful to player-controlled pirate factions, as the computer may issue raid orders to automated ships equipped with boarding pods, and automated ships equipped with boarding pods will also sometimes capture ships or stations without the player having to issue the order manually.
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What i noticed in the early game that escorts are unable to deal with single pirate raiders because of the tech gap, when i overcome the tech difference the threat shifted from single ships to fleets of pirates or other empires and are the single escorts still at a disadvantage.
In my view, the goal of a lone escort isn't really to defeat an attacking pirate ship or fleet so much as to buy enough time for whatever is being escorted to escape or to buy enough time for a fast response unit to arrive. A high cruise speed and short jump initiation time on the escort target work well enough for the former and small system fleets work much better for the latter (especially as the fleets can be limited to operating in areas where you do actually have nearby fast response units), so yes, in my opinion, it's mostly not worth investing in automated unfleeted escorts for those duties. During wartime, the role of escorts changes somewhat and the computer appears to consider escorts for use as light raiders, and as such if you intend to use automated unfleeted escorts it might be better to design your escorts as raiders from the start; heavy shielding, a high cruise speed, and a short jump initiation time can help with survivability issues, and using area weapons as the primary armament might help in allowing escorts to damage or destroy enough freighters during their attacks on busy spaceports or mining stations to be worth the expense (though be warned that area weapons can also cause damage to neutral shipping, and attacks on neutral shipping, intentional or otherwise, will damage your empire's reputation and can strain relations with the owners of said shipping).
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The other function of actually escorting civilian ships around i find a waste of fuel as ships in hyper space are as far as i know untouchable and safe,
It is possible for an attacker that is more or less exactly on the flight path to land some hits on a target moving at hyperspeed as the target flies past, though this is more a gimmick that the player can attempt than something that the computer will be able to pull off against the player. I've also seen it reported that some of the jump disruption components might be able to force a ship out of hyperspeed and the description of the Gravity Well Generator would seem to support that idea, but this isn't something that I've ever been able to get to happen whenever I've tested things; ships whose jumps were initiated outside of the area of effect of a HyperDeny component don't appear to care that their flight path takes them directly across a jump inhibition field, and Gravity Well Generators don't seem to do anything to ships whose destinations are not within the field even if those ships fly directly across the field, whether or not the HyperDeny or Gravity Well components were on friendly, hostile, or neutral vessels or stations or if the jump inhibiting field is a map feature (e.g. Pozdac Testing Zone). I don't recall ever managing to activate a HyperDeny or Gravity Well component just as a ship already at hyperspeed goes past, so there may be an odd interaction there, though as ships will occasionally decide to drop out of hyperspeed to engage an attacker it may be difficult to distinguish between the field forcing the ship to stop and the ship deciding to stop so as to engage the attacker even if you were to set up conditions where you could test this repeatably.
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Do you ever run into easy escort kills when attacking the other Empires?
Occasionally, but the computer sets up its military in a manner much different from how the player is likely to set theirs up, and so computer-controlled empires have lots of fleets that the computer can choose from for its attacks whereas a partially-automated player-controlled empire that uses unfleeted automated escorts is likely to have large numbers of free-roaming automated escorts that the computer can take for missions whereas it's likely that there will be relatively few free-roaming automated fleets for the computer to play with. On top of that, the player is not terribly likely to pay that much attention to an attack by a lone escort; that's something that the player's system defenses have likely been designed to be able to deal with without player intervention since the start of the game just due to having to deal with pirate harassment, and so the player is unlikely to pay attention to a notification of such an attack, and even if the player does see such a notice they're relatively unlikely to respond to it because most player-controlled military units are fleets or other high-power (e.g. battleship-type Resupply Ships) or high-value (e.g. standard Resupply Ships and lone large transports) units, which are unlikely to be worth dispatching in response to minor harassment attacks, particularly when there's usually a higher-priority concern competing for the player's attention (e.g. setting up a fleet battle or system assault).
I suspect that a part of the reason that player-empire automated unfleeted escorts get sent on crazy suicide missions is that the computer comes up with a list of targets that it wants to hit and tries to find appropriate units that it can send to hit those targets, but if it doesn't have appropriate units available it'll try to make the attack with what it has. A player-controlled empire that doesn't give the computer anything but unfleeted automated escorts to do whatever it wants with would thus be more likely to see units used on inappropriate missions than a computer-controlled empire which has free control over all the fleets and ships in the empire. I think another part of it is that the computer might not be correctly accounting for the threat posed by things close to the strike target (which, when some of those forces and strike targets are mobile, is something difficult to do correctly, especially as quite a bit of time can pass between a mission being assigned and the strike being carried out and as any mobile forces present are unknown unless the player has current surveillance coverage or at least recent knowledge of the target area). A further part of the issue is that it appears to me as though the computer (usually correctly) regards unfleeted escorts as low-value units, much like exploration vessels, and it will use the escorts to scout hostile systems if it starts running out of the exploration vessels usually expended on such missions. Jumping blind into a hostile system is never a smart thing to do, but if you don't have scanner coverage of the area, have not managed to obtain an operations map recently, or don't have a deep cover agent in that empire, it is occasionally a necessary, or at least useful, thing to do. Accurate intelligence helps win wars, and if that intelligence comes at the cost of a low-value unit like a small escort or exploration vessel, so be it. You're probably less likely to see computer-controlled empires resort to relying on escorts for scouting than player-controlled empires because player-controlled empires are less likely to give the computer all the exploration vessels that it wants to build during wartime to replace the ones that it keeps throwing away on scouting missions into hostile systems.
< Message edited by Aeson -- 1/15/2016 11:47:33 PM >
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