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Aeson -> RE: AI will not stop parking fleets in neighbor territory (1/28/2015 9:34:44 PM)
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If you want the computer to leave your ships and fleets where you park them, you need to change the automation setting for Fleet Formation at the bottom of the Empire Policy menu to manual. Otherwise, the computer has permission to do whatever it wants to do with all of your ships, including assigning the home base, posture, and area of engagement. Automating individual fleets will continue to work, and indeed is necessary for fleet postures to work, and in fact in many ways works better with Fleet Formation set to manual control since the ships will stay where you put them in the stance you chose for them.
And no, this does not mean you have to keep an eye on all your fleets beyond checking every now and again to make sure the fleets still have an adequate number of ships in them, which is easily done by scrolling through the Fleets menu, especially if you standardize your fleet sizes and make all fleets "pure" (i.e. they are composed of only a single type of ship), possibly further aided by naming the fleet.
Here is an example of how you might arrange things to make management simple:
1. System Defense Force: 3 escorts, defensive stance, system-wide engagement range. Escort design includes a boarding pod, a fast-initiation hyperdrive such as the Kaldos Hyperdrive (you may perhaps not bother upgrading the Kaldos drives on these to Torrents when those become available, as the first upgrade of the Kaldos is as good as or better than all but the final upgrade of the Torrent in terms of jump initiation time, and for short-range travel it is the jump initiation time which matters most for response time), and with a high turning speed and whatever sublight speed you deem adequate. You can always deploy a couple extra System Defense Forces to important systems, or assign a more potent force if necessary, so you might not want to make these ships too large.
2. Regional Defense Fleet: 10 frigates, defensive stance, nearby systems or sector-wide engagement range. Frigate design probably includes a boarding pod, a fast-initiation hyperdrive such as the Kaldos Hyperdrive paired with a high-speed hyperdrive such as the Equinox Jumpdrive (this combines the fast jump initiation of the Kaldos with the high speed of the Equinox, at the cost of doubling the space required and using the higher of the two power costs when the hyperdrives are engaged; you want both because you want the fleet to be able to quickly respond to threats in and out of the home system), and good turning speed. As with the escorts, you only really need the sublight speed to be whatever you deem adequate, but unlike the escorts you probably want these to be midweight, or perhaps even heavyweight, combatants, rather than being lightweight combatants like the escorts are, as these are the cavalry that rides to the rescue of beleaguered System Defense Forces.
3. Raiding Force: 5 to 10 cruisers, manually controlled or given attack posture with attack targets, probably not too many such groups. Cruisers designed for raiding should emphasize travel range, sublight speed, and turning speed (so high cruise and possibly sprint speed, as well as high turning speed) at the expense of firepower and/or staying power; raiders should have some degree of planetary bombardment capability and may want to be able to carry troops for invasions of lightly-defended or ungarrisoned colonies in the enemy backfield. You may want to pair fast-initiation and high-speed hyperdrives on the cruisers as was done with the frigates so that they can escape responding enemy fleets more readily.
4. Boarding Group: About 5 destroyers. Designs should emphasize sublight speed and agility, with a good amount of staying power; hyperspeed and fast jump initiation are nice but ultimately unnecessary. Armament should probably be relatively light and include tractor beams, and probably also jump inhibitors unless partnered with an interdictor design, but should avoid using gravity weapons or railguns, and must include at least one boarding pod (probably only one boarding pod, at least until and unless a bug with boarding pods is corrected); missiles might be attractive weapons due to their relatively poor armor penetration and their decent alpha strike capability, but make sure that the design engagement settings are on point-blank to try to minimize the number of missiles in the air after the shields go down and to keep close enough to launch boarding pods as soon as or shortly after shields go down. As with the Raiding Forces, Boarding Groups are specialized task forces and you probably won't have too many floating around.
5. Battle Group: About 10 capital ships, or, if you prefer, carriers; if you don't prefer carriers, you might add one or two to give fighter support to the battle line and perhaps act as flagships. These are intended for heavy fleet actions, so the designs will probably focus on firepower and staying power at the expense of sublight speed and agility, though if you prefer battlecruisers to battleships for your battle line, the focus will change accordingly, and regardless of preference the speed and agility must still be adequate for fleet action. If you're using a pure-carrier battle fleet, they either need to be fast or have a lot of staying power.
6. Siege Fleet: Perhaps 10 carriers or, if you prefer, capital ships with carrier support. Siege fleets are intended to engage system defenses like Defensive Bases and Spaceports, so sublight speed and maneuverability is not a priority, whereas long-range firepower is (hence the suggestion of using carriers rather than capital ships) and staying power will always be helpful (especially if using capital ships, as the primary armament of the capital ship will lead it to engage the defensive structures at ranges where those structures can hit back; carriers equipped with missiles or long-range torpedoes and not set to evade have the same issue). You want long-range firepower here so that any shorter-ranged weapons on the stations are unable to contribute to the fight except as anti-fighter weapons, as this reduces the amount of fire your ships have to endure, at least if you chose standoff or evade for the design engagement ranges. These fleets should probably be used in cooperation with a Battle Group or two, with the Battle Groups hitting the system ahead of the Siege Fleet to draw any defending ships into an engagement somewhere in the system at a distance from the target of the Siege Fleet, or at least arrive with the Siege Fleet and provide a target-rich environment for the fixed defenses while engaging any ships that attempt to strike the vessels of the Siege Fleet.
7. Invasion Fleet: Your preferred troop ship design, with however many such vessels in the fleet as you deem adequate or necessary; I tend to use fleets of 3 or 5 transports, and use (or combine) several fleets if I need more troops for an operation. I prefer to clear systems of space-based opposition before the boots hit the ground, so my transports tend to be relatively lightly armed and armoured, but have a reasonable sublight speed and turning speed so that they can pick up or drop the troops quickly when the transports arrive. I do not typically include escorting warships in my invasion fleets, as these groups are not meant to participate in fleet action and will likely be covered by one or more Battle Groups, Raiding Forces, or Boarding Groups when in a hostile system. Other people prefer to drop the troops while the space battle is ongoing, or even without seriously attempting the destruction or engagement of the space-based defenses, and so will use more heavily-armed and especially armoured transports, probably sacrificing troop capacity but keeping a high speed and maneuverability, or taking the super-dropship (or super-dropship/battleship) approach with the troop-carrying resupply ship.
The nice thing about the above, if you go in for standard fleet sizes as well as single-type compositions rather than the mixed compositions suggested for some of the fleet types, is that by opening the fleet list and looking at the name of the fleet (assuming you rename the fleet upon creation) and the number of ships contained within it, you know how many and what type of ships need to be built, if any, to restore each fleet to full strength. Minimally-mixed fleets, such as the Battle Group composition suggestion of 10 capital ships and 2 carriers, is only slightly more difficult to manage, as it only requires a quick check to make sure the specialist vessels of the fleet are present (for the example Battle Group, the fleet strength should be 12 ships; if they are not all there, just select the fleet, check if both carriers are present, if not order replacement carriers, and then order enough replacement battleships to bring the fleet to its nominal strength of 12 ships); the non-primary types should often be a specialist type, so for the Battle Group example the carriers might have the Fleet Targeting and Fleet Countermeasures modules and carry any admirals assigned to the fleet, freeing up a little space on the battleships and possibly keeping the admirals somewhat safer. Some other specialist designs are jump denial and interdiction ships, heavily armored and shielded flagships for admirals, unarmed or very lightly armed carriers, and ships equipped with long-range scanners. More heavily mixed fleets, such as those with multiple types of specialist supporting a primary ship design, or fleets with multiple types present in similar numbers, are more difficult to manage as it becomes necessary to take more time to check on what is missing from each whenever the fleet is understrength, and it may be problematic to remember what is supposed to be included in each fleet.
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