Situation is this. I have a Strike Fleet composed of mainly 9 carriers, each carrying a squad of ten bombers, each possessing 5 asms. In total, each sortie nets 450 9 damage missiles.
The issue I have is this. I’m fighting some minor threat, intending to conquer a system from some kind of hostile polity(?). Their fleets has 3 30k, 6 20k, 4 15k, 9 1k, ships remaining.
In order to guarantee elimination, I must dedicate 4 squads to each of the 30k ships, 3 squads for the 20k, and so on, so in total, I have to sortie my bombers more than 10 times.
I have been in this engagement for a real-life week. Detaching all 9 squads, ordering engagement range, assigning fire orders, waiting for the missiles to hit, ceasing fire orders, ordering the bombers to land, waiting for re-armament, then repeating the cycle all over again.
Did I just pick the wrong doctrine for me personally?
Are you using the various copy buttons, so you only need to assign ships once for the same target?
Do you use the general cease fire order on the sidebar?
Are you using fire at will?
EDIT You have 9 squads and it sounds like about 34 targets (3x4 + 6x3 + 4x1 and ignoring the tiny ships). Why do you need to sortie 10 times?
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By copy buttons, do you mean assign fleet, fire fleet, and cease fire fleet? Then yes.
What’s the general cease fire order?
I am not using fire at will.
10 sorties are including targets that are not on the list, but already eliminated.
On the miscellaneous tab of the sidebar, there is a “Cease Fire All Ships button”, that is the same as clicking cease fire on every fire control in your Empire.
Fire at will is very useful in two situation. When you need to fire quickly (as the inexperienced crew penalty is halved) and when you are going to fire a lot of weapons at a few targets. If you click Fleet Fire at Will, every fire control with weapons is randomly assigned a hostile target and set to open fire. If you are firing at everything anyway - and especially if you have missiles that can change targets if theirs is destroyed - it is much easier.
If you are launching against a few targets - lets say you are assigning all the fighters to attack just the three 30k ships - then I would…
- Launch them by selecting all the bombers and using detach, so you have a single bomber fleet
- Assign one bomber to attack one target, copy that to all the bombers
- Detach 30 bombers and repeat 2) for the second target
- Detach another 30 bombers and repeat 2) for the third target
- Drag them back into the single fleet.
- Use Fleet Sync On
- Click Open Fire Fleet.
For the approach before firing, use the Follow order with the appropriate minimum distance selected.
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If I detach the fighters via the ship list tab, when I land them, will they land back in their assigned squadrons?
There’s an Assign # checkbox in the combat tab. Would it not work by, let’s say, assigning 30 to a target, moving to fighter 31, assigning another 30 to target 2?
If you have a single bomber fleet, select the fleet with the carriers and use the ‘Land on Assigned Mothership’ order. All the bombers will find the right carriers (if they were in a squadron or landed for the first time using Land + Assign)
The assign # checkbox is for assigning weapons to fire controls.
I often use fleets with multiple carriers to conduct strikes against multiple targets. It is very straightforward once you get the hang of it.
BTW - in the next version, when you select multiple ships there is a summary at the bottom telling you how many of each type you selected. So selecting exactly 30 for example is a lot easier.
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