Ship Formations + Attack Patterns

posted on April 30th, 2009, 8:01 pm

More complex formations would be lovely... Even more important would be...

The option for ships not to deploy in a lovely formation of 4 x 4 but for you to arrange them and then press Ctrl F and they all move at the same pace and attempt to keep a similar cohesion of position.

posted on May 1st, 2009, 6:33 am

With some tweaks to the physics files this could be fixed. Would make for a more realistic game imho.

posted on May 1st, 2009, 7:17 am

yeah

the need for the fleet to go same speed is crucial, when you have a fleet of lets say, 3 norways, a descent and 3 sovys, lets see what happens, your norways go in, die in about a second, then th sovys get there and die, and descent comes,(thats just an example) but basically with them going different speeds your weaker ships normaly are faster and get out in front, and form a line, easily picked off

whatd be really nice, is to order ships to form a  /
                                                                    /- or somthing like that

but just so for examplle with feds, we have a descent in front 2 akiras behind(this would be line right behind descent inside of v), so basically fron meatsheild 2 excelsiors off to the side then 2 intrepids behind excelsiors(not this is forming the outisde part of v,) then behind akiras 3 norways and a canaveral for plasma and blackout, so heres what happens, they go in all at same speed, so norway plasma, intrepid do there torpedo, excelsior do there acs, then they retreat, so with descent and akiras in what is now back, if need be descent recharge sheilds, akira redo there defenses, and canaveral uses sensor blackout, and everybody lives happily ever after

cept the enemis who jsut got owned

posted on May 1st, 2009, 12:04 pm

You can order your ships to form a Wedge Ray, its one of the Formations that is there in the menu.

Its keeping the ships in some kind of order that is the difficult part... and very annoying part i might add as well.

posted on May 1st, 2009, 8:37 pm

I believe there was mention of "3D scripted attack paths" in the old odfs, but I was never sure what they did.  they obviously didn't have any visual effect, but maybe, if I understand what they are for, they could be re-written to have an effect on how a ship approaches an enemy.

If those lines were in the classic Armada 2 files, they probably refer to the manouvers ships performed when you checked the "Directors Cut" (IIRC that's what it was called) option. Having small ships strafe and bigger ships circle around targets looked quite cool.

posted on May 1st, 2009, 8:39 pm

Well, what I do Ray is to have my support in seperate fleets so that I can easily toggle between special weapons 

I know it isn't formations, but it means that I can very quickly use specific weapons and ships when I need to... of course this doesn't work after you get more than 5 frigging fleets... because I find it really hard to switch between different fleets when I am only using four fingers (the other hand is on the mouse).