Micro-Management Questions

posted on April 6th, 2011, 12:39 am

Here's the situation.  Say I have a fleet of mixed ships that counter short, medium, and long-ranged ships.  But the enemy has the same setup on his fleet.  How do I manage the battle so that the ships only fire on what they counter?  How much skill would that require?

posted on April 6th, 2011, 1:07 am

If you were to hotkey each rock paper scissors grouping into groups 1-2-3 respectively (or any three numbers you can quickly switch between) then you could quickly switch between the groups and target ships they would do best against.

posted on April 6th, 2011, 9:18 am

thats a lot of micro to do, its easier to look at your passives, pick the one with the biggest offence boost, ie lots more damage to some ship, then target your whole fleet on that. its rarely a good idea to have ships in your fleet attack different ships, you will most likely need all your dps to get kills.

say you have kvorts and kbqs in equal numbers, and the enemy has something medium range and something long range, try go for the med ships first as they will take more damage from kvorts.

its also very important to make sure you dont attack ships that take reduced damage from your fleet. if u have loads of sangs and a few vorchas, and the enemy has warpins and monsoons, its better to smack the warpins down first, they lose supply and your sangs will miss a lot less and sangs do very little damage to mons. auto target will of course go after the low def mons.

[Boggz]

posted on April 6th, 2011, 4:04 pm

Last edited by Boggz on April 6th, 2011, 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I always have my ships assigned to fleets 1-6.  Almost always they are grouped by range as range dictates most of the damage passives as well as vessel speed .


   No offence to Myles but I feel that, in a big battle, it's imperative that you make sure that each group is firing on something they are good at destroying!  Left to their own whims Sang and Excel 2's for example will target Monsoons before almost all other Fed warships and waste immense amounts of firepower  .

  As Feds I group like this:

Team 1 - Shorties (Mons, Intrepids, Ambassadors)
Team 2 - Mediums (Akiras, most Warpins, Sovereigns)
Team 3 - Long Range and Artillery (Excel 1/2, Avalons)

  If I have something cool like Defiants that I want to micro-manage extra I will put them into team 4 so I can more easily choose just them.  Sometimes I will stick the Ambassadors in with the Medium as they are 20 units slower than the Monsoons and can drag them down a bit.


  EDIT:  Actually the teaming isn't quite so important with Feds as they have mostly defensive passives.  However the offensive passive grouping is MUCH more important:

Klingons:

Team 1 - Shorties (K'vorts if I'm using them or B'rel if I'm raiding with them, NOT BOTH, Neggies if I get them)
Team 2 - Medium 360 (KBQ and Vorcha + Chargh / Qaw'Duj)
Team 3 - Long (Sang)
Team 4 - Specialist - If I'm using B'rels to raid or Vutpa for decloaking I'll give them their own team

posted on April 7th, 2011, 6:13 am

I got a similar system like Boggz. The problem is my computer is too slow and because of that I can't control more than 2 groups, the third group wouldn't get its commands anymore  .
Groups 3 and 4 are usually taken by my scouts, 5 by ships that lost engines and strand somewhere on the map.

posted on April 7th, 2011, 6:34 am

I got a similar system like Boggz. The problem is my computer is too slow and because of that I can't control more than 2 groups, the third group wouldn't get its commands anymore  .
Groups 3 and 4 are usually taken by my scouts, 5 by ships that lost engines and strand somewhere on the map.

  Yikes! 

And I thought Boggz' computer was awful


  Yeah the slower your computer is the fewer teams you can really control in a practical way .  I que up 1-4 and make scouts 7-9.  Team 0 is usually reserved for specialty stuff like SFC, Moq'bara station, or a Decloaking Romulan Scout

  It's tough when your comp sucks though .  Now you know what the Bugglez haz been dealing with for so long!!!!

posted on April 7th, 2011, 4:25 pm

thats a lot of micro to do, its easier to look at your passives, pick the one with the biggest offence boost, ie lots more damage to some ship, then target your whole fleet on that. its rarely a good idea to have ships in your fleet attack different ships, you will most likely need all your dps to get kills.

To add onto what boggz and other said, micro managin your fleet depends on the situation.

If you're right in the middle of their force in a stand up fight, then you want to micro.

If you're skirting the edge of their force and kiting, auto target is likely best since you likely want to keep them moving.

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on April 7th, 2011, 5:47 pm

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on April 7th, 2011, 5:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Keeping all firepower of your fleet on one ship can whittle down enemy numbers faster. Have all your fleet target first things that do more damage to you, then everything else that doesnt take reduced damage from you.
However, splitting a fleet into different attacking groups can be better than focus fire in certain situations. Mainly if you have lots of offense-based passives in your fleet, or if the defense passive ships you're facing are tankers (Bugs and Monsoons a good example.) If the defense passive ships aren't being autotargeted, don't bother splitting firepower to take them out unless they put out lots of damage on you.

Now, just a warning about my post: I have never actually tried this becuz I don't like using hotkeys and thus do everything except repair or decommissioning with the mouse. It's quite possible I misestimated the effects of offensive or defensive passives.

posted on April 7th, 2011, 9:58 pm

It all depends on the situation and your goal more than anything else.

Sometimes you want to kill the players expenseve/rare ship first off, so it dies or leaves, while letting the rest of your fleet fight.

Sometimes you have no chance and just want to take out a few selected targets for your teammates.

It all depends.

posted on April 7th, 2011, 10:48 pm

It really depends on matchup, situation and strategy how I micromanage. In smaller engagements with fewer ships, focusing all dps of your fleet on a single ship makes more sense since every kill counts. In large fleet engagements I try to give each damage group their optimal target (... as best as I can...).
It also depends on the matchup and fleet compositions if focusing on one ship or optimizing damage output is more important.