Do you use "Support Forces"?

[fredsanford]

In bcoopactual 's Design Submissions thread, I saw this quote by him describing a battle:

One was torpedoed and had a magazine explode while a part of the support forces which meant that it happened off screen and I never had any control over or even saw anything other than the message of the torpedo hit itself until after I read the log.

This got me thinking- Are people aware of the option to turn off support forces? If you go to the 'Options' button (9th button) and uncheck "support forces", you won't have to worry about them.  My experience was that these support forces would have a tendency to get themselves in trouble wandering off on their own, and not doing much "supporting".  So I never enable Support Forces.

I was wondering what other's thoughts were on this option.

[generalvikus]

Thanks for pointing this out! In my most recent game, one of my favourite ships - the Battleship Hastings - came in as 'support' and went absolutely nuts. It charged straight at a stricken enemy battlecruiser, with the captain presumably yelling 'LEROY JENKINS' at the top of his voice, and quite literally almost rammed a sinking ship in broad daylight and fair weather. I actually think it only avoided a collision because at the last moment I desperate gave it an order to turn away. I don't know if it's a bug, but when AI controlled forces recieve a movement order they usually start to follow it for about a second before reverting to AI control, and I was able to use this to save the ship. As it happened, I desperately ordered all of my light forces to go in and finish off the enemy ship before it could do any damage, which led to a rather brutal butchering while the Battleship Rambo suffered only minor damage, recording its closest hit with its 14 inch guns at about 600 yards.

[Deleted]

I do use it.

I turned it off before.
BUT I found that turning it off only means no support force for the player. The AI on the other hand still gets them!

So I turned it back on.
I just gotta find my support force and support them, instead. It usually works well.

[bcoopactual]

Haha, always love a good Leeroy Jenkins moment.

It was pretty annoying to lose a battle essentially off-screen.  I will say though that while the support forces are frequently off doing shenanigans, they have occasionally also saved my bacon when my CL got caught in a cruiser engagement against an enemy CA or some similar arrangement where my forces were outclassed by the AI's. 

I just chalk it up to the chaos of war and haven't ever really considered turning them off.     

[garrisonchisholm]

Agreed- a non-ideal matter, but if you support the support forces I have seldom had things go amiss. Just like Admirals Level signaling; in 1902 wretched things can happen, but its part of the genre.

[rimbecano]

Dec 6, 2017 11:46:49 GMT -6 bcoopactual said:

It was pretty annoying to lose a battle essentially off-screen. 

If this happens, the RTW process gets killed and I redo the turn (or the battle,  if I'd saved since the scenario started).

What I'd really like to see would be a system where the AI is mostly in control of the entire force but:

(a) The AI is mostly scripted by the player with a system of "doctrines" or "standing orders" (so that your forces can be directed to use their ships in a manner consistent with how you built them to be used) and

(b) The player has a limited number of "command points" available to do things like issuing direct orders to ships / divisions / the fleet as a whole,  issuing new standing orders tailored to the tactical situation at hand, or passing information about enemy ships to ships not in view of them,  so that the AI can take them into account.

The number of command points available would depend on signaling technology (simulating faster flow of information between the commander and his fleet) and crew quality (simulating the initiative of individual officers). The number and complexity of standing orders that a ship could have at a time might also depend on crew quality (a green captain promoted by nepotism and unfit to his job might not have a good handle on even the core doctrines taught at the naval academy, for instance).

[aeson]

I don't turn them off. As annoying as Artificial Idiocy can be when it has control over my ships, it can be nice to have them even if I cannot control them, and I feel that there are enough times when the support force is beneficial balance out the times when the support force is a liability.

Also, it's a beautiful thing to unexpectedly find friendly capital ships coming up out of the fog of war to save your badly-outclassed cruiser force from a squadron of enemy battlecruisers or something like that, especially if the friendly computer-controlled forces manage to do more than merely drive off the enemy.

[klavohunter]

I've always left them on, it makes for some nerve-wracking battles, but the friendly AI usually acquits itself well in a fight, or uses its AI '6th Sense' as an advantage locating the enemy.

It's always the usual AI pitfalls that annoy me, like retreating damaged ships from a battle at high speed and flooding them to death...


Hearing that turning AI support forces off makes them disappear entirely while the enemy still gets theirs, makes me not want to try that option.

[oaktree]

I turned them off. The number of times they proved helpful was vastly outnumbered by the number of times they never came close to the battlefield, engaged a superior enemy force on their own, or simply appeared, fired one salvo, and turned away for no apparent reason.

The final straw was the force I was controlling arriving to bail out the support force after it started tangling with a superior enemy force. And the support force immediately turned and ran leaving me to fight the rear guard action by myself and take the losses.

Furthermore, the AI generally poorly handles any sort of "specialized" ship like pocket BCs intended for raider/cruiser hunting and treats them like full-sized capital ships.