Avoiding Micro-management of Fighters

[Beel]

Fighters currently need to be micro-managed. You send your salvaging fighters to wreckage to salvage it, and they attack the center, breaking it into a pile of individual pieces. Then when they are done the main wreck, and have only the huge pile of pieces left, then you need to select each piece and tell them that you want them to salvage it, waiting each time for them to do the individual piece. This makes them virtually useless.

 

What I suggest is that if they are told to salvage a wreck, then when they are done what they think is that piece of wreckage, they will look for the next nearest piece of wreckage, and salvage it. They will keep doing this until the user gives them a new command, like Return.

 

The same for all fighter types. For instance, if you send out mining fighters to mine Xanion, then when they are done mining that asteroid, they will fly to the nearest Xanion asteroid and mine it. But if you tell them to mine an Xanion asteroid, then they will not mine anything except Xanion. I.e. they will continue to do exactly what you told them to do, but will not do something that you didn't tell them to do. This single change would make them TONS more useful.

[Shrooblord]

This is what the mod Carrier Commander aims to implement. It works surprisingly well. There are a couple of bugs like having to tell the fighter squadrons to perform an Order again if you exit your craft (it tends to cancel Orders for some reason), but other than that, it saves a lot of time and lots of headaches. Check it out if you want functionality like it in your game right now. As for the devs, maybe they can take a look of it and draw some inspiration on how it could be implemented for vanilla.

 

If you send out mining fighters to mine Xanion, then when they are done mining that asteroid, they will fly to the nearest Xanion asteroid and mine it. But if you tell them to mine an Xanion asteroid, then they will not mine anything except Xanion.

It does everything you've described, except this specific part. When you give an Order to Mine, they will mine the nearest asteroid, and then the next nearest resource asteroid, regardless of its material. But tell you what, two whole Squadrons of Fighters make very short work of a field of asteroids, I can tell you that much.

 

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But yeah, definitely. I would love to see the functionality introduced by this mod integrated into the main game code itself. It's a great piece of functionality. It could use a little bit more work (also seeing as people are having considerable trouble installing it for some reason - seriously I'm not sure why that is: when I install it, everything works fine), but otherwise it's one of my favourite mods out there, specifically because it solves all the issues you raised.

[Burnthalo]

I fly around in a non-carrier with a fighter carrier and a salvaging/mining carrier both on escort.  the fighter carrier has 120 various attack fighters and the salv/min has 60 each salvaging and mining.  even without command carrier (I couldn't get it working) if I select the carrier and give the command to mine they strip the entire sector of all minables and if told to salvage they clean up all but the tiniest pieces. but it only works if I'm not in the carrier. otherwise its as you said. micro-manage city.

[Shrooblord]

without command carrier (I couldn't get it working)

See I'm genuinely surprised by that. I've had such an easy time installing it, and it works a charm for me, yet here we are with a whole group of people who can't get it to install. I'm going to investigate next week if I can repro my own installation steps, and post some instructions in the mod thread. Maybe that'd help the community gain access to a great mod. I'd love to help.

[Burnthalo]

without command carrier (I couldn't get it working)

See I'm genuinely surprised by that. I've had such an easy time installing it, and it works a charm for me, yet here we are with a whole group of people who can't get it to install. I'm going to investigate next week if I can repro my own installation steps, and post some instructions in the mod thread. Maybe that'd help the community gain access to a great mod. I'd love to help.

 

I think it was me messing up one of the others that caused the whole group of installs to fail. should have done one then ran the game to test it and then moved to the next but I really didn't want to reload so much. impatience.. am sure it was my fault.