A few thoughts on fleet spawn locations

[nightraven1901]

G'day, folks. First-time poster here; normally hate forums. Making exception to usual "doesn't use forums" rule in recognition of awesome work on behalf of mod writers; would love to see this mod be all it can be. So: fleet spawn locations.

I would presume, as was the case with the original game, that commanders are anticipated to have the chance to position their fleets to use strategy and possibly some guile in the defence of their worlds. However, it is rather difficult to do when the enemy fleet emerges from hyperspace within gunnery range of your defence force! Even in cases where my defence fleet is comparatively small there seems to be a few ships sacrificed to the enemy every time, simply because they spawn closer to the enemy emergence zone than to my own base structures. Even attempting to withdraw my fleet to a stronger defensive position is useless- they are forced to sluggishly turn and only then thrust towards the base- with enemy fire peppering their rears all the while. This results rapidly in a wrecked drive cluster and a ship dropping out of my retreat formation to be isolated and eliminated by the enemy. I've no complaints to losing ships when retreating- but I'd prefer to not need to place and configure my fleet every single time to a formation that isn't absolutely suicidal. I think the pathfinder fleet option can be used to start with a single ship, so you can place all the others yourself (in some other mods works fine. Haven't actually tried it in this one; never use it; shouldn't bloody have to) but this is tedium ad absurdum. Suggested solution: simply move the fleet spawn centrepoint back about halfway between where it is now and the base location on most maps.

Admittedly did not trawl entire forum for previous two-year old posts on this subject (life is precious) and as such apologise if I missed a huge emotion-filled argument on the matter.  Comments, complaints, etc? Please hit me up. I may even take the time to come back and check on this thing; the modwriters deserve at least a little of my effort in recompense for their dedicated service to the source material. Thank-you,

[Corey]

First off, welcome to the forums- glad you enjoy the mod. We are moving the defensive force spawns closer to the defensive structure positions. The reason they're up as far as they are on some maps is essentially because of not wanting the large ships to clip into stuff immediately. What we'll be trying instead if this becomes a problem is making different markers for them, I'm just not sure how well that works with defensive forces.

[nightraven1901]

Mate, you and your team are so far on top of everything I'm asking you've gotta be suffering from freaking oxygen deprivation. Alright, seems you have a plan- I can suggest using separate spawn points for Praetors and anything larger; place them essentially the same way the defence platforms are (the game never really wants to spawn more than two super-capital class craft at once anyway, so two more fixed spawn points per map might do it nicely and keep the fleet cohesion tight and effective) alternately, tweaking the spread mechanics would help a bit but I think in most cases the spawn centrepoint has to be moved back by about twenty to fifty percent, depending on exactly how far out you intend the fleet to spawn. You could also force the game to spawn the fleet by segments; break it into a few chunks, so each one doesn't flare out so far (I know the SSDs screw the fleet spawn pretty badly; thinking they could be spawned on their own and the remaining ships could be still be tightly-packed? Just an idea...) oh, the options. I look forward to seeing which one you pick

BTW: a brief re-reading of that makes me think I came off mildly annoyed instead of impassioned- apologies for that mate; I was gunning for excited not irritated. My bad, fella!