Xenon shipyard kill issues

[pref]

I'm trying to kill a xen shipyard that happened to pop up 20km from the Yaki base, need to act quick or the first I will burn them.
I want to sit in my corvette and do support, kill incoming ships and station defenses while my capship deal with the hull. Really not a fan of holding the trigger for half an our in a capship.
Also wanted a real fight, not just a one click kill with 10-20 destroyers.

Ran into 2 problems however:

First, my destroyer just can't damage the station - it's sitting in range, the turrets hit, but it won't use the main battery. If i give an attack order it just rotates all around and flies into the station. I have a higher dps in my corvette.
Is Syn a bad choice?

Second, these drones just keep coming, and at the rate they can be killed their corpses murder my FPS in short order. I'm down to 10-20 with a nice video card after like 15 minutes. And moving out of sector doesn't make them despawn any longer, have to wait a long time out of sector to get rid of them.
Also it's quite a boring experience, every time this happens the station heals itself and i have to restart.
Can those salvaging ships eat the drone wrecks?
Or is there a way to stop the drones from coming before killing the whole station? They come out of several modules so there doesn't seem to be a single target to get rid of.
Having killed hundreds of them it seems there are still more hundreds coming with no end to it.

[pref]

It gets worse with the Syn, i was watching it 'fight' out of sector.

It couldn't kill a P and 2 Ms while my dragon downed 30+ such ships and collected the loot.
Is that ship cursed? Or this is normal capship behaviour vs xen fighters?

[Feloidea]

I can't speak about the station assault since I've never done that via subordinates, always done that sort of stuff personally.

As for the Syn not being able to kill a P and two Ms, that very heavily depends on the ship's loadout. If it's geared heavily towards anti-capital then yeah it's going to be absolutely atrocious against S and M ships because it only has very few M turrets (which presumably would be set up to deal against that threat) and turret performance in low attention/OOS is quite poor against S ships in particular (low hit chance against small targets, hitchance gets lowered even more if the ships are fast, ships hit recieve reduced damage if they're fast). Best way to deal with S/M ships is to have your own swarm of them to hunt, though a sizeable fleet of capital ships combined will also be able to apply some serious attrition through weight of firepower, but that's a very ineffecient way of dealing with S/M swarms (it does have the benefit of rarely having to replace S/M ship losses though, so if you're rich to the point you can just pump out dozens of destroyers at a whim it is a convenient low-effort solution).

Not sure if the turret commands apply in low attention/OOS but if for example your L turrets are set to attack capital ships, they might totally ignore the S and M ships and flat out not contribute to the combat calculations(what little that would've been).

[Alan Phipps]

A Syn with TER L (attack all enemies) and M (attack fighters) Pulse Turrets (and ideally with some in-game turret mods to help damage and reload rate) is just great at swatting enemy fighters and drones IS/high attention, but not so good there for station killing in AI hands.

[Koizuki]

While it's tempting to kit out all 8 L turrets on a Syn with Plasma, I've found good success switching them to a mixed loadout of 4 Plasma set to Attack Capitals (or Bolt, I guess, if you're sticking to pure TER tech here,) 4 TER L Beams set to Attack Fighters, and the M Turrets would be Flak set to Defend (or Pulse/Bolt again if pure TER tech.)

The idea is that the Beams will engage any S/M enemies in range, drawing their aggro, and then once they open fire on the Syn, the M turrets will focus fire on them to take them out. It's worked pretty well so far, so I've mimicked this loadout on my Rattlesnakes and Odysseuses as well.

As far as invincible stations, it may be a bug if none of the other suggestions are working for you.
During my time clearing out Xenon sectors for the Yaki plot, I didn't have much trouble using my fleet to destroy all their stations (aside from the occasional Rattlesnake derping into range of the Gravitons) but I did encounter one or two stations that seemed impossible to kill, but eventually was destroyed after some combination of reloading my game and/or going OOS for a while. Not sure what caused the issue, but it's possible there was some invisible geometry from another destroyed section that didn't despawn properly and blocked line of sight for the destroyers or something, I don't know.

[GCU Grey Area]

Would not worry too much on the Yaki's behalf in that situation. There's often a nearby Xenon shipyard, however the Yaki know how to spoof Xenon ID codes & the 2 factions generally leave each other alone. Only reason to do anything to the Xenon shipyard is if you're planning to do a lot of business with the Yaki & don't want the Xenon sending capital ships against you every time you visit the Yaki station. In practice though I've never bothered to do that, even during a game where I was a frequent customer of the Yaki. Indeed found that fight quite a fun diversion to pass the time while waiting for my freighters to offload ship parts & for the Yaki to make me some ships from them. By the way, did those supply runs with an Odysseus-E carrying a full complement of S/M freighters (it's an excellent blockade runner).

Frankly seems rather ambitious to attempt to demolish a Xenon shipyard with just a single Syn. They're tough stations. Generally use a fleet of at least 10 destroyers myself for station demolition tasks, & even they'll take a while if the target's a Xenon shipyard. My standard procedure for station demolition is shift-select my destroyers & give them all a 'fly & wait, then attack' order sequence. I then fan out the fly & waits to form a firing line at optimal distance for their main guns. I position my carrier about 40km behind that firing line (therefore about 50km from the station). This setup means my carrier's interceptors will engage drones that attack my destroyers, but won't launch until those drones are well outside station turret range. When my destroyers have inflicted sufficient damage to the near side of the station I split them into 2 groups & send them to flanking positions on either side of the station, again using a 'fly & wait, then attack' order sequence to keep them clear of any remaining turrets. For really big stations (such as Xenon shipyards) I often end up moving my destroyers a 3rd time so they meet up on the far side of the station.

As for Syn loadouts, during my Terran loyalist game got good results with an even mix of L beams & L bolts.

[pref]

Thanks for all the help!

Syn was equipped with all bolt turrets - thought that's good for fighter defense, beams seemed really weak damage wise. Maybe that was a bad choice?


I just accepted my fate and kept killing those drones for like 2 hours. Lured them away a bit so the wrecks didn't pile at the same location - that seemed to help with the FPS problem (please ES if you can despawn the small wrecks quicker for stubborn idiots like me!). With a little help from me they weren't even close to beating the Syn's shield regen, that thing is near unkillable.


The Syn spent about 1 min firing the main batteries out of 5 or so - was nowhere near to beat the hull repair in any way!
And a terrible suspicion dawned on me - can this be a result of a low star pilot?
My Syn had a 2 star gal, and i also had a Rattler with a 5 star boron captain. When the intensive fight was over i called the boron to help with the station hull and she had a much better main battery utilization.
Even when the whole thing was wrecked except for an XL cradle she was consistently hitting it - and not the wreckage.

The rattler felt rather competent, and having that as a first impression would paint a totally different picture of the game.

Going to try this theory again soon, as there is also an M/S wharf near the suicidal Yaki.
Will put the 5star on the Syn this time and see how it goes. Just have to steal some Asgards before to have a kill button if i really feel the need >D.

I just realized at the end that no xenon ships attacked the Yaki station, and this was even explained during the plot. For some reason I thought destroying the amp would change that but it seems that's not the case.
Anyway, thanks again for the explanations.

Otherwise i had an insanely good fight, and these beam emitters on my dragon are just mind blowing.
With drag off, the quick boost adjustments and strafe really feels like a realistic space sim but without the boredom proper physics usually brings with it. Think ES found the perfect balance here.


Egosoft, If hitting stations is indeed locked behind the skill system then please, please try to reconsider that specific aspect of the skill feature - not being able to hit a 15km station from 7kms is just utterly disappointing (also the amount of threads whining about the same thing was surprising).
I think this really hurts the game's image for no good reason.
Not sure why does the ship move at all if there is no incoming damage above shield regen and it's inflicting damage on its target? At first sight this seems easy enough a logic to implement. And definitely not something a captain needs a single star for.
Maybe using travel drive with no flight assist to approach a target with precision could be hidden behind 4-5 stars but this??
I have seen some scenarios where the game's pathing is really good considering the 3d dynamic environment and object complexity. That should be something that the game pushes proudly in the players face, and by no means would i play around with worsening that to put more weight on the skill system. It hurts the game image so much. Just my 2 cents of course.

[GCU Grey Area]

Used to think much the same about beam turrets. They do indeed look incredibly weak on paper. Then one day, entirely on a whim, I decided to try them. Did not expect them to do much of anything, I'd just come to the realisation that I'd never actually tested them for myself up until that point. Since those tests beam turrets have pretty much become my default anti-fighter loadout for capital ships. Key difference to the alternatives is an extreme level of accuracy. All a beam turret has to do in order to inflict more damage overall is to hit more often e.g. 3x more often than a pulse turret, or 4x more often than bolt, etc. Since beam turrets can generally be relied upon to keep an S or M target under continuous fire while it remains within range, this is usually the case.

As regards pilot skill, makes a huge difference to the performance of a ship in combat. Can recommend having a look at the X4 In-Depth FAQ for more info on the effect of crew skills. All of my capitals are commanded by 5* captains, while all S/M warships get a 4* pilot. Find it's well worth the additional trouble of training my pilots to a high level before assigning them to their ships - they perform better, so achieve my objectives faster & take fewer casualties in the process.

[pref]

Used to think much the same about beam turrets. They do indeed look incredibly weak on paper. Then one day, entirely on a whim, I decided to try them. Did not expect them to do much of anything, I'd just come to the realisation that I'd never actually tested them for myself up until that point. Since those tests beam turrets have pretty much become my default anti-fighter loadout for capital ships. Key difference to the alternatives is an extreme level of accuracy. All a beam turret has to do in order to inflict more damage overall is to hit more often e.g. 3x more often than a pulse turret, or 4x more often than bolt, etc. Since beam turrets can generally be relied upon to keep an S or M target under continuous fire while it remains within range, this is usually the case.

As regards pilot skill, makes a huge difference to the performance of a ship in combat. Can recommend having a look at the X4 In-Depth FAQ for more info on the effect of crew skills. All of my capitals are commanded by 5* captains, while all S/M warships get a 4* pilot. Find it's well worth the additional trouble of training my pilots to a high level before assigning them to their ships - they perform better, so achieve my objectives faster & take fewer casualties in the process.

You mean factory default beams, or they only get useful after modding?

Regarding the skill system, it's all good to provide more detail, goals and credibility to the universe, but i'd not degrade basic commands and pathing to flesh it out under any circumstances.

Way back on XR i implemented a station boarding script, it promoted 3 existing capships to a boarding squad who met at a sync point and then the 2 support ships rushed in from 2 different directions to distract and kill turrets while the boarding ship entered the theatre some 20 secs later to drop the boarding pods.
I could implement it to near perfection to the extent that i could add artificial errors to achieve the desired success rate.
The engine is really capable, it wasn't that my scripts were so great.

Seeing that deadly precision and well coordinated execution was something that really added a lot to the game world imo. Such attacks made things feel very real and the universe a seriously dangerous place.
Things like that should be standard. I would have never balanced that via not being able to hit the station when the captain can't even see anything else looking out from the cockpit window.
There are better ways that won't make the game look stupidly incompetent.

[GCU Grey Area]

You mean factory default beams, or they only get useful after modding?

Modding is not essential for them to be useful. For at least the first week or so of a new game my destroyers tend to fly with default beam turrets. During that period almost all High Energy Catalyst is reserved for fitting Expediters to their main guns. Need to have quite a lot of spare HEC stored up before I can justify using it on secondary weapon systems.

Regarding the skill system, it's all good to provide more detail, goals and credibility to the universe, but i'd not degrade basic commands and pathing to flesh it out under any circumstances.

Rather like it myself & glad there are distinct differences between pilots of various skill levels. Would find the game less interesting if all pilots performed exactly the same & there were no mechanisms for me to improve their capabilities.

[Nanook]

... (please ES if you can despawn the small wrecks quicker for stubborn idiots like me!)....

That would not please a whole lot of players who depend on wrecks for salvage, including me. They already despawn too fast for my Manticores to collect them all after a battle.

[pref]

That would not please a whole lot of players who depend on wrecks for salvage, including me. They already despawn too fast for my Manticores to collect them all after a battle.

Can you salvage drone and S/M wrecks?
Thought that's for bigger things only.

[Koizuki]

With regard to Beams, I was similarly puzzled about them early on before I started creating my fleets. I did research into them and found hundreds of posts/threads/comments that all simply said Beams sucked because of their terrible damage, and to use other turrets instead.

However, I did manage to stumble upon a handful of posts in that mess that suggested L-Beams in particular were actually very useful.
They have longer range than their M-size counterparts, and higher base damage, with the TER variant having slightly higher damage than the other factions' L-Beams.
The major advantage here is that they have an extremely high hitrate/accuracy compared to even Pulse turrets, allowing them to reliably chip away at S/M ships, and preventing their shields from ever regenerating.

L-Beams have a 4.6-5km range, while most S/M ships' weapons sit at around the 3-4km range, so they're able to start engaging and wearing them down before they even get into range most of the time. Pulse/Bolt turrets will still struggle to hit them that far out unless they're already flying straight at you.
This is why I use them to snipe S/M ships, luring them into range of the rest of the M-Flaks; M-Beam turrets still feel pretty worthless unless you have an absolute ton of them. L-Beams are also pretty capable of disarming Xenon K/I's since they can focus fire onto their turrets, rendering them sitting ducks relatively quickly, though I'd still rather just delete them outright with some L-Plasma. Thus, a mix of these two work out pretty well in my experience.

The actual S/M Beam Emitters, on the other hand, can potentially be pretty nice since you can simply throw more fighters/corvettes at the problem, and then you have mobile Laser Towers that have ridiculously high hit rates. I still prefer S/M TER Pulse on these ships for a balance of accuracy and damage, though.

Basically, all the negative comments I've seen about Beams are basically about the M-Beam turrets, not anything else Beam-related.

As to the pilot skill, their Piloting rating has a fairly major impact on their turn rates, if I recall. I think it was something like they only get to 100% effective turn rate (as listed on the ships' stats) at 5 star piloting, and it falls off the lower its level, causing a barely-zero-star Pilot on my Raptor to end up 3-4 sectors behind my 3-star-piloted Asgard when I gave them both a Fly-to order at the same time. The AI seems to path in a series of straight lines, so they end up needing to turn pretty often.

[chew-ie]

Basically, all the negative comments I've seen about Beams are basically about the M-Beam turrets, not anything else Beam-related.

Yeah, they always were / are considered to not do enough damage. That situation changes the more M slots are available - then they quickly become too powerful (Raptor...).

I've no simple solution here besides adding diminishing returns (less damage per battery if turret count rises). That way a single-turret M beam could have a solid damage and a large array of M turrets (like on a Raptor) would still have the advantage of being able to engage a lot of enemies (missiles!) but doesn't get a linear increase in damage.

[pref]

Can recommend having a look at the X4 In-Depth FAQ for more info on the effect of crew skills.

Thanks, checked this - but the problem lies deeper then scripts.
Having higher delays between actions or reduced usage for tools like drones, accuracy/rof/dps adjustments are all good solutions to skill handling.

This inability to find an angle to shoot, stick to a good angle once found and constant repositioning is probably happening at the engine level - which as i recall also has skill related adjustments baked into it.
At least in XR it required the skill parameter for movement and other commands.
That makes the game look way worse then it actually is. Probably costs lots of lost brain cells and the owners as customers.

[GCU Grey Area]

M-Beam turrets still feel pretty worthless unless you have an absolute ton of them.

Still prefer them on my capital ships & I don't just mean Raptor. Initially tried a mix of L beams with M bolts, largely due to concerns about the range of M beam turrets. However, eventually noticed that those M bolts almost always missed anyway when shooting at S/M targets outside M beam range, so the on paper range advantage of M bolts made little difference in practice.

These days the only circumstances in which I use non-beam turrets is if I'm using a Boron fleet, or I want to include missile turrets in a capital ship's loadout (M missile turrets work just as well as L, albeit having a lower ammo capacity) or on M ships, for which I tend to favour shard turrets. The much higher manoeuvrability of M ships (compared to capitals) makes it significantly easier for them to get into short range, where the high accuracy of beam turrets is less valuable & consequently the low damage becomes significantly more of a downside.

[Koizuki]

I think in my current fleet, the only ship I've given M-Beams to is the Zeus-E because the vast majority of its 18 turrets are on the top side of it, allowing them to focus fire quite nicely (contrast with the Colossus whose turrets are sort of all over the place.)
That said, you are absolutely correct about most turrets having trouble tracking enemies at range, but that again is the reason I've equipped my Capitals with at least one L-Beam. One TER L-Beam does a bit more than 4 M-Beams worth of damage per second, outranges commonly-used enemy weapons, has the same high accuracy at range, and causes the target hit to begin attack runs on your ship, which generally consists of it flying straight at it. Once they start doing this, most non-beam turrets have not too much issue hitting these enemies, and I force them to only target these enemies by setting them to "Defend" so that they only target ships currently making these attack runs. It's worked out pretty well for me, as even the M-turret-poor Asgards and Syns were never really bothered by poking the hornet's nest of S/M Xenon and station drones in the Tharka's Cascade to Savage Spur areas.

I haven't yet tried Missiles on my offensive Capitals yet, though. I did try them briefly on some S/M ships, but re-equipping them got annoying fast, even with 2 Auxiliaries and 3 Carriers in the fleet; Despite producing everything I need, they would burn through all their resources, and the traders for the Aux ships didn't use the Aux ship's Captain's Piloting stat like Station-bound traders do with Management, so they were unable to resupply my Aux ships since I didn't have enough 5-star Pilots. My Aux ships themselves do have 2 Missile Launchers each, and I've modded them with negative reload as well to try and slow down how fast they spam missiles (I use the Interceptor Missiles, so at regular speed you end up with Macross-level Missile ridiculousness -- 60+ missiles chasing after a single P) but then I run into the other annoyance where for some reason the "High" resupply setting seems to change their number of drones when they auto-resupply on each other. I wish that resupply setting was configurable in some way, or perhaps able to set "Profiles" to resupply to (for example, ships perhaps saving the "Loadout" used to create them initially, or allowing us to manually set it to any saved Loadout, then resupplies simply reference that setting to see what needs to be refilled.)

[pref]

I stole an asgard finally. Never used that ship in personal operations previously, just had them do gate defense.

Now i tried to "support" it, but it's like the inverse of the Syn situation.. a quick touch deletes an I? I had the feeling that the one I didn't even need the full shot, could probably kill as many as i can get bunched up for a single swipe.
Wanted to be a pirate this game, not build ships just steal a few capitals. But it feels like with this single asgard i can just kill whatever as long as i can defend it from fighters with my corvette. Not sure if even that is needed as the shielding is also brutal, the Syn could outheal a 100 defense drones plus few incoming S/Ms and has a weaker capacity.
Is this intended, or will be patched soon?
I wanted to put a 5* captain on it so it can move quickly when ordered, but will that mean that all my fights will last like 1 sec + battery alignment time?
Am i better off shelving this thing?

-----

On another note i stole a lone Tokyo as well, by the time the marines finished it went neutral and recalled the fighters so i got a nice little fleet with it for free. I wanted to assign most of my S ships to it as well, but they cannot dock, just circle around with a failed dock order (unable to reach destination) in both high and low attention. The ship is not full yet with docked fighters.
Is this related to the ship type? Is there a better carrier that doesn't have issues?
I have never tried fleets due to things like this, usually ended working with 1 - 2 capships that i aligned myself and the rest big ships went to oos defense.

I'd like to have a carrier that can execute orders well - curious about new fleet commands and improvements.
Which carrier is the best right now regarding flawless command execution?
Which commands or setup works best for the scenarios below?
Would like to cut down on trial/error time as much as possible.

I will to use it in high attention, while i fly my corvette eliminating bigger unexpected threats.
Targets will be either bigger fleets that i plan to just disable for boarding (so no accidental destruction of capships), or well defended stations.
It should be able to defend against a bunch of S/M ships and missiles but don't care about firepower apart from that. I just want to see the fleet functionality at its best.

Any hints would be appreciated, or link to a proper doc/guide on the topic if it's that complicated.

[taztaz502]

M-Beam turrets still feel pretty worthless unless you have an absolute ton of them.

Still prefer them on my capital ships & I don't just mean Raptor. Initially tried a mix of L beams with M bolts, largely due to concerns about the range of M beam turrets. However, eventually noticed that those M bolts almost always missed anyway when shooting at S/M targets outside M beam range, so the on paper range advantage of M bolts made little difference in practice.

These days the only circumstances in which I use non-beam turrets is if I'm using a Boron fleet, or I want to include missile turrets in a capital ship's loadout (M missile turrets work just as well as L, albeit having a lower ammo capacity) or on M ships, for which I tend to favour shard turrets. The much higher manoeuvrability of M ships (compared to capitals) makes it significantly easier for them to get into short range, where the high accuracy of beam turrets is less valuable & consequently the low damage becomes significantly more of a downside.

M beam turrets not entirely useless then? I always avoid them.

Love L Beams though, even L Pulse.


As for dealing with xenon shipyards i tend to just wait until i've got an asgard to save myself the heartbreak.

Have had good success with defence station recently OOS by just using 3 destroyers. They seem to manoeuvre around and deal with all segments of the stations 100% better than they used too.

You might also want a carrier close by with some torpedo bombers to deal with any xenon capital ships that show up, they work a dream OOS. Alternatively you could use behemoth destroyers and just keep the bombers docked at them.

[Koizuki]

I'm sure M-Beams have their usage (on my patrol Corvettes I've been testing giving them one set to anti-missile, and the rest being the standard Flak set to Defend/Attack Fighters) but outside of something like the Raptor, and to some extent, the Zeus series carriers, most Capital ships don't seem to have enough M turrets that can focus in any given direction at a time.

The M-Beams would give consistent dps because they almost can't miss, but their range is incredibly short. Granted, Flak is not significantly longer range, but if they need to get that close anyway, then they'd be conducting attack runs already, in which case I personally prefer having at least one L-Beam bringing them in from longer range, and bursting them down with some Flak as they make their approach, hopefully not giving them the ability to retreat back out of range for another run. Shard turrets might work here as well, but being shotgun-type weapons, their dps will be very inconsistent even in this scenario.

Is this intended, or will be patched soon?

It does appear to be "intended" because its tradeoff is a fairly long cooldown period between uses, but as you have seen, their shielding is tough enough to shrug off most things outside of multiple K/I's in range while waiting for it to cool down. It's pretty commonly known that this ship is extremely OP and some players choose not to use them at all because of that.

On another note i stole a lone Tokyo as well, by the time the marines finished it went neutral and recalled the fighters so i got a nice little fleet with it for free. I wanted to assign most of my S ships to it as well, but they cannot dock, just circle around with a failed dock order (unable to reach destination) in both high and low attention. The ship is not full yet with docked fighters.
Is this related to the ship type? Is there a better carrier that doesn't have issues?
I have never tried fleets due to things like this, usually ended working with 1 - 2 capships that i aligned myself and the rest big ships went to oos defense.

I'd like to have a carrier that can execute orders well - curious about new fleet commands and improvements.
Which carrier is the best right now regarding flawless command execution?
Which commands or setup works best for the scenarios below?
Would like to cut down on trial/error time as much as possible.

I will to use it in high attention, while i fly my corvette eliminating bigger unexpected threats.
Targets will be either bigger fleets that i plan to just disable for boarding (so no accidental destruction of capships), or well defended stations.
It should be able to defend against a bunch of S/M ships and missiles but don't care about firepower apart from that. I just want to see the fleet functionality at its best.

There's quite a lot to parse through here, but let's see..

First, check to see if there's anything else tying up the landing pads on it? And the dock space for S and M ships are different, so make sure there's still space for the relevant ship type; The Tokyo can only dock 58xS and 11xM ships at maximum.
I've used the Zeus-E, Atlas Sentinel, Colossus Sentinel, and Raptor in my game and none have had issues with docking so long as I kept their fighter complements within their individual docking capacities.

All carriers should operate similarly in terms of "command execution" since they should be using basically the same scripts, I believe.

For fleet setup, if the carriers are set as the Flagship, they can enter "Position Defense" mode which sends out every subgroup assigned (you can toggle each group to participate or not) into a large "Defend Position" bubble you can move around, and you can set whether ships from each bubble will move to support other bubbles. These ships will attack any hostile that enters their bubble's range, but otherwise will do the usual Defend Position stuff of slowly flying around in circles within the bubble.

Otherwise, you can also have it just follow you/stay at a position and set its subgroups to do the work instead.
"Intercept for Commander" will have them go after S/M ships (I use this generally on my S Fighters, M Corvettes, and any Destroyers I've set up for anti-fighter.)
"Bombard for Commander" will have them go after L/XL ships (Used on anti-capital Destroyers, S/M Bombers, and a set of S-Fighters I've put Burst Rays on for turret stripping.)
"Attack with Commander" has it simply follow its leader around and only engages whatever they directly engage.
"Defend Commander" will have them follow and be passive until its leader gets shot at.

Those I believe are the main roles you'd use for fleet setups, and once done properly everything kind of just works in my experience.