X3 - Patrol - wingman setup...

[Brin33]

Right, after my previous post about buying Nova vanguards, I have gone out and bought 10 of the beuties...

A few questions....

How does everyone setup a patrol?
I mean actually telling all the ships in the patrol to be wingmen, I can't select all 10 novas and say, set homebase to cantaur and set to wingman. Do you all select each ship in turn and set these options? or are there shortcut keys I am missing?

If I have set Novas to be wingmen do I also need to tell them a homebase?, and, if so will they then follow the homebase ship?
I have seen several posts warning about setting wingmen to protect, because if the protected ship is killed the wingmen sit there and get picked off.

My intention is to setup this squad to patrol some of the family sectors, will this sort of patrol help increase race rank?

[General Dave]

You set the fighters to attack the target/protect any M6 or greater ship.
The M6 ship with the correct flight/fight software will have the command patrol several sectors/ patrol single sector.

in the Corvettes command console you will see extra commands, use this to individually set the desired sectors for patrol and then the start sector patrol key to begin, the protecting M3 will follow and protect your M6.

[Player.]

There is alredy a thread about this

[EidolonsFury]

First off, I may be wrong on this information, but I like offering my opinion anyways...plus, I may be right.

I'm assuming you already know the basics of what's required to actually set up a patrol (M6 or better ship.) When setting up the patrol, you mainly need to do it one ship at a time, or depending on what else you have in the sector, you can probably have a ship broadcast to the other ships the orders you give.

Homebase isn't really for other ships...not even sure if you can select another ship as a homebase, other than M1's. To my understanding, homebase is for something that you own where your ships can dock, factories or M1's come to mind.

Wingmen are more for the player than anything else. You can give them commands with Shift + 5/6/7 keys to do various tasks such as attack your target and similiar. I don't think it runs automatic for use in the sense of wingmen on an automated patrol.

The actual patrol though, I believe is just as you had feared, with the bad things you've heard. You set the ships to "protect" the M6 (or better) ship that you give patrol orders to. Once they all fall into line (or hit the waypoint) then they actually group into a patrol unit. Thus you'll be paying them their wage, and if they get too damaged, they'll leave the patrol for a shipyard awaiting your orders to give them repairs and send them back. You are right that should the patrol leader get taken out, it's usual bad for the rest of the squad, but this is why you set a patrol force appropriate to the duty you assign.

[Andaius]

Ok here's some tips:

1: The wingman:yes/no option are for PERSONAL wingmen.

2: If you want to assign them as "wingmen" to other ships you have to goto the "protect..." command.

3: To my knowledge you can't set homebase to anything that can't land something(carriers and stations only). So thats right out.

Also note that for pure fighter patrols there is no "patrol" command you have to assign a group to a "Flight Leader" by telling them to protct him them tell the leader to "attack all enemies". Only the "big" ships (thats m6, m1 m2) can get the "patrol sector/s" command. So in that situation you would have to tell your m3's to protect the cap ship then set the cap ship to patrol.

Also not that you can give blanket orders to everyone in your sector with the "broadcast to all..." commands with the given class options you can give orders to all m3's in sector at the same time. Useful when you either start or remove "unwanted" assets from the sector so you don't give orders to ships that are in the class but you don't want in the patrol group.

Hope this clears it up, you can find the "broadcast" command in the command console of either your ship or by remote console on another one of your ships in sector.

[Brin33]

Thanks guys,

Yes, I have a basic grip of this...

I can set fighters to have the M6 as the home base, plus with wingmen command, and tell the M6 to patrol sectors. I was getting several commands confused!

The main thing I was missing is the broadcast to all ships...
Plus, wingman is only for a personal wingman... All is well Thanks again all

There is alredy a thread about this

I did do a search but couldnt find any! , do you wanna post a link to the thread player?

[EidolonsFury]

I think there is just about already a thread for everything. I mean pretty much any question regarding X3 that is thought up, or even imagined, has usually already been asked at some point before. The difficulty is finding those threads and the answers within them, or validating that some of the answers are still valid (depending on the question.)