Wings and WingMEN - controls and confusion

[jubbbird]

I seem to be a little confused about wingmen and wings. I read in the manual that the keyboard shortcuts to tell your wingmen to attack and defend are shift+6/7, but as yet I have been unable to actually put that to use. Presumably I get the message "no wingmen" because making a wing is clearly not the same on account of the fact that you can create many wings.

Are wingmen plot mission only, or does this work only for ships who are in the same wing as my current ship? I'm fairly sure I tried that though...

If that is not the case, what exactly constitutes a wingman? And what is the easiest way to control wings? I'f im being followed by a fleet of 6 wings, how SHOULD I be instructing them to attack a given target? At the moment it seems a fairly long winded and complex affair, unlike controlling these 'wingmen' I have yet to meet...

[andrewas]

Go into the command console of your wingman and set wingman to yes.

Although their more trouble than they are worth since if you use a jumpdrive, you will have to keep them stocked with ecells, or they will try and follow you in conventional flight.

[Kitch]

I'm not a fan of the new Wings menu.

All it does for me is make a lot of ships crash into each other as they all try and follow the same order at the same time.


Actual WingMEN, you can set a ship to be a wingman in its control panel. At the top where you give orders for Navigation, Combat, Trade, Special etc. On that screen, scroll down and you'll find Notify Me When Order Complete and Homebase: etc. Here is a toggle that says Wingman Yes/No. Set it to yes and the ship will auto follow you wherever you go and will obey wingman commands.

If you have a base ship to operate from, especially with the new auto rearm and auto refuel commands, wingmen can actually be quite fun. Need to set them up to be good wingmen though by equipping them with the right weapons etc (i.e. fast firing like PACs and put 4 in a Nova so they don't run out of energy all the time etc)

[Central Scrutinizer]

It seems to me the Wingman menu is really meant to set up groups of ships you don't fly with for patrols or whatever when you're not around. They tried to make it easier to just issue a single command and have a group of ships fly and fight together.

I haven't really experimented too much yet, but I'm not sure the old way of just having a leader and manually setting other ships to protect it or attack its target is more effective, as you can fine tune what they're doing. If you set up a wing it seems to just pick a leader and they all fly around together and do the same thing. The old way still ended up with a single leader you could order around and the others would fall in so I'm not really sure how handy the new interface will be in that regard. Again it'll take a lot more experimenting to really figure it out. I will say I'm a little underwhelmed by this addition though. I was really hoping for a detailed wing control panel would simply make it easier to build customized combat patrols without digging through the control panels of each individual ship.

[jubbbird]

Well the separate 'wingman' option effectively answers my quesiton. I can see how wings make handing out orders to multiple ships easier (though I gather it too is bugged, at least for docking) but for wingman keyboard shortcuts it's back to standard 'wingman' settings - that's fine.

Cheers for the help guys.

[Madwasp]

There should be little colored boxes on the top right side to open up the specific wing menu and give commands faster that way without breaking the gameplay. It's kind of annoying to stop in the middle of a fight while all the ships are shooting you to give orders.

[Ranix]

Having a wing of ships with forward-facing Photon Pulse Cannons and ordering them to attack a large target is pretty brutal, cause they'll all attack the same target. Nothing like massive PPC salvos to end a J in a hurry.

I'm considering a heavy Cerberus squad.

[Grimm Spector]

that's exactly what the wingmen commands are for, your own wingmen, as for the Wings they're fantastic for OOS protect... orders to protect your STs and if you supply them with jump drives UTs, since ships protecting something will dock with it if there's room, course if there isn't room they won't refuel at that station and someone might get left behind, it's a pain

but the wing command script is a great help in controlling multiple combat wings at once in combat check it out in the scripts forum!