capping with wings / fighting with wings

[Thelastreject]

I have a small wing of a couple elites and a falcon (so far)
Is there a good combat setting for capping when using a wing of say 3 fighters?

If my wing is fighting a ship and the pilot bails, will the wing cease fighting and pick another target?

Is it worth capping with wings?

What is the best setting for wings when engaging another small equal force, if I don't want my wing engaging my target?

Sorry if these are covered elsewhere but I couldn't find anything.

[heratik]

I would not bother using wings for capping as you sometimes have to react quickly when you hear the pilot give his bailing speech before you blow the ship up, although they wont attack once the ship becomes neutral, in those precious seconds between the pilot deciding to bail and the ship becoming neutral they may carry on firing.

Also, the AI doesn't know it's trying to cap, so will not use the various techniques to improve chances of a bail.

[ajax34i]

There's no extra support, other than the regular wing features (the ability to command all the ships with 1 command interface), for capturing ships. If you're trying to get M3's to bail, then the damage YOU do after the shields are taken out is what gets them to bail. If you're taking on bigger ships, you need a TP or other ship to launch the marines, but your wing can assist with attacking the shields of the target.

I don't think they'll stop if the pilot bails. The ship does go blue, but I've never tested and am not sure what the AI will do. You gave it an order to attack, it will attack even if it's blue.

You can use the fighters to keep the target's shields down, but the thing is, it only works on M6's or equivalent size ship. M7 and bigger will have tough anti-fighter defenses and will kill your wing rather fast. M3 and smaller are too weak to control the damage properly and will die to your wing very fast. So, not really worth it.

Order them to fly away.

I'm not sure if you realize, but you can have a wing of fighters, which is usually just a group of 4-8 ships of the same kind that you can order around with one command interface. Because you order them with the command interface, it's kind of assumed that you're going to have them do remote jobs.

On the other hand, if you're flying an M3 and want a couple more to provide support to YOU, you should make them wingmen, not wing. Ships that are wingmen you can control with 2 hotkeys: wingmen attack my target, and wingmen protect me. This allows a bit more precise control during a fight, but is a feature for when YOU are flying and you want ships to protect you.

[DiArmada]

I'm not sure, but I've never seen a pilot bail which was under attack from a ship I wasn't piloting.
some of the M7's which I sometimes use for escorting pop loads of fighters, but no bailing.

[Nanook]

Pilots only bail out from their ship when the player ship has fired the deciding blow. That includes with main guns, turrets, and missiles. Pilots never bail when attacked by the player's AI-controlled ships.