Formations & "Follow Me" order

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Xeiki
Posts: 10
Joined: Wed, 23. Feb 11, 14:41

Formations & "Follow Me" order

Post by Xeiki » Sun, 7. May 23, 21:43

I was testing out a few capital ships to figure out which one I'd want to work towards (cheat package makes this easy; don't want to spend hours to farm stuff just for a quick test). That turned into somewhat of a test of which capital ship is the most self-sufficient/convenient to fly yourself. Which brings me to the Split Python.

The ship is really fun to fly, given its massive amount of PPCs it can fire towards the front, making short work of everything M6 sized and up. It can also mount PBEs in all turrets not occupied with PPCs, so missile defense is (usually) not an issue - every missile which comes into 1km range of your ship gets destroyed pretty much instantly. So far so good - but here's the catch: the ship's fighter defenses are laughably bad. PBEs take far too long to kill the hull of fighters, if they even come into range and don't hover at ~1,5km range. The next best option is ironically the PAC, since it's got the best projectile speed (700m/s), followed by the EBCG with 600m - but neither of those reliably hit fighters attacking the ship. Every tiny maneuver means all the shots miss.

Thankfully, the Split have a ship perfect for fighter defense: the Tiger. All around coverage with FAAs, good speed, relatively thin thus not necessarily hit by every capital ship gun out there ... which brings me to my actual problem: there's no way to get the Tiger to follow my Python in a useful way. Ideally, it'd to what the play ship does when you activate the auto pilot to follow a ship: fall in line right behind your target. But when you give a ship the order "follow me", it falls into formation according to the formation settings you chose for the lead ship.

So, my question is: How do I get the Tiger (or any ship, for that matter) to follow me in line ahead formation? (Single file, one after the other - like a string of pearls) Secondly, if that's not possible - how to I get it to fly closer to my lead ship? It hovers at around 3.3km from the ship its following, which is too large to provide flak cover.

(As an aside - is there an explanation of what the formations do somewhere? "Dragonclaw" is a nice name, but I don't know what it does, and Line appears to be a "Line abreast" formation instead of "Line ahead.")

BrigandPhantos77
Posts: 517
Joined: Wed, 27. Dec 17, 05:47
x4

Re: Formations & "Follow Me" order

Post by BrigandPhantos77 » Wed, 17. May 23, 04:38

You could use Ion Shard Railguns for fighter defense. They can tear fighters a new one pretty quick. That being said, keeping both PBEs and ISR and using one of the programmable turret configurations could be a nice way to go. That's what they exist for. You just have to set them up in your global commands menu. They can switch weapons automatically this way. There is also a limiter to prevent area effect weapons from being used, or allowing them. As for the wing configurations they do indeed change where your wingman place themselves. You'd have to trial an error to find one that works for you though.
Peace is a state of mind!
War is absolute!
~ Phantos ~

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