What is the point of the engagement range stat? (2024)

The issue is that engagement range is calculated from the furthest available enemy. So if you have a mixed fleet of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and corvettes, everyone will calculate the distance off of the battleships with the longest engagement range. So BBs will be ~100 units away from each other, cruisers will be ~50 units from enemy bbs, destroyers will be ~40 units from enemy bbs and corvettes will be even closer. (or whatever the actual units are these days anyway)
Which in effect causes ships with shorter engagement range to all smash into each other.

If you had two fleets of just bbs set to artillery, they would stay away from each other.

Questionable said:

So what, I have to build seperate fleets all made of ships with the same engagement range just to get my artillery ships to actually stay at range?
This doesn't at all sound like the combat computers are working as intended.

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See, this is what happens when you give Citizen Rights to Synths, they start thinking they can tell the ship's captain how to do their jobs.

Questionable said:

So what, I have to build seperate fleets all made of ships with the same engagement range just to get my artillery ships to actually stay at range?
This doesn't at all sound like the combat computers are working as intended.

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Clearly the Admiral is sitting in one of the ships, and that is the ship which determines engagement range.

Questionable said:

So what, I have to build seperate fleets all made of ships with the same engagement range just to get my artillery ships to actually stay at range?
This doesn't at all sound like the combat computers are working as intended.

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Yes. Multiple mono-fleets (i.e. separate fleets for each ship type) have been optimal for this exact reason for as long as I can remember. I've got 2800+ hours since initial launch, and at this point the early years are a blurry memory-jumble of building wormhole generators and trying to line up the perfect "death flower" of overlapping defense stations, so I don't really remember if it's *always* been this way with needing to run mono-fleets . . . but if not from launch, then it became optimal fleet composition pretty soon after. And it's never been addressed.

If you want to play with actual, functioning tactical choices in combat computers, I recommend the mod, NSC2. There's some things in it that aren't quite to my liking (as it's a pretty large mod), so I tend to play a few games with it, and then play a few without. But the combat computers are great, and one of the main reasons I use the mod.

Questionable said:

So what, I have to build seperate fleets all made of ships with the same engagement range just to get my artillery ships to actually stay at range?
This doesn't at all sound like the combat computers are working as intended.

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This will do you no good, as the BBs will still try to get in range of enemy BBs just like before.
In other words, it does not matter if they're in the same fleet or not, only if they're in the same battle.
The issue isn't really that your BBs get to close. They get close enough to get in range of the furthest enemy. The problem is that all units do that, so those with short range also try to get in position to fire on your BBs.

Red Earth said:

It matters if a fleet is trying to flee the system before combat starts.

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I don’t understand.
If a fleet is trying to flee the system then they are not trying to engage.
Explain how engagement range matters in this scenario.

Restless Native said:

I don’t understand.
If a fleet is trying to flee the system then they are not trying to engage.
Explain how engagement range matters in this scenario.

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I think he means here that a fleet with carrier range engagement will have a very easy time to stop an enemy fleet from passing though a system without being caught in combat.

Conversely if a fleet has carrier engagement range it will also have a harder time avoiding combat, if it just intends to pass through a system without combat, compared with a fleet with standard engagement range.

2 fleets with carrier engagement should enter combat by default in most cases.

Askorti said:

The issue is that engagement range is calculated from the furthest available enemy.

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Why do that instead of calculating the distance to the nearest available enemy? Intuitively wouldn't you calculate to the nearest first, and then work your way towards the back as the frontline ships get destroyed?

Maybe it has to do with reducing CPU load.

Kleithn said:

I think he means here that a fleet with carrier range engagement will have a very easy time to stop an enemy fleet from passing though a system without being caught in combat.

Conversely if a fleet has carrier engagement range it will also have a harder time avoiding combat, if it just intends to pass through a system without combat, compared with a fleet with standard engagement range.

2 fleets with carrier engagement should enter combat by default in most cases.

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Is that not just because of their range and nothing to do with the combat computer.