But itās not sufficient and the biggest problems between the races in Multiplayer is the HW1 races canāt form strike groups while the HW2 races are in delta and hold it by default.
Itās broken clearly.
The engine can do it, the code is already being used by default when popping out squadrons using HW2 races, having it be broken for half the races is not āsufficientā by any definition.
There can never be balance if HW1 ships are attacking solo and HW2 ships are attacking in formations ā Especially when HW1 is supposed to support formations.
Change all the numbers you want, itāll never work ā ever. You absolutely must fix the behavior problem, they arenāt working right and thatās clearly obvious.
It does break the game and make it unplayable ā you can sludge through the HW1 campaign ā but itās hardly any fun when the units donāt even follow the orders you gave them, but in skirmish or MP HW1 races will lose every time to HW2 races because of this bug. That makes it unplayable.
Thatās like saying pawns can move sideways, yes it would break the game, yes you could still theoretically play it that way, but pretty much every chess player on earth would say itās āunplayableā as in the integrity of the game is ruined.
Like it or not, the game is designed around strike group formations being used to keep your groups together and create the alpha needed to blow up bigger class ships. The game design is still identical and now you canāt use these essential formations because they donāt work and so your fighters go bananas and attack targets of opportunity instead of the targets youāre selecting.
Whatās happening is when you give an attack order, the unit is getting a move order to the target and when it goes into firing range itās behavior changes to idle aggressive and it starts auto attacking. you can try to issue it a command and itāll follow it for one attack and then itāll go back to idle aggressive and start auto attacking itās own targets of opportunity again.
When they go into idle aggressive, they are thinking as a single unit and thatās why they break formation. As soon as combat ends and they exit attack mode they go right back to being a group and idle in formation.
Idle aggressive defined, is when units are idle and an enemy comes within firing range. The units will auto attack if set to aggressive.
Itās a bug, defending the bug does not make a better game.
The new tactics is whatās probably breaking it ā the aggressive tactic now functions like HW2. HW2ās tactics were changed to Passive, Aggressive, Neutral. Neutral ships wouldnāt attack unless fired upon, Aggressive, theyād fire upon any ships in their range and passive would set them to not fire at all.
When you set this behavior to a unit in HW2, itās actually a squadron so all of them follow it, but when you set this behavior in HW1, it sets it for a single ship, so each ship starts making itās own decisions which differ from the other ships in the formation and so their pathing represents this.
Once you put a set of units into a formation, they should be treated as a single unit in terms of A.I. and how tactics apply. Instead their being applied to each individual ship instead of the strike group.
More over, they added formations to the HW2 races, so you can take a group of squadrons and put them in a sphere formation. It doesnāt work exactly like HW1, because the Squadrons stay squadrons, but the squadrons then form the formation. The reason this was added was for balance in MP, so HW2 races could use the sphere tactic also. The end result is it doesnāt work in HW2 either for the same reason, the individual squads will break formation as soon as combat starts.
Thatās like the definition of broken ā the scope of this bug destroys any hope or possibility of balance between HW1 and HW2 races ā you can change numbers until youāre blue in the face, but uh, until they work as a unit they arenāt working.
