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KopiG

Lt. General
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Jun 17, 2016
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This is happening all the time. Why does my Strike Force refure to engage the enemy fleet when ordered ot engage all threats?
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i posted about it,, the strike force seems more restrictive now, the only times i have see it "normal" is when i have speed focused fleets. theres something odd going on. My suspitions fall above fleet speed difference.

 
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Seems to happen now and again, I've not worked out any contributing factors.
The fleet will be on full health, plenty of fuel, easily strong enough to take on the other fleet, orders set to always engage...and then will just sit there while your patrol fleet gets destroyed.
So very frustrating, especially as the same fleet in the same circumstances works just fine before and after.
 
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I've also had trouble figuring out when strike forces will engage. One fairly reliable instance (in my experience) is if a battle was initiated by enemy submarines on convoy raid, since strike forces do not go after subs engaging convoys, thats what convoy escort is for. I'm not convinced this is a hard and fast rule, but I've often seen this progression from both sides:

convoy raid by team A -> convoy defence by team B -> strike force by team A -> no reply strike force from team B

From your screenshot, it looks like the battle was initiated by enemy convoy raiders, your DDs on convoy escort killed the enemy submarine, but were caught by the reply enemy strike force, as above.

However, if you have ships on patrol, and they spot an enemy submarine group, the strike force will move to engage, which can be really annoying if the main enemy fleet is sailing through the channel and your fleet is off chasing down a single U-boat in the Western Approaches...
 
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I've also had trouble figuring out when strike forces will engage. One fairly reliable instance (in my experience) is if a battle was initiated by enemy submarines on convoy raid, since strike forces do not go after subs engaging convoys, thats what convoy escort is for. I'm not convinced this is a hard and fast rule, but I've often seen this progression from both sides:

convoy raid by team A -> convoy defence by team B -> strike force by team A -> no reply strike force from team B

From your screenshot, it looks like the battle was initiated by enemy convoy raiders, your DDs on convoy escort killed the enemy submarine, but were caught by the reply enemy strike force, as above.

However, if you have ships on patrol, and they spot an enemy submarine group, the strike force will move to engage, which can be really annoying if the main enemy fleet is sailing through the channel and your fleet is off chasing down a single U-boat in the Western Approaches...
Soooo this has been buggy for ages now. Great I lost all my convoy escort vessels. More than 50 Destroyers lost. What a buggy behaviour how strike forces work. I think this has been going on for years as I seem to recall this happening a year ago as well when I was more actively playing. Oh I cant be bothered to write up a bug report, Vic 3 destroyed all my bug report writing energy.
 
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despite the concept being historical, the in-game implementation of strike force has been poor enough to degrade the experience in multiple ways:
  1. ships can count as "fleet in being" even if the enemy navy wants to fight them and they're de facto hiding from it. the other side has no way of forcing a fight to contest superiority with ship combat.
  2. by default, ships will spend ages hunting for subs even when set to strike force. this is tedious from a human perspective, and game-breaking from an ai perspective.
    1. latter because players can, and have, wiped the fleets of majors using sufficiently low-visibility subs on always engage. sooner or later, the big fleet will de-org (and more subs can be added) over a weeks-long battle (lol) and sooner or later, the torpedoes will hit.
  3. there is no granularity for what strike forces will contest, so they don't even do their function of "engaging certain threats based on criteria" very well. having something similar to the strategic bombing target menu would have been nice.
  4. the naval invasion rules are stupid and frustrating. i would much rather see naval invasions more freely available, but the supply penalty for hostile waters greater. could still tell the ai to only use invasions in green waters similar to now.
separate from strike force, i would like to see some more tangible benefits to land warfare to states where you have green waters. not just shore bombardment, but logistics bonus for side winning in the water and penalty for losing. ports get boosted/reduced supply hub max, intel on coastal states, maybe a positive stat modifier similar to air support. these wouldn't be a perfect 1:1 representation of history, but would help approximate the advantage of having a dominant navy and give players an actual incentive to contest waters beyond "can i invade and protect convoy trade".
 
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despite the concept being historical, the in-game implementation of strike force has been poor enough to degrade the experience in multiple ways:
  1. ships can count as "fleet in being" even if the enemy navy wants to fight them and they're de facto hiding from it. the other side has no way of forcing a fight to contest superiority with ship combat.
They can't be lured to fight your own strike force, BUT they can at least be all lured far away to fight something completely irrelevant and stop blocking your invasion xD

Example against UK as Germany:
- Just prepare your naval invasion and strike forces as normal
- Wait for the invasion to fully prepare and 'launch it' (it won't because enemy has naval supremacy)
- send a very small surface fleet to convoy raid something far away, this triggers the enemy strike force to go out of port and engage your lonely ship (far away)
- the moment they enter the battle with your (very much dead) bait, the enemy supremacy provided by this fleet temporarily drops to 0
- Your invasion launches, and it doesn't matter that you have no naval supremacy :D

I've killed UK this way many times in 1940 for the lolz. :D

IDK if this still actually works, but I think it does, because sometimes another AI launches invasion of UK despite their fleet being fully operational, and none of the invading AI's fleets are nearby (even if they were, they'd not be able to contest the UK naval supremacy).
 
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A few days ago I was playing with Italy and I had the same problem of inactive strike force. So I put some ships for Patrol and Convoy raiding. And then it started leaving the port.
Before that I only had Convoy escort and ground radars.

But I don't know if it's a coincidence or if there's another factor involved.

By the way, the slowest ship in my strike force is 30 knots speed. So it shouldn't be a problem with speed. I keep ships slower than this to Naval invasion support.
 
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The decision making is indeed very weird, and doesn't seem to be affected by the selected 'risk taking'. My strike force always seems to go after the most irrelevant 'threats' like enemy subs that are already trying to escape from my convoy escorts and don't need any help, yet they remain completely oblivious to enemy patrols and escorts harassing my own subs.

The only time I ever see them engage properly is when my patrols detect enemy fleet somewhere first.
 
I always operate under the assumption that my strike force will set sail and engage iff I've set up patrol task forces AND one of them finds an enemy fleet.

Not sure if that is the way it is intended to work, but for me it usually works out as well as it can given the limitations of the naval warfare model.