Fleet organization basic mutual support

The common mistake players make is to select all their ships into one huge wing, this is very bad

why this is a bad choice is you have no protection inside the wing and you have no flexibilty when you have targets of oportunity or new threats that must be dealt with fast and effective.

first of all lets say you have 24 heavy fighters, you should build the fleet like this:

make a choice which one will be the top boss of the fleet, now give this ship 6 wingmen, then give these wingmen, each 2 wingmen, then give one of these wingmen their own wingman

this creates wings within wings and they will support eachother they all have one wingman that protects them from harm, this will insure that each and every ship will get reinforced within seconds

the setup will look somthing like this:

1. Fleet leader
   wingman
   Lead
   wingman
2. Element Lead 1
   wingman
   Lead
   wingman
3. Element Lead 2
   wingman
   Lead
   wingman
4. Element Lead 3
   wingman
   Lead
   wingman
5. Element Lead 4
   wingman
   Lead
   wingman
6. Element Lead 5
   wingman
   Lead
   wingman

Now you give orders to the leader only, Lets say you set his behavior to patrol a sector, then everything will be automatic, All you have to do is to watch over them if you get hailed and then see if everything is working as it should, if you see a enemy force thats being neglected, select one of the wings leaders and rightclick the enemy leader and they will engage those enemies until they are out of the picture then they will resume follwoing the fleet lead

You can attach bomber wings to the fleet for example, but they only need one leader so make them wings of 4 ships 1 leader with 3 other ships. then attach this wing to the fleet leader and they will assist acording to their speciality.

Hope this guide can help you out this was not meant as a one shot tutorial but only a help to those who find dealing with fleets overwhelming or not working the way they thought it should

Ok so how to actually store them and deploy them is this:

for travel just hold shift and drag a box around every ships now deselect the carriers and destroyers, so only dockable ships are selected, then right click the carrier and click "dock at"
now they will dock and stay docked for the travel

now send the carrier to the operation area

next for the deployment you now make sure nothing is selected then rightclick the carrier and hit recall subordinates, this gives the carrier full control of the fleet and will give order to the ships according to its behavior, make sure you give the carrier a patrol or protct behavior around the target, if youre attacking a station then set the target close to that.

if you want some ships to stay docked now simply select them and rightclick on carrier and hit dock at again

there is not set rules on how to perform a succesfull attack its all a learning curve and things can happen fast, you could get ambushed by a destroyer K or I and you may want to retreat the fleet and come back later or you could take heavy losses, but thats all up to you