[Bullethead]

Originally Posted by HS

Sorry for causing inconvenience with my settings in this forum, but when changing to a dark text colour I can't read my own sentences.

Must be a bug in the forum software. Every other forum I've been in, your own settings down affect anybody else. IOW, if you have white text on a dark backgound and I have black text on a light background, your messages should still show up on my end as black on light. Strange.

It's not that big a deal, though. When I see a huge blank post from you like this one, I just highlight it like a spoiler and can see it. When I reply, I set the text color to black in the quoted parts and I'm fine. What's it look like on your end after I change your quotes to black on me end?

to now I’ve been unable to complete a bombard missions since my fleet always got intercepted before and the rest of my ships was homeward bound afterwards. Is there anything I can do avoid meeting interception forces at an early stage or to make it more unlikely to meet them?

Well, after the battle, if your bombardment TF has changed its orders to return home, you should be able to give them new orders to bombard again.

As for meeting the enemy, that's pretty much to be expected. Both sides have a lot of patrol boats out to give early warning, and some areas like the upper Channel have fairly strong patrols of real warships. All these things are there to give early warning, disrupt your plans, etc. If you want to minimize contact, therefore, try picking targets where patrols might be expected to be thinner, or spend some time trying to thin out the opposition.

And secondly: What happens during such a mission? Will a bombarding scenario be created or will the mission goal be achieved automatically in the campaign modus unless any naval battles take place before?

Bombardments only happen on the campaign map; there's no tactical battle for them. Battles only happen if both sides have surface ships.

Finally the division turn by succession. Up to now it works for me only by selecting the relevant division leaders, which means that for a whole fleet I have to change course with turn by succession division by division, one after the other (I usually do that by pausing the game). Is there any simple possibility to use a division turn by succession for all divisions of the fleet with one command?

You can reduce your workload with the "guide on other division" command. You can make long chains of divisions this way (like the GF's battle line). Then all you have to do is give the order to the 1st division and all the others in the line will turn in succession when they reach the point the 1st division turned.

There are 2 ways to give the "guide on other division" order. First, in the TF Org screen where you set up your TF formation, if you put 1 division directly behind another, it will automatically be on "guide on other division" to the division ahead when a battle starts. You can also give this command during battles by selecting the division you want to be the follower, putting the cursor over any ship in the division you want to be the leader, and right-clicking. This enables the "guide on other division" order button, which you then click on.

NOTE: Once you have a division guiding on another, you have to tell it to "guide independently" to break the chain.

But to turn a whole TF, you still need to give separate orders to every division not guiding on another. The reason for that is because in most cases, rotating a whole TF while maintaining the original formation can't just be done by 1 simple turn order for every division. To maintain the formation, most divisions will have to change speed at least twice, those on the outside of the turn will have to turn on a bigger radius using several waypoints, etc. And even if you don't mind the formation getting skewed, many times telling each division to make the same turn simultaneously will result in divisions trying to drive through each other, leading to much chaos if not collisions.