Stealth destroyers not defending transports when not seen

Well I had a close game with an isolated start and a huge opponent with 2 vassals on other continent. Basically it came to space race, with him invading me with some modern stuff, missile cruisers, stealth destroyers etc.

I had a huge navy so I kept sinking the invasion forces before they could land. But then 2 turns before my space ship voctory comes this mother of all naval SODs, I think I counted over 15 missile cruisers, 10 or so attack subs, and about 20 transports. So I go carpet bomb it with about 10 stealth bombers and then attack with battle ships and missile cruisers. I sank escorts and start sinking transports. Got all but 3, and have no other heavy hitting ships nearby so decide to get some action for my stealth destroyers that were guarding the sea food.

Well it turns out there were also about 12 stealth destroyers in that stack. Problems is so long as none of my ships were able to see them I was free to massacre his tranports, even though there were still escorts present. So as soon as my stealth destroyers were in range they were able to see his stealth destroyers and only then I could engage them. Was it inteded to be so? Cause this makes stealth destroyers very poor escorts.

Yeah, been noted elsewhere I believe that the same stealth that makes the stealth destroyers kinda cool also renders them useless as escorts (except, ironically enough, against other stealth destroyers who can see them...)

Many fix ideas have been talked about, but as far as I know no patch - official or otherwise - currently addresses this.

Dunno...if you think about it, your opponent was better off with the stealth destroyers than he/she would have been without them. True, it would have been more useful to have proper escorts instead, but the stealth destroyers were better than nothing, as they prevented you from picking off the last few transports with your own ones. 12 of them sounds like overkill though.

Basically late game the only Escort ship is the Missile Cruiser (of course It needs to be accompanied by at least 1 Stealth Destroyer and 1 Attack Sub)

How about this:

I had 1 Missile Cruiser and 1 Transport sitting on the same pile with a fleet of miss. cruisers, stealth destroyers, carriers (+ intercept fighters) and transports on the pile to it's left.
There come's the enemy, attacking with a destroyer. Who defends? My transport. And get's sunk. W T F? After that a bunch of frigattes and transports attacks and gets sunk by my missile cruiser that was supposed to protect my transport.
Can someone explain why my transport was forced to fight the destroyer?

ChickenSalad said:

How about this:

I had 1 Missile Cruiser and 1 Transport sitting on the same pile with a fleet of miss. cruisers, stealth destroyers, carriers (+ intercept fighters) and transports on the pile to it's left.
There come's the enemy, attacking with a destroyer. Who defends? My transport. And get's sunk. W T F? After that a bunch of frigattes and transports attacks and gets sunk by my missile cruiser that was supposed to protect my transport.
Can someone explain why my transport was forced to fight the destroyer?

Click to expand...

I believe this will happen if the missile cruiser is carrying units (in the form of guided missiles) and the transport is empty.
For some reason the naval defense AI will often (but not always) defend with ships that are empty before ships that are carrying other units...even when it makes little sense and the loaded ship has a far better chance of winning as in your example.

Nope: The missile cruiser was empty while the transport was carrying 4 units (mech inf, mod armor, para, gunship).

ChickenSalad said:

How about this:

I had 1 Missile Cruiser and 1 Transport sitting on the same pile with a fleet of miss. cruisers, stealth destroyers, carriers (+ intercept fighters) and transports on the pile to it's left.
There come's the enemy, attacking with a destroyer. Who defends? My transport. And get's sunk. W T F? After that a bunch of frigattes and transports attacks and gets sunk by my missile cruiser that was supposed to protect my transport.
Can someone explain why my transport was forced to fight the destroyer?

Click to expand...

Same here, it ain't the first time that I see this . .. .. .. .ing behaviour.

Why ???????

Does it just happen with missile cruisers beeing escort ?

You must be wrong about the MC being empty and the Transport loaded.

This is how the defender is chosen in BtS:

1) Ignore all potential defenders that are not visible to the attacker.

2) Pick the strongest empty ship.

3) If no ships are empty, pick the strongest loaded ship.

So if you have empty Transports and loaded MC's, the former will defend, while the latter sit idle.

Beyond that, if you have heavily damaged empty MC's, and completely healthy loaded MC's, the empty ones will defend (and lose), even though the odds for the healthy ones would have been extremely high (if, for example, the attacker was a Transport).

It's definitely something that needs to be changed, to the tune that the strongest visible unit always defends, and only in the event of a tie is an empty unit chosen over a loaded unit.

You're right. Dug around and found a suitable savegame to recreate the situation. Seems that I had forgotten that a) I had most probably unloaded the transport during the turn before the attack and b) there were 2 cruise missiles left on the MC. Cos no matter what I changed, empty transport and loaded MC is the only combination that leads to the transport fighting the attacking destroyer.

Btw. I think it should be changed in such a way that the strongest unit of em all should be chosen for defence, whether that's a unit visible to the enemy or not.
What's a strong ship in a convoy good for, if it won't defend it's convoy? If I don't want my stealth ships to get engaged unless I use em for attacks (or they get spotted), I'll simply not put em on the convoy tile.
Besides the power that stealth brings is that the stealth unit has the element of surprise. So the enemy thinks he's attacking an unprotected transport convoy only to find himself ship to ship with a bunch of destroyers and subs.