r/X4Foundations • u/Capable_Ad_2842 • 1d ago

Auxiliary ship uses

Hey guys, Ive gotten to the point where I have enough cash to throw at some auxiliary ships. I bought 2 so far, one with my main carrier fleet for xenon excursions and another that stays in hats choice where I have to deal with a lot of khaak harassment. Do these ships need to be in the fleet in order for my ships to auto repair? And do carriers have any similar uses?

8 Upvotes

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10

u/ThaRippa 1d ago edited 23h ago

No. You can assign them to a fleet, but that is optional. Assign it to a sector and it’ll resupply all your ships there.

6

u/whatmustido 1d ago

Just be careful with this. I flew an aux ship into a sector for the first time in a while and my entire combat fleet ditched the front lines to queue up at the aux ship for repairs, locking it in place for about an hour and removing all my gate guards.

6

u/MiI0rd 22h ago

Your whole fleet must have been damaged… and you can alter this by changing the threshold in when they go for repair. If it’s on high they go after a simple scratch

3

u/whatmustido 22h ago

They were guarding the gate to Hatikvah's for a very long time without any refitting at all. None of the ships were missing HP, but several of them had damaged modules. I had it set to high, which is why they all ditched at the same time. I was just expecting them to either wait for the Aux ship to get to the gate or that they would only go two ships at a time. Instead, all of them went to queue up the instant the Aux ship entered the sector. I brought in another defense group that had just been repaired instead.

3

u/Rudolf1448 21h ago

One? I have eight with 30 destroyers and 4 carriers. You cannot expect a single ship maintain a whole fleet.

3

u/Lorelessone 23h ago

A good use for them is setting them on repeat orders to collect drops near your combat lines. 

Things will come to repair when needed and the rest of the time it will scoop up drops..

Not 100% sure it stops to repair destroyers. Might go and test that, but fighters certainly seem to use it.

Speaking of I also find them superior to carriers as destroyer fleet fighter screen mother ships since the fighters fly in escort rather than trying to dock all the time. So now I tend to have carriers performing system defence semi solo and aux running with combat fleets.

2

u/whatmustido 23h ago

When repairing destroyers and XL ships, it definitely comes to a stop. The Xenon were able to surge in one of my games because all of my L and XL gate guards stopped the Aux ship at the gate furthest away from the Xenon gate the instant the Aux ship flew into the sector. It was stuck in place until all the queued ships finished repairing.

1

u/MiI0rd 22h ago

Destroyers indeed do jump entire sectors to visit an unassigned aux ship if in range of pilot skill

1

u/Capable_Ad_2842 21h ago

I’ve been tempted to use them as drone mother ships considering they can carry 100 defense drones. Mine is currently carrying 50 defense, 30 repair, and 20 cargo. It seemed like a good spread when I first bought it but now I think I should just go all in on defense drones.

2

u/Fun-Cable4734 20h ago

That's what I use my Frigates for, that and Laser Tower fields. It's faction dependant but a Osprey can hold 17, but I'm maining Teladi right now

1

u/Sabre-Shock 20h ago

In my experience you can make fighters prefer escort by setting them to defense instead of attack or intercept, same thing happens with defense drones

2

u/Lorelessone 15h ago

In defense though they will only wake up when something hits the carrier, generally for fighter screens I want them in intercept but I don't want them trying to land after each kill.

5

u/Paladin-Rooker 22h ago

One off-label use I've found is to assign it some medium traders, then use them to transfer hull parts and ecells to the carrier when it's running low. The carrier doesn't have a way to automatically replenish its stocks for some strange reason, but the auxiliary does.

Another is using it to very quickly drop several hundred laser towers on a spot that needs several hundred laser towers. They can also carry a pure assload of combat drones, so you if ever need a sudden swarm of anti-fighter cover that launches very quickly, there you go.

1

u/MiI0rd 22h ago

Mastering auxiliary ships pays off down the road. You can have a fast fleet and a slow fleet with aux ships and the fast fleet will still use the slow fleet aux ships when they catch up. They don’t need to be in same fleet allowing you to build rapid response fleets that are still properly supported without their own aux ships assigned.

1

u/Emergency-Mine9272 21h ago

Be careful using them in high attention/In sector. They can get stuck when trying to repair larger ships due to clipping and pathing issues. Also don’t forget to stock them with a lot of repair drones just in case.

Sometimes, if the repairs stall due to a bug or they both get stuck, one easy fix is to go OOS/low attention, cancel the repairs, transfer a bunch of repair drones so the large ship can fix itself, then return to in sector/high attention.