PD unloading

It seems to be a reacuring thing, with all PD weapons firing at the first target they get.

One workaround is to pack several types of PD weapons that engage at different ranges, since one might take out a CSM before it gets into range of the next one, causing the following CSM to be targeting by a fresh PD weapons.
A good mix is a long range PD, the Bomblet Missile, then the PD Beam (for 'quick' hits at medium range), and then a PD Blaster or Cannon for the tertiary for whatever makes it past the first two.
It's not much, but it's better than nothing.

If you get enough PD weapons, I have witnessed many PD weapons on a cruiser engaging several targets at once when it comes to lesser fighters.

During tests of a PD heavy Dreadnought vs. 'weak' fighters, I've seen it engage upwards of ten seperate targets with its 40 something PD weapons, so it proves ships can engage multiple targets with PD weapons, even if it just has many PD weapons of a single type.
So it might be possible that a ship with many PDs might be able to engage more than one missile at a time, unless it fires everything at the first missile when only using a single PD type.

I think it has something to do with weapon damage, if it will do a certain amount more damage than a target has structure, it might only fire enough weapons to 'overkill' it, and then use remaining weapons against a second target, up to enough to 'overkill' it, at which point it could have weapons left to engage a third target, and so on, which is the likely reason my test run of a PD heavy Dreadnought had it engaging many targets at once.

I think it does more than "overkill" it. I've seen PD shots (bomblet missle/blaster) self destruct when their intended target got destroyed before they reached it.

I find that PD works fine, there are just a couple of things that you need to be aware of. Its performance depends on several things, the most important being the following:

First, if your pd weapon is incapable of incapacitating or neutralizing a missile or fighter, of course you want more than one of them to fire on it. Spreading your pd among a bunch of targets does you no good if none of those targets is damaged enough to stop.

Second, your combat strategy settings also come into play. I use the setting "Total Targeted Damage (less than)125% of Structure" in the Targeting Priority Order part of my strategies as appropriate,. This means that once a target is being fired on by weapons that have enough potential damage to destroy it (with 25% extra for a little margin), your weapons will move on to the next target. This works with PD as well as regular weapons. For fighters I may back that off to 75%, as that is often enough to destroy its weapons.

An exception to that second point is if you are firing a missile weapon of some sort, such as a CSM or bomblet missile...in those cases, I've found no way to spread them among multiple targets. They are probably different because they can be shot down by pd and it keeps them firing together for the sake of saturating the target's pd defenses, but it could just be a bug.

<Shameless Plug> http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/4037 </Shameless Plug>

(Note that the components.txt is based on the pre-1.58 version - making your own adjustments would probably be a better idea)

Im not entirely sure the overkill is the problem.

Consider this.

You'll notice when a ship with multiple seekers fires, they don't all fire at once, they come out in a nice little line one after the other.

A ship has serveral PD weapons of equal range. When the first of a set of three capital ship missiles comes into range, the ship fires all its weapons at the first and *only* avalible target, the PD can't reload in time to attack the other two.

So regardless of the overkill limit, a ship will always use all of its weapons if it has only the one target. Not much can be done about this, as it would reduce the effectiveness of other weapons.

In my view the answer is to make point defence a very high fire rate weapon, but proportionally reduce the damage so that first volly doesnt stop the ship from targeting the other incoming seekers.

Darren

Direct Fire weapons (such as all PD) don't all fire simultaneously either, but you do have a point - a lot more will fire than needed before a new target is found to shift target to. This goes by the assumption that the 'overkill' algorithm can only change/manage targets, it can't tell weapons to "don't shoot, we got 10 other guns already targeting this".

I'm not sure what the situation is in 1.58 - can someone test whether that "PD Heavy Dreadnought" (see 2nd post in this thread) would still multi-target if all its 40 PD guns were the same type?

Personally, I've had (haven't played since 1.38 - need to find time to play again) very little problem with PD overkill as I don't rely on big single ships, but a TIGHT custom formation of many ships. First missile gets shot down by all of the nearest ship's PD, 2nd missile gets shot down by all of 2nd nearest ship's PD, etc - I rely heavily on PD Blasters (beam) because they travel instantaneously to minimise the "whoops, your target missile is gone, your shot will now disappar" overkill effect.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

in BM:
I made Cruiser with APBs and some PD, and when i was attacked by LOT of fighters, i seen it firing on multiple targets. And thats with default strategy.