weapon platform targeting issue

IIRC, there is a "target specific" option that lets you select individual weapons to fire at individual ships. More micro-management, but it ful-fills your desire.

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

except that he's got multiple WPs firing on a single target...

you *could* try the lessthan 150% targeted damage thing in the strategies, it's under the target prioritys list IIRC.

not sure that it's working corectly though, and I don't know how it works for WP's eaither. does it consider a planet as a single object with all the weapons in the weapon platforms as weapons? or is each WP design allowed to have a strategy of thier own?
I've never been a fan of WPs so I've not sat down and tested them.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

This is something I would like to know too... I used WP's a LOT in SE:IV simply because they are "extra" in my way of thinking... they are a decent way of throwing a lot of defense into a planet without needing to manage fleets just in case someone has greater cloaking than I have scanning or makes their own wormhole into my territory hehe.

WP's also don't count against ship limits (neither do fighters or sats when on the planet and I use those a lot too) mostly I like that in SE:IV they had a really nice little range bonus just for being planet based and that helped me get "first strike" more often than not. (500+ capital ship missiles all flying out at your ships at once can spook even hardened combat veterans lol)

So even though defending anything but a ring/sphere world with WP's is impossible against a determined enemy they can often give im a bloody nose for the effort lol.

Unfortunately, unlike SE:IV, all weapons fire at once on a target instead of in succession, thus wasting extra attacks on the vapor of an already destroyed enemy. This is what makes Point Defense quiet useless right now.

There's actually a "set strategies" hotkey, but it doesn't DO anything. I'm thinking that was one of the features that got cut, like the fold-space button.

This would be one reason to deploy your small ships in echelons, so that each echelon can see the results of a previous echelon's salvo.

The issue may be less of a bug than a feature -- a set of limitations to work around... though it'd be nice to have an Aegis system allowing point defense to target multiple targets....

... are difficult."

Hmm... the difficulty you mention with WPs is particularly nasty because they are a point source -- with fleets you can moderate the "focus fire" dynamic by judicious placement. I'm not sure, though, that the 400kt nuke is such a bad thing, it's just weak against fighters and ships

In empire settings, there is a section to change the strategy for planets.

I've tried having two different classes of weapon platforms, one with "attack farthest away" and one with "attack nearest" as strategies. However the whole group of weapon platforms continued to launch at a single target.

In another test, I had six weapon platforms (18 missiles) with strategy "Total Targetted Damage < 50% of Structure". They still launched the entire batch at one target at a time.

I've tried this same thing with a single battleship, loaded with six high-tech missiles (300hp damage each) vs a mixed group of missile and gun destroyers. Even though it was set to target ships "Total Targetted Damage < 50% of Structure", it launched all missiles at one ship at a time.

At first I thought "total damage means the ship's current damage". But how does that make sense for the option "Total Targetted Damage < 200% of Structure"?

It looks like the targetting orders need some code work.

What's happening, as far as I can tell, is the targeting code is considering ONLY targets that are currently in range. Once the nearest ship gets in range, the code sees it, notices its the only target, and fires everthing at it.

The battleship launched missiles at the first target it saw. Then six seconds go by while it's reloading. During those six seconds, the other five destroyers entered into it's range. Once the battleship could fire again, it launched everything at just one of them, and continued to do that until it picked them all off, one volley at a time.

It could have killed them with three volleys if it distributed it's fire amongst the targets.

The idea is to be able set the amount of overkill that you want assuming that some direct fire will miss and some seekers will get shot down by PD. 200% number would mean targeting up to 2x the firepower needed to destroy the target.

Obviously the system is broken somehow. My ships will unload 5 CSMs at a ship that has only 25 hit points left. It looks to me like the firing decision is not linked with any other weapons in play in combat and that the firing decision is made for each one independently.

This whole set up is a throw back to SE-III where it worked well, but was tedious. Also in SEV when you manually select targets there is no way to tell if the weapons are already targeted at something else each time you use the manual targeting tool. You just have to remember which weapons you already targeted and on who. This is absolutely ridiculous for large battles. This well below the old SE-III process where you knew exactly which enemy targets were selected for each of your weapons.

Hmm. Definitely not splitting fire at all.

A ship actually will split fire, on occasion, although not due to having multiple in-range targets.

I had a ship firing at a planet. Mid-salvo (it was using MB so not all could fire at once), an armed satellite came into firing range. The ship redirected the remaining blasters towards the satellite, hitting it and the planet at the same time. I think this means that fire not splitting is a result of a problem in target prioritizing. I could be wrong, however, as I once saw a ship chase after a fleeing ship and ignore two ships that entered range and closed distance to engage. Despite these ships being not only closer but armed (unlike the fleeing, disarmed ship), the pursuing ship didn't change targets.

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"He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." -Jim Elliot

What would be nice is if we could set this as an option. Concentrate fire or disperse fire as part of the tactics setting.

Total Targetted Damage means the damage that should occur if all currently targetted weapons hit, which are missles in this case. This is so that the thing doesn't launch a second volley of missles that probably wouldn't hit a living ship. Though, from what you say, it isn't working.

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With all these people, you would expect one of them to carry an iguana around...

That is definitely the way to go for practicality. I've also suggested a targeting range larger than the firing range. So that it would give such scripts/AI chance to retarget weapons to meet the script criteria.

I've been banging my head about a solution to this for a day now. The only thing I can come up with just feels 'messy' in my mind. It goes like this:

It runs a check ever second using the targeting range, which is say 20% larger than the firing range. In this example we'll use 3 targets. 1 that comes into range first, and the other that comes into range later.

Then you would have a simple division among targets, and have a threshold. In this case 1

TIMELINE (in seconds)

1. Check - no target
2. Check - 1 target. Assign target #1. Assign all guns divided by # of targets. Check threshold, unassign guns on those above threshold. Assign all available guns divided by # of targets.
3. Check - 3 targets (2 more come into range before #1 enteres firing range). Assign targets #2 & #3 randomly. Assign all guns divided by # of targets. unassign guns on those above threshold. Assign guns divided by # of targets.

So, you can see how I call it messy. But you can also see the reasoning behind it. Without the first gun assignment, you can't activate the threshold check, and without the 2nd gun assignment you can't get it to re-assign the guns.

It's a chicken and the egg sort of scenario...but its the best way without having to write any crazy AI code to handle gun assignments.

The initial problem with this is that it's constantly re-assigning your guns for you. You can get around this by making the code 'ignore' any manually assigned guns (for example, computer viruses or other specialist weapons).

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