SE5 Targetting Needs Help

Just to test this I mad a DD loaded with PD and a carrier (PD only for this test) it was guarding. I made 20 fighters, which should have been easily destroyed, to attack the carrier.

Well the PD did destroy the first two fighters, the other 18 jumped the carrier and it was all over. With the amount of PD it should have put up an AA defense similar to WWII Germany. At the rate this works currently a kite could get through.

It deffienly made me rethink my stradgey though.

I think that the best targeting setting was that of SEIII... Also better than that of SEIV...

I certainly hope the AI battle targeting gets vastly improved. Seems the bane of AI's is that they get singleminded in target selection in battle. I sure hope that targeting gets spread out better so that you don't have 20 or 30 ships all gunning for the same target.

Also the AI targeting before battle needs improvement. I've seen way too many examples of AI fleets targetting a fleet or ship several systems and many turns away only to have that fleey or ship be gone by the time it arrives. I've seen way too many examples of AI fleets ignoring excellent targets of opportunity like colonies or ships and fleets within one turn's movement because once an AI-controlled fleet has orders it never changes until it completes them.
Omnius

There's been some good proposals put forward but we're still waiting on the issue of "overkill" with targeting and the general selection of targets along with strategy UI in the Empire options menu to be addressed by MM.

-----

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

has this been fixed in 1.25 or anyhing??

Workaround would be to use a variety or ranges for your weapon mix. Don't think it's fixed with 1.25.

.......................
I thunk therefore i wuz.

That is the only way I got it to work too...

This may be old news, but have you tried adding "Total Targetted Damage (less than) % of Structure" to your Targeting Priority Order list? In my own tests, it seems to work for point defense direct fire weapons. Bomblet missiles still over-saturate with it.

I haven't seen it work for targetting regular ships, though. I still have more tests to try, but to this point it only seems to work for pd.

Way to complicated for me... I just did PD in range.

There is some good talk here but just keep in mind that it is possible to go over board an really unbalance things.

(omnibus)
I proposed that there be a "zone of control" or pillage seeting like sentry that allows "attacks of opportunity"
which would benefit not only the ai but the player to blockade / raid AND allow monsters & pirates.

At the very least, what Omnibus is suggesting - that fleet orders not "lock" the fleet for several turns - is probably crucial.
at the risk of giving the ai an advantage in simulataneous, it just might be necessary to have it move its ships/fleets on a mp by mp basis.
The ai is EFFECTIVELY playing simultaneous , even in turn settings, and thus the result.

One way to approach the problem would be to have a line in the settings file something "Max percent weapons targeting = 50" or something. This would force the space station to use only 50% of its available weapons on a single target. So if it had 10 PD guns 5 would fire at the first available target and 5 at the next.

The other alternative is for the targeting system to make an internal calculation like "total mass of target/available weapons" which would result in a number that could be applied to the final targeting solution. Perhaps a logical extension of this would be to allow some sort of targeting AI for combat similar to that which is used for the AI scripting files in general.

You can already do this. The lines you want to edit in the data files (or can edit in-game for your strategies) are the "Damage Amount" lines for each of the target types.

-----

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

So does altering those lines achieve the desired effect?

They certainly do help with spreading out weapons fire. They're also a few lines in settings.txt (Estimated targeting percent...) that set the amount of estimated damage of the maximum when that weapon hits it's target. This would be part of the calculation used in the damage percent against a target type in the strategy.

-----

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

So, how does PD targetting work when a fighter launches a missile? Do the PD weapons split their fire between the missile and the launching fighter?

I've yet to test this in combat, but I've considered arming my fighters with rocket pods and energy weapons. From a distance, the fighters would launch their missiles and follow them in to engage with ammo-less, energy weapons. The target ship's PD's would partially be distracted by the missiles. In a way, this is like using decoys to draw fire away from the fighter. Don't know if this works or not.

"Do not be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." - DVader

I use this with heavy fighters and it works well both in Simulation and in actual battles. It works especialy well with IRM ships where is causes the ships secondry weapons to engage the fighters and not work as point defence thus eliminating or at least spliting the fire aimed at the fighter misiles which are generaly the more deadly of the two halves of the posible target