Hold fire until you see the whites of their eyes

[Traveller]

Another suggestion that I might take a crack at modding.

If you have a specific target... and you expect to be within firing range within an amount of time that's <= your reload speed... DON'T attack other targets of opportunity!  Maybe this needs to be a special keyboard command, maybe not.  God I hate it when my fighters shoot at missile frigates when they are 0.1 seconds from being in range of the data center I need them to kill.  I shouldn't have to micro putting them in stand-down until they are close enough.  (Or bombers vs something else important, etc).

[Kahuna]

Press K for stand down mode.

[Chris_Stalis]

Well, interface and logic wise, this sounds like a keyboard command to suppress the default firing at targets of opportunity. My main critique is that, visually, it would be hard to indicate which mode the ship is in to the player. Border color is already used for free-roaming vs stationary, lighting is already used for standby mode, and ship color denotes different players. A key component of the game is how easily you can tell what the ships are doing by just looking generally at a picture, much like a chess board. Thus, you'd need to figure out how to communicate this to the player, then decide how statuses are going to cascade. For instance:

1) After targeting a single target, what behavior should the ships have after the target is eliminated?
2) Does the "hold until ready" command also modify the ctrl+rclick (attack all of a specific type) or v+rclick (free-range defender) mouse commands?

Honestly, I think that stand down mode is more than sufficient, but others might have more ideas.

[damiac]

Well a command to exclusively kill a certain type of enemy (Ideally the command just goes away when none are left in the system) would be good. 

Think about it, I have a cap of fighters, and there are a bunch of bombers coming at me, with some enemy fighters between us.  I don't want my fighters to all shoot at the enemy fighters, then sit around in front of the bombers reloading, I want them to fly right past the fighters, and immediately strike the bombers when in range.

So I think this would work well by just right clicking the bombers with the fighters selected.  Once all bombers in the system are dead, the order should go away, and the fighters would return to normal targeting behavior.

To use stand down mode for this, I have to pause the game, stand down the fighters, tell them to go after the bombers, wait until they are all in range of the bombers, then take them off stand down.  This is less efficient than just letting them waste the first shot on the fighters, because there's no way they'll all get in range to hit the bombers at the same time.

This situation is more relevant when talking about units with slower firing times, for example, zombards wasting their alpha strike on fighters rather than the missile frigates directly behind them.

[Traveller]

Not quite good enough to say "don't fire at other things at all", because if your fighters are spending ten seconds flying through a screen of enemy fighters or swarmers before they hit their target, they might as well fire on targets of opportunity for the first eight seconds of that.  You'd want to make sure the ETA calculation takes into account relative speed.  I've been trying to think of ways to abuse this behavior by kiting weird with a much faster target (darting forward and back to confuse ETA calculation) but I don't think it's really so bad; as soon as the target turns around it would free up the pursuers to fire.

Re: Chris,
1) After the designated target is dead, your ships are no longer manually targeting anything.  The rule wouldn't restrict firing behavior at all without a manual target.
2) Yes to ctrl-right click if I understand it right (haven't used it), no to V-click because you didn't designate a target, unless you V-click a ship (so you start by targeting it).  It operates only when there is a manual target.

It always targets the most specific thing that you've designated as a manual target.  So if your bombers are flying through a small pack of plasma siege starships to attack one you specifically targeted at the back, they will delay firing as necessary to hit that specific starship ASAP.  However, if you order your bombers to *move* to the middle of an enemy plasma siege pack, and they pass through fighters on the way there, they will opportunity fire on the fighters immediately because they don't have a manual target that they are holding fire for, even if they are set to prefer plasma siege starships.  Way too algorithmically complex to compare ETA against every random ship in the system, and liable to give unexpected behavior anyway...but if you target a ship manually, I think that holding fire to attack that ship fastest would be expected behavior.

I'm not actually sure how you'd use the interface to say "go here while specifically targeting this ship type along the way" -- is that what ctrl-rightclick is for?  Or is it like V-clicking but only going after a specific type?  In either case yes, with a manual target, they'll hold fire to hit that target ASAP.