Micromanaging focused fire

[superspeck]

When I'm raiding, I need to micromanage my ships' fire to prioritize targets that are causing a lot of damage and/or make retreat impossible. For instance, when raiding a Special Ops base (seems I'm upagainst an 'Easy' Random AI that is both a train master and a special ops master, *grumble*), I warp in a couple of transport loads, dump them off, they get snagged by the tractors, kill the special ops base, and then start shooting equally at all the turrets. The turrets eventually die at about the same time, but that means that the fleet got battered down to nothing ...

What I actually wanted was them to pop the lightning turrets, then pop the tractors, and then let me put them back on the transports and run away. It seems that the fleet doesn't intelligently prioritize targets on their own, and there isn't a way for me to do that and then turn my attention elsewhere.

Is there a way around this besides micromanaging (queuing) the fire focus? Is this something I can recommend in the suggestions forum, or has it already been hashed over 200,000 times?

[x4000]

If you give your fleet a single order to attack a specific lightning turret, then they will kill all of the lightning turrets before then killing all the remaining turrets, before then killing whatever else is there.  So hopefully that will help with that one case.

The targeting is quite intelligent, actually, but it's not psychic and what you are describing is not something that I think is even really logically possible -- why would ships prioritize shooting tractor beams, which do them no harm?  They don't have any way to know you are planning to run away with them.  Rather, they all prioritize (generally) doing as much damage to all the various enemy ships as possible, so that they kill as much of the enemy as fast as possible. 

Targeting for self-preservation purposes actually doesn't make any sense, either, in a mixed-arms fleet because if ship A fires at the things that do the most damage to it, rather than what it can do the most damage to, then you wind up with your total damage output dropping.  Assuming that your fleet is properly composed of ships that can all do a lot of damage to all the various targets, then you'll wind up with them all "covering each other" rather than covering themselves, if that makes sense. 

So basically, the targeting assumes that you've got mixed fleets that are somewhat appropriately composed based on what they will be facing; if you stray too far from that you can still win, but it then requires micro to do very well with (unless you just brute force it with way more ships than the enemy has).

Hope that makes sense!

[superspeck]

Thanks. How does that work with ship strengths vs. turrets? I haven't seen a chart, I don't think, on what sorts of ships will take down certain turrets faster. I know that bombers will take out buildings and forcefields better, and different turrets are strong against X and weak against Y, but I've just been brute-forcing everything with an approximately even combination of the "holy trinity", leveraged towards bombers when I have to take down something heavy.

[x4000]

No problem.

The ships don't use the same list that you're seeing, actually.  They look at raw damage numbers, and a variety of other factors.  So they'll target turrets just like any other ships.  The list that you're seeing is performance results based on battles.  Turrets are pretty robust, so the autotargeting tends to leave them until last most of the time because otherwise you wind up killing almost nothing will everything is still shooting at you.  Quickest way to reduce enemy firepower tends to be to kill their weaker mobile stuff, then it falls over to the rest, etc. 

That varies, of course, but more often than not that's what winds up happening.  That's why one really good tactic is to shoot the guard post from afar, or with a couple of units on a suicide run, while your main fleet stays back out of turret range.  Then the AI ships can come out and fight you, you can dispatch them, and then dispatch the turrets.  Otherwise there's a major home court advantage that is a bit hard to overcome except by brute force, so to speak.

[keith.lamothe]

Superspeck, have you tried the new focus fire control nodes?  They cause ships to use an alternate target selection behavior that tends to get stuff dead faster, but has other drawbacks.  The normal algorithm prefers to spread out its targeting which is often better in the general case.

There's one node for sniper (infinite range) units, and one node for non-sniper (finite range) units; the alternate algorithm works pretty well for infinite range and is less well tested for finite range stuff but you may find it useful

[orzelek]

Hmm so you actually need to build the node.... My bombards seemed to shoot very nicely into same turret until it died without the node. I need to test them with focus fire node then

[keith.lamothe]

In that case it may not help, as it's already doing it for whatever reason.  Either that or maybe I unintentionally messed up normal targeting

[superspeck]

Superspeck, have you tried the new focus fire control nodes?  They cause ships to use an alternate target selection behavior that tends to get stuff dead faster, but has other drawbacks.  The normal algorithm prefers to spread out its targeting which is often better in the general case.

There's one node for sniper (infinite range) units, and one node for non-sniper (finite range) units; the alternate algorithm works pretty well for infinite range and is less well tested for finite range stuff but you may find it useful

I didn't see the nodes ... are they in 3.060 or 3.08x?

[x4000]

3.08x only.

[superspeck]

My only argument with the "reducing in the most efficient manner" -- yes, focusing on the things that can't do them damage might not be the best idea. However, with the fire spread over so many things that CAN do damage, they all get destroyed at once. That means that they've had the maximum amount of time, from their point of view, to inflict damage... which certainly isn't positive from MY point of view!

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, the focus fire node alternate method basically computes for each target "how many shots would it take me to kill this thing?" and picks the target where that value is the lowest; the second piece is that it actually prefers targeting things targeted by lots of other ships, rather than trying to spread it out.

I have a save game with hundreds of snipers at a wormhole where they will focus fire a 100+ ships 1 by 1 with great alacrity.  It's beautiful

[Velox]

     I truly love the preferred target mechanism - I find that my ships need very little supervision nowadays.  There are two things I wish for, though:
     1) A second layer to the preferred targeting: when a new target is assigned, the old one could move down to the secondary, etc.  This would be very handy in situations where I have a ship strong against two different targets in an enemy group, or especially when turret-killing.
     2) The ability to set preferred targets when no enemy is present.  I think this could be done quite nicely with the sidebar somehow, since you can already view every potential target under the sun (via F1).

[Baleur]

I just do what i do in starcraft lol. Queue orders!
Shift-Click lightning turrets, shift-click mlrs turrets, shift-click tractor turrets, shift-click at your homesystem in the map view.
Takes a few seconds, byebye now they manage themselves

I'm actually starting to discover how useful micro can be in this game (yes! no joke!).
Last time i played, i completely outgunned the enemy fleet that was hiding in a cloud of perma-mines by just strafing outside in a circular motion lol. Had to be really close, lost one or two ships, but it was awesome, felt like i was ordering my zerglings around

That feeling, in a hugely macro 4x space game? Win. Win win win!

[orzelek]

You should really check the commands descriptions available from menu. Commands can be queued now with shift key if I remember correctly.