Manually targeting enemies causes lots of overkill with large fleets

from Sins Forums

As the title says. When auto-attack is enabled, when a big fleet is auto-attacking a bunch of enemy units, it understands that one ship has a limited amount of HP and stops firing 2 or 3 seconds or so before the ship explodes to move on to the next auto-attack target (hold Alt down). However, if you manually tell a lot of ships to fire at a single enemy unit, the ships all keep firing until the ship explodes. When you have fleets of 70 or more frigates, those 3 seconds can equate to a very significant amount of damage - it takes a few seconds for the game to update the hull/shield points. The ships on auto-attack understand this, but the ships on manual attack don't.

(Related: Rarely, when the fleet is in auto-attack mode, the targeted ship is regenerating quickly, and the fleet fails to kill the first targeted ship before moving on to the next, leaving the 1st ship with 1 to 50 hull points left.)

For this reason I don't like to order each group of my fleet to target specific enemy ships unless it's essential (eg.: capital ships, subverters, re-prioritize if fleet is targeting flak...).

I'm not sure if I would classify this as a bug, but it is a slight inconsistency which can get annoying if I feel like I should be MMing attack orders in the battle, which I would do if it didn't result in this sort of problem.

19,485 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

That's generally the way I play as well. I think the devs did this to discourage FF if at all possible.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

It's one of the places where the AI comes out quite nicely. Mitigation was supposed to be the final nail for focus fire tactics, but the numbers for it are off badly.

 

:fox:

Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

You can make groups of 20-30 ships and manually focus fire each group separately on different ships.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Now that I think about it, a very serious player would order exactly the number of frigates needed to kill enemy frigate X in 2 or 3 or 4 shots... but figuring out those numbers on the fly would be quite difficult.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Experience and testing gives you those numbers. 

This is the difference between best (elite) online sins players and pro players.