Automatic Fire?

[Girlinhat (OP)]

So I had an encounter, some 30 little buzzing enemy ships, not sure what they were armed with...  I stood outside their range and pelted missiles at them.  I tried to use autofire...  10 ships of mine with 10 missiles tubes, 2 FC, slaved for 5 to each.  I click "autofire" and they immediately ignore my logical setup and slave all the tubes to 1 FC and fire ALL 100 missiles at a single enemy destroyer.  80 are wasted as this was extreme overkill.

How do I get ships to fire at large swarms without micromanaging it?  I'd rather not try and remember the 30 different ship numbers from the targeting list and hope I didn't skip any.  I didn't have to deal with PD at that time but how do I handle PD any easier?  Is it going to be the same enormous headache trying to target each missile with each PD?

Am I missing something or is large-number combat just enormously annoying?

[scoopdjm]

"annoying"?, micromanaging? *PFFFT*, what are you NOT a DF2010 player?

yes thats how you have to do it in any case when it comes to combat its really important to make sure you fire correctly so after awhile you'd probably end up microing again anyways.

[Hawkeye]

Autfire is what the AI uses ATM. Steve put the button in for us to play around with it, but it realy doesn´t work all that good because 1) the AI expects ships with only 1 type of weapon and 2) as you noticed, the AI isn´t all that good with target selection.

General consensus is: Don´t use it!

PD is different. If you set up your PD (guns and missile launchers) correctly everything goes automatic and quite good, I might add.

[Owen Quillion]

The automatic PD functions work quite well in my experience.   The rightmost box in the Combat Assignments window lets you set it up; missile fire controls let you set a number of missiles to launch per enemy missile, and you can set up one ship and use the Copy Assignments buttons to set it up for ships of the same class.   I'm not sure about beams; I've only used my offensive particle beams in final defensive fire once, but that worked the same way, basically. 

My escorts did a fine job of firing as soon as missile salvos appeared, and would also immediately launch on survivors (42% interception rate is a tricky number).  I suspect that if you're getting extremely saturated, you might get slightly better results if you were to micromanage, but it worked well in more-or-less equal tonnage missile-only fights with Precursors. 

Offensively, I think it's just a nightmare if you've got a lot of contacts.   Generally if I intend to fire on more than one target I'll break up a task group (I typically do this with my fighter squadrons or gunboat flotillas) and then use the Copy assignments/targets.   I imagine this wouldn't really help much once you're fighting more than small groups of Precursors, though.   

[Garfunkel]

Indeed. Divide your TG into several squadrons, then use "copy target" - instead of assigning targets to each ship, you issue targets to each squadron.

For example, I had 28 destroyers engage 72 enemy FACs that required 2-3 missile hits each for at least a mobility kill. Each of my destroyers only had two launchers and a single MFC. Thus I divided them into seven squadrons of four destroyers, each squadron targeting a single enemy craft for a salvo before switching targets. This reduced the amount of micromanagement considerably.

[Charlie Beeler]

The main issues I have with autofire is that there is no way to setup a player directed assignment protocol.  Instead any ship/task group that has autofire checked will override all previous weapons assignments and attempt to spread fire across all available detected targets.  This includes overriding point defense assignments.  

My advice is to not use autofire and take the micromanagement route.  It's time consuming, but the end result is much closer to what you want.

[Girlinhat (OP)]

I did find good use in the "same location" function, allowing me to spread FC assignments over all targets in the same location, but I think a better goal for missiles would simply be to add a tiny sensor to allow re-targeting.  That way you can get a full salvo and no leftovers, quick kill count.  It'd be considerably easier for beams, without ammo concerns...