As part of my extensive testing for how Laser Warheads currently work I did several test salvos of all sorts of different speeds (both lasers and non-laser warheads), and I could never successfully get Area Mode PD and AutoFiring to work. I had lots of successful manual firings against missiles at the lasers maximum range, and lots and lots of successful automatic Point Blank Defense firings, but no matter what I did I could not get the ship to automatically target in area mode. (They had plenty of time. 5 second recharge times, 300+k km laser range, 300k km area defense range, and I made really slow missiles at 8.3k km/s)
How am I supposed to set up a the PD, Automatic Fire Checkbox, and Firing Modes to successfully do this?
Area Defense mode is only available for ship/PDC mounted beam weapons. To my knowledge there is no cross functionality with missiles.
Autofire only works with offensive functions and not defensive. It will actually reassign weapons that have been allocated to point defense to offensive targeting. To my knowledge Steve has not changed this.
Area mode for beams may have some coding issues. To my knowledge no one has used since missile speeds were increased a couple of years ago and made it next to useless without a segnificant tech advantage.