Area defense picket not firing

[nakorkren (OP)]

I split my fleet into two parts, with some long (320km) range beam ships out in front (let's call this Fleet A) toward the enemy missile frigates, who are firing at the rear-half of the fleet (call that Fleet B).  Fleet A's fire controls are all set to Area Defense, no targets are set, and I have tried Open Fire All (which doesn't seem to do anything when BFCs are set to Area Defense with no target), leaving them off, etc with no luck.  None of Fleet A's weapons fire while set to Area Defense.  For context, Final Defensive Fire doesn't work either, despite several salvos stopping for the increment directly in range of my PD turrets on Fleet A.  I'm partly wondering if Fleet A isn't firing in Area Defense because it doesn't recognize the missiles as hostile (to Fleet A), but that would prevent Area Defense from being useful in protecting a 2nd fleet in any scenario, which doesn't seem likely.

I verified that the weapons can fire on salvos passing through Fleet A's range by targetting salvos manually, and the weapons get two rounds of shots in (one as the salvos close and one as they pass by and on toward Fleet B) before the missiles get past.  This gets the job done, I guess, but is extremely tedious since I'm having to manually target each salvo and it's going to take Fleet A quite a while to close with the enemy. 

I'm 90% sure that I'm just not configuring something right.  Can someone please, please enlighten me on how to get Area Defense BFCs to fire automatically?

(Yes, I searched the forums exhaustively for this issue.  I found a few posts that said "Just set BFC to Area Defense, don't assign any targets, and click Open Fire and it will work", it's not working for me. )

[nuclearslurpee]

Is the "enemy" actually set as hostile by your player race? This seems to be the most common cause of problems like these, so even if you've searched extensively this is worth checking.

[nakorkren (OP)]

Fair question, but yes, they were set as hostile. 

I figured out the issue with some further experimentation.  It wasn't enough to set each BFC to Area Defense and then click "Open Fire All", I had to manually set each specific fire control to "Open Fire FC". 

Also, the reason I didn't think it was working when I tried that before was that I'm not getting a message listing how many missile were killed like you do with Final Defensive Fire, and I wasn't counting individual missiles remaining in the salvos.  I'll look into my Event settings and enable all messages to confirm I didn't accidentally hide it at some point, but given that I still get Final Defensive Fire messages and normal ship combat messages, I'm thinking no.

[nuclearslurpee]

That sounds like a bug. Point defense fire should not require manually opening fire at all.

I do wonder if you are assigning a FC order immediately before the missiles cross the PD envelope? In 1.13 and older C# versions there is a non-WAD behavior where giving a new order to a fire control can cause it to experience a fire delay due to new orders even for PD fire, which is not really intended. v1.14/2.0 corrects this.

[Elminster]

Point defense fire should not require manually opening fire at all.

That's not entirely true.
The second post here http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.75 states, that Area Defense need to be set to Open Fire.

[Garfunkel]

Final Fire always fires, AMM and Area Fire require FC to be open. This is because it's possible that in certain situations you do not want those weapons to fire.

[Black]

I didn't play with missiles in my recent games, but I think that last time I did my AMMs fired automatically at enemy salvos.

[nuclearslurpee]

I didn't play with missiles in my recent games, but I think that last time I did my AMMs fired automatically at enemy salvos.

This is my recollection as well.

[Droll]

AMMs should not be firing automatically, they should require the FC with the PD mode to be set to open fire. If they do, they shouldn't, the player might be in a situation where they believe their beam PD is sufficient and decide to conserve AMMs.

[nuclearslurpee]

I had always thought that the way to control this was (should be?) by changing the PD mode of the fire control to "None" or otherwise, but a FC should automatically fire for PD purposes as long as it has an assigned PD mode. Perhaps I haven't experimented as much as I should to fully understand the system.

It would be great if Steve added a button or functionality to open fire with FCs set to a PD mode so we don't have to manually go through and open fire with every one without a target, which doesn't really work well in-game.

[Black]

So I fired up old game where I had missile ships (version 1.12.0) and my AMM equipped ships open fire automatically on enemy missiles. Setting for fire control is Point Defence Mode and fire control is green, so not set to open fire. I am quite sure that this behavior was not change in later versions.

This is also one of the reasons, why I play mostly with beams now as the enemy will quickly deplete my missile reserves with AMMs fired in offensive mode. To deal with that requires lot of micro, unlike massed railguns and gauss in Final Defensive Fire mode. I dont really mind that my AMMs open fire against enemy ASMs, but I would at least like chance to set up my fire controls to ignore enemy AMMs.

[Garfunkel]

I think it was changed in 11 or 10 then. I recall some discussion from Steve about changing the behaviour of AMM launchers/fire controls.

[TMaekler]

Maybe it is time for a guide overhaul - how do missiles work in each mode 

[Steve Walmsley]

It is in the v1.12 changes list.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11593.0

"Missile fire controls with point defence modes set will launch AMMs without a specific 'Open Fire' order."

[Zook]

I've had the same issue with Area Defense not firing, despite "Open Fire" being issued. I got it to work by issuing "Cease Fire", then "Open Fire" again.

Just a wild guess: could area defense not firing have anything to do with all incoming missiles being targeted by my AMMs already?