One last question regarding your point defence firing or not firing - can you send a screenshot of your ship design?

I'm curious if you're using very short range gauss cannons, one last "rule" to remember is that point defence firing happens at 10,000km, so if you're gauss range is shorter than that, they won't fire

I spent hours last night (sure seemed like it anyway) micromanaging a really long fight. I had three battlecruisers versus something like one hundred smaller, disparate ships. I was both faster than them and my weapons outranged them and I was able to kite them, slowly whittling them down while they could not fire back. (Maintenance was my undoing, I ran out of maintenance before the enemy ran out of ships, and I had to retreat.)

I did notice however that having more beam fire controls than absolutely necessary proved to be a handicap, as I had to manually designate a target for each fire control. If I had grouped my similar weapons under single fire control, I could have significantly reduced my micromanagement time. My battlecruisers are now in refit to 'remove' fire control systems (and add some maintenance stores). More battlecruisers coming off the line soon. Hopefully, my 48 FACs will be enough if my enemy counter-attacks.

The number of fire controls should be rather dependent on the size of the ship and the number of beams that you use. As I tend to have beam weapons on almost all of my ships I don't need to have allot of backup fire-controls (in case they are damaged). You also can leave a fire-control with no weapons and just have it as a backup, nothing prevent you from doing that.

Also... kiting and attack from a distance is also allot easier against the AI than against multiple controlled factions. In a multi-faction then the side being slower can always rotate ships in and out of distance by alternating the speed of their ships to replenish their shields. This will either force the opponent to get closer or just simply empty their MSP stores from weapons failure for no good reason.

Also... if you spread your weapons out on more ships you also have more maintenance stores to draw on for weapons failure in case you do get into the situation of a long range fire duel.

Quote from: nuclearslurpee on January 26, 2021, 04:27:02 PM

it is useful to have even your massive 50 cm lasers assigned to final fire just to give a little bit more defense while you close the range.

It will be rather costly in the sense of maintenance in current version.

Unless you are desperate then yes I agree that leaving your spinal weapon off PD is probably a good thing. If you roll the "1" on a D100 dice it will cost you dearly and the effect on those weapons for PD are not going to be that high anyway.

it is useful to have even your massive 50 cm lasers assigned to final fire just to give a little bit more defense while you close the range.

It will be rather costly in the sense of maintenance in current version.

One thing I have noticed in my past playthroughs - I have seen combat reports for Final Fire and related orders, but not Area Defense.  I would see the flashes and the number of incoming missiles reduced if I had weapons on Area Defense, but I did not see the combat events like I did for weapons on Final Fire or Final Defensive Fire.

Same here, area defense only shows energy impacts. It also doesn't update the ships missile kill counts

I did NOT have "show all events" flagged. Never noticed it before. That could well explain everything.

They should be showing up even with "Show all events" off, so if they do show up now then you must have accidentally hidden the PD firing reports.

The only other two possibilities I can think of that would cause it are:
1. Bugs
2. Not having the middle drop-down option on the top of the events screen set to "All event Categories".

That's the thing though. The events screen did not show any reports of my ship's weapons firing on missiles and mentioned nothing about how many had been shot down. They 'did' fire on enemy ships that had been designated. Is there some esoteric button somewhere that needs to be pushed to 'tell' your ships to fire defensively? I DID drag the final defence and area defence tags onto each of my fire controls, in which were also my weapons and ECCM.

The only thing I can think of, is in the top right of the event page, click the "Show All events" checkbox.

I can indeed see the missiles, before they enter laser range, let alone that of the gauss. I'm not sure what size they were but fortunately for me, they only did one point of damage each. (I have two active radars aboard, one optimized for size 3000 for range and the other optimized for size 50 for precision.)

I did not autoassign, as I did not trust it. If I hit autoassign, it automatically makes my lasers final defense, which given their range seems kinda dumb. I manually dragged the final fire onto the gauss guns and area defense onto the lasers.

I'm really not sure what all the numbers mean on the screen. I 'think' they 'might' have been groups of five, with about sixty in total per wave. I got hit pretty consistently by 22-23 of them. By the numbers, my weapons should have been quite accurate against them. Is it the case that they were just consistent in the numbers they shot down and all I saw were the impacts of the ones that survived? I would have 'thought' we would see something telling us about hits on missiles, but what do I know, I'm a newb. ;-)

With the settings I used, my weapons 'were' able to fire offensively and destroyed the two enemy ships.

Weapons in Final Defensive Fire mode can still be assigned targets. I think they will prioritize shooting down missiles over firing at the offensive targets, but that isn't a bad thing for smaller lasers and Gauss to do.

If you look at the events tab (the calendar button on the main screen) you will see information on what ships fired, how many missiles were shot down, how many hit your ships, etc. Additionally, you can get events to show up on the main screen by going to the display tab on the left of the screen, and clicking "Events", which will be the top-left checkbox under the "Display" tab