Right now, ships in battle appear to pick one target and fire on it until it is dead and fire is spread out over the enemy fleet. To add some complexity to the game and encourage multiple design fleets (as opposed to single design fleets, such as 5x missile destroyers), here are a few suggestions.



#1

Change targetting so that a ship counts for the number of CMD points it uses when the enemy targets it. This would mean that larger ships are targeted by more enemies.



#2

Add a module that makes the ship count for more CMD points (or targets) for the purposes of targeting. This would allow for the creation of tank or escort ships that get targeted more often than the other ships in their fleet.



#3

Add a module that makes the ship count for less CMD points (or targets). Together with #2, this could allow for colonizers to be in a fleet with escorts and not get shot at by pirates.



#4

The option to assign a targeting priority to ships, possibly at design time, so that they prefer targeting large ships or small ships.

sounds like a good idea!

and fire is spread out over the enemy fleet

Actually, it isn't. Any given unit can only fire on one single other unit, leading to a scenario where a ship with 40 guns fighting off 20 enemies loses because those 40 guns all targeted the same unit and overkilled it, wasting 90% of the big ship's firepower.



Anyway your #2 suggestion would be over powered. I'd put one of those on every single one of my dreads and then load that dread up with armor, using a destroyer swarm as offense. As the dread would be able to take HUGE amounts of punishment, with the entire enemy fleet essentially smashing their face into a wall, the destroyers would walk all over them.



It'd be a Glass Cannon situation where the enemy would choose to let the cannon fire a second time over destroying it because "Holy shit, that wall is BEEFY! Must kill!"

I think it would be easier if you could just peg a ship and your whole fleet would attack it.

Draco18s wrote:
Anyway your #2 suggestion would be over powered. I'd put one of those on every single one of my dreads and then load that dread up with armor, using a destroyer swarm as offense. As the dread would be able to take HUGE amounts of punishment, with the entire enemy fleet essentially smashing their face into a wall, the destroyers would walk all over them.



It'd be a Glass Cannon situation where the enemy would choose to let the cannon fire a second time over destroying it because "Holy shit, that wall is BEEFY! Must kill!"

Yeah, it would probably need to be balanced some way. Possibly a situation where you can only have 1 of the modules installed.



As for the tvtropes links, that site has already eaten my life and I know what those pages say

werewolf_nr wrote:
Yeah, it would probably need to be balanced some way. Possibly a situation where you can only have 1 of the modules installed.

Even only one of those on a dread would make it a high priority target with your rules, despite being little more than space junk held together with spit and bubble gum.

As for the tvtropes links, that site has already eaten my life and I know what those pages say

Not everyone does, though.

About tank ships, I proposed a new system for a more realistic composition of the fleet. Don't hesitate to post your thoughts about this ideas (there is the main one and others).

Click here

Photon_Ventdesdunes wrote:
About tank ships, I proposed a new system for a more realistic composition of the fleet. Don't hesitate to post your thoughts about this ideas (there is the main one and others).

Click here

Ehhh.



I just want more control in manual combat. Right now it's all automated except for a minor bonus (battle cards).



I'd like to be able to say "you three, target that ship, you with the big gun, target that thing, the rest of you go here here and here." That way I can properly manage overkill ratios by not having a big gun ship target little puny guys and "waste" damage that could have been better spent targeting something else. Or having the combat AI decide that my missile boats should be stupidly firing missiles at the enemy flak defense guns.

Draco18s wrote:
Even only one of those on a dread would make it a high priority target with your rules, despite being little more than space junk held together with spit and bubble gum.

True, I wasn't really expecting all of the suggestions to be implemented at once, because that would cause problems. Really I was thinking that it would be either #1 or #2 and #3 instead of all of them at once.



I think I'm going back on the #4 since it would be weird to try to make tactical decisions with only a strategic overview.

#1 is what breaks things. It causes overkill on small targets even more so than before (if no large units), while also protecting small units from taking any fire (if a large unit is present).