amaromarn wrote:
ofcourse that is exactly what commanders in real battles might do.

Well yes, if you couldn't just look at what weapons and armor an enemy fleet had before combat that would be a perfectly sensible ruse for your fleets to fall for.



Again, I really just want some tweaks to discourage players from just stacking one type of module on a ship. Multi-targeting is one avenue through which this can be addressed, and would help by making larger ships more effective vs. swarms of smaller ships than they are now.

The suggestion is strongly related to /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11910-suggestion-multiple-ship-targetting

This thread has been linked to the former and is moved to the archives.

Andargor wrote:
It's the rate of fire of the weapons used. They fire on one target at a time, but since they can fire multiple times between phases, they change target if the first one is destroyed.



This is apparent with the current small ship vs large ship problem: send in a couple of missile equipped destroyers vs a dread equipped with kinetics or beams. The dread will die, but so will both your destroyers because it will have shot them both by the time the missiles get there.



The OP's proposal won't solve this, but it is a step in the right direction.

I agree that this isn't a fix by itself, but it should be part of the multifaceted fix. There are other great suggestions here that I've thrown my support behind to help fix it.

FinalStrigon wrote:
I thought some ships already fired on multiple targets? I've been seeing my Battleships and Dreads engaging at least two ships...Unless I'm just mixing up what's shooting what as the battle moves and the camera shifts and what-not.

It's the rate of fire of the weapons used. They fire on one target at a time, but since they can fire multiple times between phases, they change target if the first one is destroyed.



This is apparent with the current small ship vs large ship problem: send in a couple of missile equipped destroyers vs a dread equipped with kinetics or beams. The dread will die, but so will both your destroyers because it will have shot them both by the time the missiles get there.



The OP's proposal won't solve this, but it is a step in the right direction.

Unikraken wrote:
More often than not, Destroyers and above are using overkill. It's well documented here in the forums. Maybe corvettes shouldn't fire on more than one ship, but everything above that, especially destroyers who have a bonus to weapon modules and are the most heavily used ships, should be able to.

More often than not? So, am I wrong in seeing my bigger ships engaging more than one enemy? I was playing more battles last night, and I could have sworn that was what I saw.



Back on topic, I disagree about the Destroyers. Their purpose is to be escorts and engage smaller enemy ships. Following this line of thought, Cruisers are also more of a defensive class. While admittedly their role varies according to ship and navy, their duty is often air defense (unnecessary in ES), commerce raiding and shore bombardment (hence the support mod bonuses, for the Invasion mods). The Battleship was designed to be the workhorse of navies, although it's usefulness was questioned even when in service, but in terms of ES they should at least be the ships that can engage multiple targets. Keep the balancing that existed in the real world, where even a powerful Battleship was susceptible to being attacked by an outnumbering force of smaller ships, and you have a balanced fleet right there. Destroyers for escort/protection/cannon fodder, Cruisers for invasions/more fleet defense, Battleships for blowing stuff up.



Dreadnoughts were, were, really, just Battleships with more and bigger guns, so they would have the same use really as Battleships. So, really, the only ships that make sense to fire on multiple targets are the Battleships and Dreadnoughts. The Destroyers and Cruisers weren't designed for those firepower roles.

I can't vote on this, because I'm of the opinion that any general will prioritize targets until eliminated, with the only exceptions being blatant overkill would be wasteful and missiles that are streaming towards an enemy fleet could change targets if it were destroyed a round before impact...

or possibly have a fleet's missiles countered by a fleet's flack, rather then ship by ship. (make flack less effective just stacked on one ship and more effective spread over the fleet) This makes loads of sense to me, since the flack is supposed to take out the missile before it gets to the target, while missiles could be plunked all over a fleet. Possibly causing disruption of all sorts.

I also think that the large, production expensive ships should be able to attack multiple times. I also agree it should be bound to the CP used by that ship, meaning dreadnoughts can attacl 4 times while corvettes can only attack once. A fleet can only attack another time if all ships in that fleet have one attack left. So if you leave your big ships without escort, they can make it up by their pure power.

Small ships should NOT be able to attack multiple times imo.

FinalStrigon wrote:
I thought some ships already fired on multiple targets? I've been seeing my Battleships and Dreads engaging at least two ships...Unless I'm just mixing up what's shooting what as the battle moves and the camera shifts and what-not.



If I am wrong, I agree, to an extent. The Dreadnought, at least, should engage multiple targets, and maybe the Battleship. But for the other ships, I don't see why. It would make more sense for smaller ships to concentrate their fire on single targets, instead of diluting their damage output.

More often than not, Destroyers and above are using overkill. It's well documented here in the forums. Maybe corvettes shouldn't fire on more than one ship, but everything above that, especially destroyers who have a bonus to weapon modules and are the most heavily used ships, should be able to.

I thought some ships already fired on multiple targets? I've been seeing my Battleships and Dreads engaging at least two ships...Unless I'm just mixing up what's shooting what as the battle moves and the camera shifts and what-not.



If I am wrong, I agree, to an extent. The Dreadnought, at least, should engage multiple targets, and maybe the Battleship. But for the other ships, I don't see why. It would make more sense for smaller ships to concentrate their fire on single targets, instead of diluting their damage output.

Yeah, it would be a big step in the right direction at least.

Honestly, I don't care about the method they use to prioritize targets as long as we can get some confirmation that they are going to allow ships to fire on multiple ships.

This is pretty clear cut, I think ships, depending on tonnage, should be able to engage multiple targets. Suggested numbers as follows:











Each weapon type on a ship should be divided among the targets it can acquire. (Corvette has 8 guns and 2 missiles, 4 guns and 1 missile per target)



Regardless, the numbers I'm suggesting aren't the important thing, the idea behind it is. This will help deal with some of the disparity that causes destroyer spam to be so prevalent. Also, just aesthetically and logically, the fact that a dreadnaught can only engage one corvette at a time is just crazy.



This kind of gameplay (1v1) works just fine with a game like Civilization where all the units are people and relatively simple machines, but makes no sense in this game's context, given that these are extremely advanced ships of war flying through space thousands of years ahead of our own technology.



Anyone else agree with me?

ofcourse that is exactly what commanders in real battles might do.

Unikraken wrote:
I think a better solution for prioritization would be for ships to target based on ower: (military power). The more powerful ships are targeted first, which makes military sense and is incredibly simple to do.

Hmm, that does make sense. My only caveat there is that there should probably be some other checks involved because you wouldn't want to encourage players to field decoy ships without weapons but with piles of defense and hp to distract opposing fleets from their destroyer swarms.

It seems half-assed to me, because several ships still won't be able to attack multiple targets. CP times 2 would atleast ensure they all can attack multiples.

werewolf_nr wrote:
Yes please. Fire on a number of targets equal to the CP of the ship. How the fire is divided is, of course, another conversation.

This is the simplest and most elegant solution within this topic.

I voted no, not because the general idea is wrong but because i believe there is a better way of doing it.



Instead ships in a fleet during a firing round should technically have already worked out their total damage done during the round?



SO instead of applying that to the ship targeted, the total damage output of the fleet should be put against the defenses and health of each ship in turn, putting forward as much fire as necessary to complete a kill and the move on to the next ship.



Or the general gist of it as you might understand, because following this exactly could leave the combat feeling a little 'gamey'.

Ohma wrote:
Well, the simplest solution (disregarding the AI tweaking nightmare it could easily become) would be one target per gun on ship. So a corvette with five lasers could potentially fire on five different ships.

I'm opposed to this method for one simple reason, damage would be far too diluted. I think my suggestion, while ever so slightly more complicated, is a much better option. It makes larger ships have a more important role while allowing smaller ships to still function within the fleet.

Ohma wrote:
The down side of this is that the AI would have to be much better at prioritizing targets in general than if there were hard limits based on hull size (or the game would have to do some more abstraction behind the scenes), but this does seem to me to be the most direct/simple way of addressing the problem.

I think a better solution for prioritization would be for ships to target based on ower: (military power). The more powerful ships are targeted first, which makes military sense and is incredibly simple to do.

Well, the simplest solution (disregarding the AI tweaking nightmare it could easily become) would be one target per gun on ship. So a corvette with five lasers could potentially fire on five different ships. The down side of this is that the AI would have to be much better at prioritizing targets in general than if there were hard limits based on hull size (or the game would have to do some more abstraction behind the scenes), but this does seem to me to be the most direct/simple way of addressing the problem.

bossman2k8 wrote:
while I think this is a brilliant idea engaging 11 targets would be pretty extreme I think it would work better not just by say a dreadnought targets 11 but any ship with over so much weapon strength targets multiples.



for instance a battlehip with 1500 beam targets 2

a battleship with 3000 beam targets 4

for every 750 ower: you have on a certain weapon you add one more target

this means that late game with the better weapons dreadnoughts could engage 6 or 7 targets and still have adequate shielding.



missiles Ithink should be the exception for every 500 ower: you target a new enemy because its ridiculous when 30 missiles hit a ship that would have been blown up by 5

I think this is needlessly complicated and doesn't improve the gameplay over my suggestion, it just makes more for the team to code when the deadline is already so close. They should just be able to shoot a number of targets. Adding complexity where it's unnecessary just slows down development.