It is a quandary. I find it mostly a problem for the poor torpedo fighters: as they head towards a cruiser, they prematurely launch at some fighters that are the escorts and then by the time the reload has finally occurred - half of the torpedo squadron is already gone. Perhaps another combat order so a certain ship can be ordered never to fire on fighters? Like torpedo fighters to prevent premature launch?
I haven’t program since Vic-20 peeking and poking so I have no clue about the difficulties involved. Perhaps to be addressed in GSB 2 which is forthcoming next month right…?
As Berny’s example shows, this is primarily a problem not so much because the weapons can’t hit fighters (I’ve seen fighters get picked off by heavy plasma, so obviously it can happen), but more because of the long fire intervals of some weapons. If a fighter torpedo takes out an opposing fighter, that’s nice - but also annoying, since that torpedo was slated for the big sitting-duck cruiser just ahead.
maybe some more fuzzy-logic style stuff needs to happen where the ship analyses its chances of hitting that target, and the time until it comes into range of a better one, and compares it to the weapon reload time… eeeek.
As far as I can tell, no fuzzy-logic style fire permission system was installed. However, ships now re-evaluate driving targets over the course of a battle. The easiest way to see the effect this has is to go into a scenario with a large map and some fighter squadrons that aren’t set to escort a ship (preferably it is a group of enemy fighters which aren’t escorting an enemy ship, since you can control the orders of your ships to seen the effect on their flight patterns more readily than guess the orders affecting enemy ship flight patterns). Place a bunch of cruisers or something on the battlefield, and set the priority of fighters low (but don’t delete the Attack Fighters order) - perhaps at 10% or so - while setting the priority of cruisers and frigates high - leaving these at default values should work. You will see your cruisers or whatever begin crossing the battlefield to the nearest enemy ship of the highest priority target type, but when the enemy fighters get to within some range of your ships (the range is dependent on target priority levels), you will see your ships maneuver to engage the fighters, and those ships will continue to move to engage the fighters until the higher priority target gets close enough to look like a better target to the driver AI.
This means that low rate of fire weapons (like fighter torpedoes) still fire on craft that they aren’t suited for use against even if they would be in range of a ‘better’ target shortly. On the other hand, ships are better at selecting what target to close with - no more engineless ships at the front of the deployment formation that cause your long-range fleet to march forward into the advancing short-range cruiser line of your enemy.
Could this be something we could control for the weapon module? All it needs to be is a set of comma separated sizes the weapon will attack (if unset, then default to “all”).
This addition would allow for simple tests via mods. If it improves things, then you can patch with that value set (tiny patch) for whatever weapons.