Weapon specific targeting

Gratuitous Forum Suggestions
1

No, this is not a call for much more control. What I would like to see is a single line added to each weapon:

preferred_target =

where the acceptable values are:

FIGHTER
FRIGATE
CRUISER

It should take more than one, so you could add:

preferred_target = FRIGATE,CRUISER

and that weapon would ONLY attack frigates and cruisers, regardless of what the ship is doing otherwise. So main gun weapons might be given this limitation, and some rapid-fire weapons might only attack fighters.

This would make orders far more sensible. It’s absurd that right now I have to tell a CA to NEVER attack fighters so it won’t waste useless (against fighters) weapons on them.

2

Alternately a battery_type where the values are “primary,” “secondary,” “torpedo,” and “defensive,” (or tertiary) perhaps.

Primary batteries prefer to fire on cruisers, but will fire on frigates barring other orders. They never fire at fighters.

Secondaries prefer frigates, but will fire at fighters and cruisers barring contrary orders if those targets are nearest.

Torpedoes would only attack frigates or cruisers with a preference for the latter barring other orders).

“Defensive” attacks fighters as the primary target and will only attack some other target if no fighters are in range. Anti-fighter missiles would get this label)

The idea is that a CA should be able to wade into a mixed force and have the big guns shoot at big targets, and the small batteries deal with fighters, etc.

3

I was looking at making this fighter for the Star Blazers mod:

You can see that the underside is a single, huge torpedo.

I’d love to do this, and I can certainly make salvo_size = 1 and salvo_interval = 999999 and have a torpedo bomber (with a defensive turret, too, so it can at least shoot while flying around later).

The trouble is that the defensive turrets won’t do anything because as it stands I have to set any “bomber” types to ignore ALL fighters.

It would be so nice if the “attack” weapons meant for ships could be set to ignore fighters, while anything with a higher tracking value would attack them if orders allowed.

Heck, even that simple solution would rock:

Any weapon with a tracking speed under 2.5 ignores fighters, how about that? Would that be hard to do? In addition, any weapons that track 2.5 or better might shoot at fighters regardless of contrary general orders.

Such a change would allow bombers to fire back when attacked by interceptors even though they’d get distracted in a furball.

If high-tracking weapons would shoot at fighters even when “attack fighters” order is deleted, that would be great. The you could order ships to ignore them—which in this case would me for MANEUVER, while they’d still shoot at any that flew by with defensive weapons.

In this case many ships would be set with no attack fighter orders except interceptors and escorts.

Bombers would fly right through enemy fighters heading for their real targets, but they’s at least return defensive fire while they were decimated.

Frigates and Cruisers would do the same instead of the odd frigate running after a fighter it can never catch instead of attacking a frigate sized target.