AutoTarget for Towers

NeXuS

Good morning everyone.

Lately I had an idea I now want to share with you.
What about auto-aiming for Towers?

In your advanced HUD you have the option to target specific parts of enemy ships or even target allied ships with that weapon.
I'd love to see an option to give each weapon a priority to fire in, when in range. For example: My small laser cannons should auto fire on engines if in range (if not, fire at will), while my heavy cannons should auto fire on shield generators in range (if not fire at will).

So, without having to pause the game and declare targets for my weapons manually, I'd like to see an automatism, doing this for me.

What do you think?

Alpha

NeXuS Wouldn't that remove most of the pilot skills you need to be effective in combat?

Jenwuf

NeXuS
At the moment, i can only see it being useful when in bounty hunt where you almost always target reactors for example. Since its far too easy to just pause and target manually.

However, this might prevent the "pause and think" idea presented by the game FTL, since there its almost impossible to lose if you keep pausing and thinking ahead.
This kind of feature would make battles less about pausing to target things and more about maneuvering your ship into position to make best use of your weapons in real time, not a "pause and click" space strategy game.

Dibs

Jenwuf I can dig it. Maybe a simple target priority drop bar for weapons, shields, engines and reactors could be handy. By no means should it focus fire all weapons on a single module unless its the only one of that type left. I find quite often on moving ships, unless i lock camera to it, i often misclick what i'm intending to target, it would at least abate some of my clumsiness

NeXuS

Jenwuf
I would not say that you allow this option to all your towers to target a precisely named room on an enemy ship.
But let's assume you habe a new room called "tactical station".
This station gives you perhaps four "target points" (if crewed with four crewmen). With this points you can tell up to four weapons on what type of room they should fire if possible. If not possible they fire at will.

So with more tactical stations you are better in precise Shooting, but you need much more room on your ship.

Jenwuf

NeXuS
Huh... so like fire control systems?
Thats pretty cool!
Maybe it could be implemented as something that targets the designated parts, and then tells its weapons to fire at it in a salvo or something.

Possibly it could even be on a seperate ship to make fleet engagements intresting...

Dibs

Jenwuf NeXuS I think at that point maybe something more in line with a laser designator to paint a target for all un-focused weapons could be easier? If you have more than one it could cause split fire

Walt

I'm open to this, sounds especially useful for electro bolters, like you could tell them to prioritize shields. Also an option for a weapon to ignore focus fire targets when it already has a high priority target, so that you wouldn't override your electro bolters when focus firing your ship.

I'll add it to the Trello.

Atarlost

Walt This would be especially useful if it were saved in the ship file so it could be used to customize target prioritization for NPCs.

GunsForGuns

I think you should have to have a part on your ship to do this like a super duper targeting system... just an idea

Walt

GunsForGuns I think you should have to have a part on your ship to do this like a super duper targeting system... just an idea

Maybe, but are your crew really so dumb they can't just follow your orders? (I mean, they can already target on their own, I don't think it's much of a stretch to say they're smart enough to prioritize certain enemy parts.)

GunsForGuns

Walt that is true you would have to make it make sense... some how.

NeXuS

Walt
Perhaps they are smart enough. But normally you have a commanding officer. So what about a command room that could command fire on one kind of subsystem. Towers could subscribe to this command room to get the fire order.
Several subsystems require more command rooms...

GunsForGuns

NeXuS not a bad idea.