(mostly copied from the discord #aurora-help channel)
Since “fire at will” just tells your ships to pick a target for now and doesn’t tell them to shoot at bad guys in the future, it would be nice if there was a “fire at bad guys automatically” mode for fire controls.
To add on to this, it would be nice if we could have conditionals and a priority to the selection, kind of like the change to conditional orders being a list.
As an example, we tell our gauss turrets to be on final defensive fire, but if there are no missiles around they can target ships below 1000T instead. Meanwhile we have some particle lances on another fire control, and we want it to automatically target any fleet with a ship larger than 10000T and traveling slower than 8000km/s. On another ship we have some lasers that we want to shoot at anything, but we don’t want to waste shots at long distance, so we set it to fire at any ship within 20000km.
I imagine it would make the most sense to use your current intelligence for ship sizes/speeds in case of cloaked enemy ships or ships traveling below their maximum speed.
I also expect that this would be best used with beam fire controls, but maybe someone would want to use it with a missile for control.
That would be great. Or even a “fire whenever in range” or “close and fire” command. Anything to make combat a little more streamlined and intuitive.
As it is, I keep building new fleets of more advanced ships with better fire controls and longer-ranged beam weapons and sending them to where I know the Raiders to be (near Mars), but no matter how many videos I watch, I just can’t get my head around combat.
Drag the weapons onto the fire control. Drag the enemy ship onto the fire control. Order my ships to fire at will. But my fleet inevitably gets wiped out without even damaging a single enemy ship.
So, I exit the game without saving, then the next day add some more ships to my fleet, and try again.
But I fully understand that this is a complex game and a labor of love, and I’m lucky to be able to play it.
Have you set that specific NPC to hostile in the diplomacy tab? Are you getting event reports that your ships are firing but missing? Or are they not even firing?
Yes. I have set the NPC to “hostile.” The only event reports I get are describing the hits to my ships, and their very quick destruction. My lasers and fire control ranges are 300k km.
I would suggest to save your game right before the engagement and post your AuroraDB.db. Wait, it weights 70MB. Anyway, make it accessible somehow and someone will tell you if something is wrong with your ships, or tell you how exactly to conduct combat with those ships.
I launched a new attack with my fleet of 7 missile boats, and something seems to be happening. According to the messages my ships are getting multiple hits, but so far it looks like none of the alien ships have been destroyed.
Looking at the messages you haven’t had a penetrating hit yet. All the hits have only caused armour damage. Once you have missiles getting through the armor you’ll get messages that include penetrating hits not just armour hits. You won’t cause damage to systems or destroy the ship until then.
The missiles are definitely working, but there is not enough of them to be effective. Post your beam ship design. It’s very easy to be hopelessly outtech’ed when you do fight with direct fire weapons.
As Ultimoos says, and from the Ship Combat tab, we see your ships have 1 launcher.
So, at best, as the fleet is made of 7 ships, you are shooting 7 missiles to 1 target.
If this target is flying alone, maybe you can hope in some hit.
But, if it is within a fleet, made of multiple ships, their point defences can cooperate and probably destroy all your missiles.
You certainly need much more firepower in your volley.
In the forum, some interesting designs begin to appear, so I suggest you to compare them and decide which one best fits your playstyle, or can be adapted to your tech level in the current game.
