Dear Devs,
I was wondering if it's possible to create a new attack command feature for ships in this game similar to what is in Supreme Commander Forged Alliance does. What this attack command can do is > Select any ship units > Hold Shift > Right Click on Targets > use Shift + G. It is perhaps the most useful command function in Supreme Commander FA because it allows each individual unit you have selected in your army, to attack each unit target independently and separately of each other so your army is not focus firing on one unit but each of your units is firing on each independent target unit which has been selected. It saves having to manually select each ship in your fleet to focus on separate targets. And a fleet can consist of hundreds or thousands of ships, so it would take forever to manually select each ship to focus on a different target. If you're interested, please see this video because it explains how it works in Supreme Commander FA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSxP-UUe75I
This would be extremely useful because there are capital ship abilities within the fleet that works best targeting different targets independently instead of one target focused fire because it would be overkill. For example, the Advent's Radiance Battleship with Cleansing Brilliance ability does enough damage that you don't even need 12 of these battleships all using the same cleansing brilliance ability on one target if the enemy ship hitpoints is low enough that 3 or 4 cleansing brilliance can destroy an opposing capital ship. Anymore than that is overkill and would be wasted on one target. It could also be useful if you have thousands of bomber squadrons that can use Shift G to independently go after different targets.
Another useful feature of Shift G is the ability to dynamically control how units move to one particular spot which would be useful for situations like an TEC Akkan Battlecruiser can force foe and friend alike ships to cease fire with the Armistice ability, so it would be handy to use Shift G to direct your fleet of ships to one spot next to a TEC Akkan Battlecruiser, ready to wipe it out of existence when the Armistice ability expires.
It would perhaps be one of the most useful attack commands in Sins 2 I think. What do you think?
I'm not opposed to it, but generally it is better to focus fire, as long as you're not wasting damage. The sooner an enemy dies, the less DPS you take. The less DPS you take, the more of your units survive, which means their remaining units die faster, and things start to snowball.
I can't see too many uses for this, especially with the devs already looking into mitigating overkill AI damage.
There are a lot of uses for it. In Rebellion I have 650 bomber squadrons in my Advent Fleet, and it instantly zaps any capital or even Titan ship in one pass. Having 650 on one target no matter how beefy it is, is overkill so Shift G would be helpful. You could divide the target into 2, so 325 bombers on one target and 325 bombers on another, effectively increasing the kill ratio to 2 capital ships or titans per second.
I know that focus fire is useful in so many instances, and I focus fire each titan and capital ships in the fleet but there are equal amount of uses for Shift G. For example, corvettes would benefit from it because each corvette would focus on their own targets. As you know, corvettes have unique ability to give a debuff modifier to their target. For example, Advent Acolyte Corvettes debuff their target's 'chance to hit' by 5% which stacks up to 50% the longer you hit them. Imagine every single ship on the opposing fleet is targetted individually by corvettes and imagine every single one of those ships having a 50% chance to hit debuff. It's not practical to have 500 corvettes and manually select each target 500 times. That would take forever and too much effort.
Imagine what other ships with unique abilities or debuffs can benefit from Shift G attack command.
Why not shift right click to give the bombers a secondary target to kill after the first one? Sins II's damage ticks way faster than Sins I's did.
That said, I can see your suggestion being useful for spreading debuffs like you mention. I'm just not sure how many of those we'll actually have.
Thank you for the feedback, the video link didn't work on my end though, Ill try to surmise this for the team, but its also valuable to see what others think of the suggestion
Because
Because the shift right click means you have to take time to select half of your bombers first before initiating shift right click to attack secondary target. If you can select all of your units in your fleet or fleet tree, then Shift G means the game can then evenly calculate how many bombers to split up to attack two targets. So out of a 1000 bombers, 500 attacks one target and the other 500 bombers attack the other target.
If you want to simultaneously attack 4 targets, the shift G could calculate that 250 bombers attack each target separately. And so on. It's going to save you so much time, attention span and energy when you can be doing other actions at the same time. And honestly, 250 bombers is enough to kill cruisers and low level capital ships, so you can afford to split your 1000 bombers up. Atleast that's how I see it
Cheers @RammaStardock
A few quick thoughts:
I suppose a useful starting point for the dev team could be to lay out some scenarios when you'd want to focus fire and when you'd want to spread it out and why. There are already examples above, primarily when your fleet gets so large and its damage output so high that it can one-shit even the strongest enemies like high-level titans and starbases, which then wastes dmg. Anything else?
Also, this thread may cover some similar ideas: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire2.com/516678/page/1/#3877540
I think there's really only two reasons to do this.
As for ways to do it clearly, I think honestly, just a click-and drag box is probably the easiest way to do it. It's clear to the user, and it should be easy to implement. We don't need to overthink this.
I'd prefer to have target priorities for each ship type in a fleet outside of battle via toggles. Then when you selected your ship and focus fired you could choose between the whole fleet attacking the target or just the ones with that target type as first priority. I would not want my flak frigates attacking a titan when fighters were hitting my fleet.
Here is an example of some of the orders available in WARNO by Eugen Games. Which has very similar scaled battles to sins2. Now some engagement rules below determine what a unit should do if out of range while the enemy is in range. Some determine pathfinding, some what to do if an enemy is not armed. One at the bottom basically because WARNO uses ammunition trucks to resupply tells units not to waste missiles on empty transports. My favorite is telling a unit that has smoke that if it is engaged while being outranged that it should pop smoke and then also set defensive so it reverses out of range. You will note that you can save and apply to all units of that type on the field currently or save as default for future games. You never have to micro that tank to pop smoke and reverse again.
Now sure most of this does not apply to Sins2. But when it comes to an interface popup that lets you determine different ships behaviours in common situations and what targets they should engage first or formations to adopt before battle. I'd love something like this. One thing that cheeses me off in gravity wells when taking planets is that my ships will happily be almost dead and attacking the lowest threat like a garda frigate while the enemy missile boats kill them from behind the gardas or even unarmed siege vessels. Target priorities would fix that.
Yeah the forum doesn't seem to allow clicking on external links so you would have to copy the link and paste it in the browser which works.
I seem to recall, from one of the dev posts maybe or a detailed user report, that there is now a command on how much ships (fleets?) should focus fire on enemies. If so, that sounds like a good addition. When fleets get big enough, full focus fire could be overkill for even meaty targets, while early on or for smaller fleets, it seems crucial to make progress on whittling down incoming firepower. Also sounds very useful for certain abilities, e.g. buffs and debuffs from frigates and cruisers where not autocast anyway.
Overkill doesn't matter. Making sure something dies does. I have to manually que all orders one by one now. Use to when you right clicked a stack it would target each ship individually. Now they all fight their own target. This is extremely bad for corvettes. When fighting carriers you want to focus them 1 at a time. Currently they would rather try to kill all the ships at the same time. When microing and killing ships one at a time. Overkill can happen. However, generally the overkill damage lost is better than targeting a bunch of ships and never killing any becasue all your damage is spread across a fleet of ships.
There are two options for fire. Focus or Spread Fire. You can read the tooltip when you are hovering over a stack in the selection window to see how to choose which one you want. (see my picture below)
Read the bottom two lines of this tool tip. (I am hovering over a stack of skirmishers).
So first option makes all units attack individual units spread out each having their own target?The second option makes your units attack one of the units in a specific stack one at a time until none remain?
1. Spread fire isn't quite a full distribution due to emergent factors but roughly, yes.
2. Yes.
Thanks for your reply and showing the concrete example. Looks good to have that choice.
A few suggestions:
1. Maybe the two commands could be phrased more accurately/clearly? For instance:
Spread fire across units in this stack
Focus fire on one unit at time [in this stack]
2. Is it really right click and hold ALT? Normally, it would be Hold ALT and right click, no? That's of course assuming that the info card is for the targets rather than the player's own units.
3. Does or could this also apply to abilities? As in left click on the ability and then either RC or RC + ALT on target stack to spread or focus apply ability.
Moving slightly away from that specific command, I had another request. Left clicking multiple times on the players own stack starts selecting multiple individual units with the stack itself. That is, if i left click (or maybe shift + LC) that stack 5 times, I select 5 units within the stack. Could be useful when fleets are still smaller and one wants to quickly give different commands to parts of a stack, like splitting it off to a different fleet or just simply attack different specific targets. Maybe a bit niche but could help, if not too much trouble to implement.
There are a couple of issues with the strings I have noticed,
But left click and then hold alt is the most egregious.
There is no left click hold alt. Its alt - right click
Use ctrl-shift left click to 'unstack' your units of a given type. It is listed in the tooltip.
You knew what I meant.
The tooltip says right click hold alt.
But you agree it is alt right click.
I.e. the tooltip is wrong. And right click then hold alt does nothing.
lol, I can't imagine reading that and thinking it meant to right-click and then hold alt, but I suppose you're not technically wrong and it should be flipped for clarity.
But anyways... Saw this feature for the first time a couple days ago and absolutely love it. Super convenient to be able to focus fire a class of ship from the fleet overview (not sure of the use case for spread fire tbh 🤷♂️)
Only really issue I had was that it's very easy to accidentally send your fleet hunting across the system if a stray ship was split off from the fleet, but I can't think of a way around it so probably just something to live with and make us pay attention.
I've reworded all the lines to reflect the correct temporality. e.g. ALT and then Right Click.
I miss toggles. Why are key combinations better than pre-determined behaviour toggles that are one simple click that lasts forever?
When a decision like this is made it makes me think there is some future plan for console release which would suit this kind of control scheme but to the detriment of pc controls. Homeworld 3 made me think the same when the first thing you see is “press any button to continue”.
Company of heroes 3 of course just gave up on consoles. Once they left the big publisher they did not have the resources to support it and now can concentrate on PC, actually since the console was de focussed the game has become a bit more of a hit because the devs concentrated on making the responsiveness etc better.
I guess the other thing to ask is whether you have given the player latitude to fail with the new commands or are showing the player how to win instead. More granular contol would make the player think and be creative about target choices, hopefully setting out a plan through toggles (doctrine) before entering battle.
i need to try the new features though before judging. Downloaded the latest patch last night.
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