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Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire?

Will Skyfall

Join Date 06/2007

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Prioritize Targets w/o Focus Fire?

How do I prioritize targets without getting smacked down by Shield Mitigation?

I've been trying to figure out how best to marshal my forces in the Battles That Matter--i.e. the battles where some degree of micromanagement might be crucial. Most recently, I've been trying to focus-fire on capships, or target the enemy's LRMs to seriously cut down on the enemy fleet's damage potential.

I understand, however, that shield mitigation is designed to minimize the effectiveness of focus firing. So it may be counter-productive, for example, to tell my entire fleet to target one LRM at a time.

But what about the following?

I have 10 . . . I dunno. Let's say "Flak Frigates." Or fighter squadrons.
My opponent has 10 LRMs.
I've enabled stacking in my empire tree, so both my force and my opponent's force take up one icon each.

I click my "10 Flak Frigates" icon on the empire tree, and right-click on my opponent's "10 LRM" icon. Do my 10 flak frigates split their fire among the closest available LRMs? Or do all 10 flak frigates focus-fire one of the LRMs, and then do something else when it eventually dies?

If the latter, can someone suggest an alternate way to quickly get large chunks of my force to selectively attack a subset of the enemy fleet; say, "All his LRMs"?

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As a bit of a side issue, am I right in thinking that the way shield mitigation works favours slow firing, heavy hit weapons over faster firing lighter weapons?

Yes. Looking at it at the extremes, a weapon that fires and hits for tiny damage every time will continuously follow the mitigation a curve: A weapon that kills a ship in a single hit won't suffer from ANY shield mitigation increase because the target will be dead in a single hit at the base value.

However, there are very, very few weapons that come anywhere close to this level of damage, and so what will happen is that the FIRST ship will fire and get the low value, but the NEXT ship that fires will get it at the VERY HIGH value produced by the first ship, and soforth, so the difference is likely immaterial. But if you CAN slay it instantly with something like the TEC Kol Gauss shot, that would certainly do the trick. Some of the weaker ships can be fragile enough to die to this in one or two hits.

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Actually, if you take the case where shield mitigation is maxed out, it's fairly easy to show that the slower firing weapon does have an advantage.
Target has shield mitigation at 60%. Compare two attackers, one fires every second for 25 damage, the other every 2 seconds for 50 damage. Both have an apparent dps of 25.
After a second the target's mitigation has declined to 58.75% which is when the faster firing weapon hits. After 2 seconds the shield mitigation has dropped to 57.5%, which is when the slower firing weapon hits. So the slower firing weapon will be firing through 57.5% mitigation while the faster firing weapon will be firing through 58.75% mitigation.
A small but definate advantage.

Of course in a real battle a target is going to be hit more than once a second, by lots of different ships. It might be worth baring in mind with the Koi rail gun though.

I guess it's an unintended consequence of the way shield mitigation works though. Slower firing weapons have a small and difficult to quantify adavantage over faster firing weapons with an apparently equal dps.

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I think the developers would be well founded in a decision to increase maximum mitigation by 5-15%, and reduce the rate at which it increases to 60-80%.

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Hmm... as a matter of fact You can change this factors by Yourself. You don't need a developers to this. You must change some text files only.

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Wouldn't my game then go out of sync while playing online?

What do you think of that change, in the context of it being patched into the official version? I think it'd be a good one.

The AI would have to be tweaked so ships would spread fire unless given a specific order to fire on a specific ship, but I'm sure the developers could accomplish this with ease.

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Well, this change will work only in single. But is better then nothing

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The primary irritance of shield mitigation is the fact that it entirely benefits the side that spends all of its time FLEEING CRAVENLY. How many times have you wished that your fighters would quite dancing around and just follow and shoot in a straight on berserk attack? How many times would you have been willing to order your ships to simply ram the enemy, accepting horrible damage just to KILL THEM DEAD DEAD DEAD?

Shield mitigation, is, of course, partly to blame for this, as the more you try to kill them, the harder it is to do damage to them, which effectively gives a ship far more hitpoints than it visibly appears, making it practically impossible to kill fleeing enemies.

I want an Interdictor Cruiser. Something that disables phase-jump-out in a radius around it, but is otherwise a pretty useless ship. Something to make them STAY THERE and DIE.

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I have 10 . . . I dunno. Let's say "Flak Frigates." Or fighter squadrons.
My opponent has 10 LRMs.
I've enabled stacking in my empire tree, so both my force and my opponent's force take up one icon each.

I click my "10 Flak Frigates" icon on the empire tree, and right-click on my opponent's "10 LRM" icon. Do my 10 flak frigates split their fire among the closest available LRMs? Or do all 10 flak frigates focus-fire one of the LRMs, and then do something else when it eventually dies?

I haven't gotten a consistent answer for this question; though the running theory seems to be "all 10 flak frigates focus-fire one of the LRMs." And since focus-firing, at least with large equivalent fleets, seems to bring you out slightly ahead, I don't think I mind this behavior.

So. If I want to kill all 10 LRMs, can I SHIFT+click the icon 10 times? Does a different frigate get queued up as the target each time? Or do I have to break the stack open and SHIFT+click each frigate in turn to get this behavior?

Also, I noticed an interesting thing with Alacer's tool.

* 8v8 Cobalts: FG wins.
* 8v9 Cobalts, where the superior force is spread-firing: the larger force (SG) wins, with about 4 ships surviving.

Does this hold with other group sizes / ship types?

It seems that while focus firing conveys an advantage in equivalent-number scenarios, it doesn't give you enough of an advantage to win if you're outnumbered.

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* 8v9 Cobalts, where the superior force is spread-firing: the larger force (SG) wins, with about 4 ships surviving.

It looks like focus-firing, at least with nothing but Cobalts, gives you something around a 6-7% effectiveness boost. 11 SG Cobalts will beat 10 FG Cobalts, but 16 FG Cobalts will beat 17 SG Cobalts.

Numbers, of course, will vary based on the units being considered (health, damage, regen.)

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8v8 Cobalts: FG wins.* 8v9 Cobalts, where the superior force is spread-firing: the larger force (SG) wins, with about 4 ships surviving.Does this hold with other group sizes / ship types?It seems that while focus firing conveys an advantage in equivalent-number scenarios, it doesn't give you enough of an advantage to win if you're outnumbered.

This isn't a convincing argument in favor of spread, though: How many of the 9 Cobalts would survive if they had focussed rather than spread? 5? 6? Maybe more?

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How many of the 9 Cobalts would survive if they had focussed rather than spread? 5? 6? Maybe more?

If you go with Alacer's tool for results:
* 4 Cobalts survive when spread-firing, with one badly damaged (1/8 health)
* 5 Cobalts survive when focus-firing, one badly damaged (1/8 health) and one at 1/3 health.

I don't believe it's a convincing argument in favor of spread; as a friend of mine points out, however, it's a convincing argument in favor of shield mitigation doing its job. If the role of shield mitigation is to reduce the effect of focus firing, the fact that a numerically inferior force usually cannot focus-fire its way to victory seems to bear that out. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't focus fire much more tactically effective in other RTSs?)

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How many of the 9 Cobalts would survive if they had focussed rather than spread? 5? 6? Maybe more?If you go with Alacer's tool for results: * 4 Cobalts survive when spread-firing, with one badly damaged (1/8 health)* 5 Cobalts survive when focus-firing, one badly damaged (1/8 health) and one at 1/3 health.I don't believe it's a convincing argument in favor of spread; as a friend of mine points out, however, it's a convincing argument in favor of shield mitigation doing its job. If the role of shield mitigation is to reduce the effect of focus firing, the fact that a numerically inferior force usually cannot focus-fire its way to victory seems to bear that out. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't focus fire much more tactically effective in other RTSs?)

Correct typically the best thing to do in a typical RTS (DUNE2--->WC3)is FF against the highest (Hit points/Damage per sec ) coefficient.

IE you hit the targets with the lowest hit points to damage potential ratio first so as to take as much bite out of the enemies army/fleet/ect in the shortest amount of time. That is why it is a waste to take out capital ships that are lower then level 3-4 from at TACTICAL point of view. The contribute very little DPS compared to the amount of hitpoints/health they have. In the time it takes you to kill 1 cap you could have killed ALOT of small ships that have more DPS potential. Strategically... thats another matter.

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If the role of shield mitigation is to reduce the effect of focus firing, the fact that a numerically inferior force usually cannot focus-fire its way to victory seems to bear that out. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't focus fire much more tactically effective in other RTSs?)

Question: What effect does a lack of shield mitigation have? How many Cobalts, 8F vs. 9S, are left if shield mitigation is ignored?

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Question: What effect does a lack of shield mitigation have? How many Cobalts, 8F vs. 9S, are left if shield mitigation is ignored?

Without Shield mitigation, There will likely be 1 to 2 of the focusers killed, while all 9 of the spread ships die.

My test showed that shield mitigation increase does not slow the rate of increase, so this linked tool may be incorrectly displaying the results. Maybe more tests should be made to see if my test was accurate or inaccurate.

Has anyone found an effective way to spread fire without micromanaging like crazy? Auto-assign, attack move, etc. all seem to cluster on only a few targets or just one single target.

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Sounds like mitigation would be better served by having a non-linear decay rate. Like a half-life. This way more DPS means a higher mitigation cap, rather than anything over 12.5 raising the cap to max.

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the AI should just always focus fire, problem solved.

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I hit the "S" button, for stop. The AI will usually spread out its fire after that. If not, I hold shift and sequentially focus fire (good for siege frigate raids).

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I like the "S" button.

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TC is right, the empire tree is totally crap and bugged out when it comes to targeting enemies. In the end, clicking on the main screen yourself is the way to go when it comes to micromanagement.

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If you blow up the capital ship first the little ones tend to run away. Hows that for a linear non linear paradigm of sheild mitigation.

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Mitigation doesn't care if the 250 points come from 1 unit or 10 units, thus focus fire does nothing to influence mitigation.

Irrelevant.

A better way of looking at it is that it encourages you to spread your DPS out.

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hmmmm...

very interesting information in this thread, some of you guys really have the number crunching down to a science.

Well my input to this thread is more of a hypothetical and not based on real numbers...but wouldn't the most effective solution be to focus fire but with sub groups of your fleet onto the enemies that take the most damage according to dmg/armor type...?

this way you are still removing DPS sooner from your enemies fleet (albeit slower than 'true' focus fire), but not receiving the harsher 'penalties' from mitigation granted by focus fire. Or has this been the focus fire model you guys have been using all along?!

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but wouldn't the most effective solution be to focus fire but with sub groups of your fleet onto the enemies that take the most damage according to dmg/armor type...?this way you are still removing DPS sooner from your enemies fleet (albeit slower than 'true' focus fire), but not receiving the harsher 'penalties' from mitigation granted by focus fire. Or has this been the focus fire model you guys have been using all along?!

This would work, IF mitigation had a higher threshold (or slower progression), but as it is mitigation maxes out very quickly, even with a few ships.

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Mitigation -does- need a higher threshold or slower progression, I agree heavily there.

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It's possible the mechanic was implemented late in development as a quick-fix means to prolong combat and help make it more manageable.

I think this is exactly what's going on, and it's a good thing, IMO. Being good at micro is part of winning the game. With mitigation in effect, it gives you time to survey a battle for a moment after it starts and get the right orders to your ships. It makes tactics matter. Without mitigation, command and control would be nearly impossible in the face of LRM or CA hordes.

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