Horrible battle controls

[Soteria]

Am I missing something, or are ships extremely difficult to control in battles? A few examples:

Auto-fire comes enables itself when you come in range. I've tried turning it off before getting close so I can target specific ships, but my ships auto-fire always turns back on.

Auto-fire is awful. If I have torpedoes on a ship, and have it turn toward a ship I want it to target, it will immediately fire the entire load at the first target that it sees, even if that's a frigate. And sometimes the torpedoes are fired wildly off target if you happen to be turning while they're launching.

Ships don't necessarily attack the target you specify. I had a formation of about a dozen destroyers whose fire I wanted to focus on an enemy titan. When I told them to attack the titan, they split their fire between two different ships.

Ships don't go where you tell them. I'll try clicking on the map where I want a ship to go, and the movement indicator shows it trying to go somewhere else entirely, sometimes as much as 90 degrees off my intended course.

Ship selection doesn't work like I'd hope. Again, maybe I just don't know what I'm doing, but I can't see an easy way to select, say, all of my frigates in a battle. And it seems like lassoing is the only way to select a ship, when sometimes I want to use ctrl+click to grab multiple ships.

Is there any way to deal with these issues? In a lot of ways this game is a lot of fun, but when you get into a large battle, which should be the highlight of a campaign, sometimes it's just really frustrating.

[Davor]

Sadly this was never fixed or I should say fleshed out more. I am not sure if this will help but what settings do you have combat on? While I can't remember how it works, you could have the option on for where the AI does the choices.

Even with this off, I find combat lacking and hard to do. Mind you I love it during huge battles, but smaller battles would love more control. First check the settings you have for combat. It might help, it might not.

[Soteria]

Yeah, I set it to full control. I was really hoping someone would tell me that I'm just a n00b. I did discover that you can use shift select multiple ships.

But as another example--I attacked a star system with my doomstar which had defenses. During the initial pause, I disabled autoattack and attacked the star base with my torpedoes and the other two structures with my beam weapons. As soon as I unpaused it, my ship unloaded every last weapon at the enemy missile platform. :/

[prokolyo]

The combat controls are very extremely poorly documented. I guess if everybody shares stuff that works GUARANTEED, maybe some type of a guide can be compiled. Here are several things that I have discovered.

1. To attack a PARTICULAR enemy ship, select your ship (left-click), press "Z" and left-click on the enemy ship. It does NOT work with groups, squads, etc. Only with a single ship. Or maybe it works with a group of ships that are EXACTLY the same, make and model :)

2. Another type of attack is to select your ship (this works with groups of different ships also) and right-click on the enemy target. I think in this case though your ships could pick up different targets while they move to attack (if different targets become available). For #1 it GUARANTEED attacks the enemy ship that is specified.

3. Something I just discovered - I have a ship with 10 missiles, 5 in 2 slots. Got attacked by a group of ships. It turns out that you can left-click on each slot with missiles and the left-click on an enemy ship to attack them with that slot. So basically each weapon slot can attack different enemy ship.

4. In the case of #2, if you attack an enemy group of ships (same make and model type of group), I think it attacks them one by one, until all are destroyed. When you do this attack, the cursor blinks on all enemy ships from the group.

5. MOD GOD Spud Dastardly :) has compiled this guide:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1467526081
The part about tactical combat sheds some light on the combat controls as well.

6. Also, the game manual has a chapter on tactical combat (called Take Command Battle). The last manual should be somewhere in the game folders but not sure where exactly.

I hope others can add to this too so the new (and not so new) players can finally figure this stupid combat mess already...

[marckb]

Originally posted by Soteria:

…I've tried turning it off before getting close so I can target specific ships, but my ships auto-fire always turns back on …Auto-fire is awful.

Is this post out of date? Because I don't see any way to even try to disable auto-fire, and it IS awful! It will unload all your missiles right into asteroids if the enemy happens to be on the other side. (This has the side effect of rendering all "terrain" an impedance rather than a tactical consideration.)

[Soteria]

Originally posted by marckb:

Originally posted by Soteria:

…I've tried turning it off before getting close so I can target specific ships, but my ships auto-fire always turns back on …Auto-fire is awful.

Is this post out of date? Because I don't see any way to even try to disable auto-fire, and it IS awful! It will unload all your missiles right into asteroids if the enemy happens to be on the other side. (This has the side effect of rendering all "terrain" an impedance rather than a tactical consideration.)

Maybe? I posted that about a year ago, it's possible they've updated things somewhat.

[Gez]

The only updates the game is getting are from WhatIsSol's unofficial patch.

[Davor]

Originally posted by marckb:

Originally posted by Soteria:

…I've tried turning it off before getting close so I can target specific ships, but my ships auto-fire always turns back on …Auto-fire is awful.

Is this post out of date? Because I don't see any way to even try to disable auto-fire, and it IS awful! It will unload all your missiles right into asteroids if the enemy happens to be on the other side. (This has the side effect of rendering all "terrain" an impedance rather than a tactical consideration.)

Been a while since I played. Have you tried right clicking or is it left clicking on the spinning circles. When you do click on it (sorry can't remember right or left) it should turn off auto fire.

I can't remember if it's single ship you have to click or just a group of them. Hope this helps.

[vaaish]

Tactical combat controls are still pretty flawed but Sol has improved them.

Autofire:
This is impossible to disable permanently. You can right click on the weapon to disable it, but this will only last until you fire the weapon. Autofire resumes until you right click to disable. This makes disabling it useless after you have more than three ships or so.

Movement:
So movement is all kinds of weird. Mostly it works, but you should note that the bounding boxes for ships aren't always sized well. If you set a movement point too close to another ship, your ships will float around and turn oddly trying to get to a waypoint that's impossible to complete.

Ship facing is also weird at times with the ships not facing the direction of travel.
There's sometimes a weird bug with the waypoint indicators that offsets them from where you click. The ships will still go where you clicked, just the graphics for the lines are messed up.