Combat system improvements: active pause, unlocked camera, targeting options and more.

[this_is_your_life]

EDIT: Post has been heavily edited.
For better combat experience and tactical possibilities, ability to slow down or stop time and better way to pick targets is required. That's why I suggest "active pause button" and ability to unlock camera. Although, I presume, the latter would be painful to do. If I recall correctly, certain mechanics are bound to field of view and, in that case, would require rewriting. What I want to could be achieved easier with better targeting controls. My suggestion:

• Toggle through hostile ships <R>
  
• Toggle through neutral and friendly ships <N>
  
• Toggle through disabled ships <some other key>
  
• <Shift> -> Changes toggling into selecting nearest ship of that kind. Remove that part about escorts from menu.
  
• Bonus: toggle through escorts.

As for "active pause", I've checked a "debug mode". Slowing the game to 10 frames per second works well. I'd love to suggest enabling it in normal mode, but there are a lots of issues with that.

Other thoughts:

• Now we have to hold <Tab> to shoot and "Automatic firing" in "Preferences..." to do that instead of us. How about <Tab> working like <Caps Lock>? Make <Tab> key toggle "Automatic firing". This way its gonna be "toggle to shoot" instead "hold to shoot". Imho much better.
  
• RMB on enemy ship to command focus fire; RMB on flagship to command "go there" instead "gather around" - weird.
  
• Moving your flagship using mouse, eh?
  
• Ability to command escorts to board disabled non-hostile ships (friendly ships, escorts). I think sometimes they do that on their own and it's good. I want to be able to command that when they don't.

Share your thoughts.

[Avior]

You'd think someone would have asked for this earlier...[github.com]

[this_is_your_life]

So I, um, slightly edited my post.

[w@ke_]

Hotkey suggestions are great. I thought there was – and then wished there was – already a cycle hostile/cycle friendly command. Cycle disabled would also be great. Although I'd suggest keeping a discrete fire key from a toggle auto-fire key.

I also love the mouse suggestions. Escorts to automatically board other escorts, but a command would also be nice since I believe they won't do that as long as there's hostiles around.

Tactical pause or slow could do a lot to strengthen the game's fleet management mechanics. Coupled with the zoom, you could actually give pretty nuanced command, which In turn might make the meta much more interesting. (Don't need a fleet of pure tanks when you have good control of your ships' behavior.) That would be a good thing, I imagine. Although it would also make the game much easier, and probably represents a lot of hurdles to the programmers (do not know coding, so cannot confirm). Definitely a good discussion to have.