What's the low down with auto turrets?

[wildbill]

I've been playing almost daily for a couple of months now and I still don't quite understand auto turrets. There's a sub-station version and a block you add to your ship version. What's the difference? Why use them? What do they do?

[aY227]

You can assign turrets as auto-turrets in ship panel - select them and right click.
Than they well... fire automatically - that's it - super useful.

Block you are talking about (I think) is a turret design one - totally different thing - you can design look of turret and any weapon will look like that - just cosmetics.

[General Runtime]

Remember to assign the auto turrets to a separate weapon group hotkey for best results. You do this in the ship's info page by mousing over the weapon and pressing a number

I tend to have 5 or more hotkey groups: 1. manually aimed weapons, I can turn them off when mining or salvaging. 2. mining or salvage lasers, I turn them off in combat. 3. one or more torpedo tube groups, sometimes split into anti-shield and anti-hull types. 4. autoturrets set to auto fire. 5. CIWS/PDCs set to defensive fire

[Firefrye]

More info on turrets set to auto-fire:
All turrets in a single "group" (single assigned number) will attempt to aim at the same target. Defensive turrets may not follow this rule? (I kind of forget this detail and haven't checked myself) This has a few consequences
- the AI will use the turret with the shortest range to choose a target AND decide how an AI pilot will fly
- the AI will not attempt to compensate for different projectile types (hit scan / projectile / rockets)
- The AI will not wait for turrets with slower rotational speeds to "catch up" and fire before switching targets
- if the weapons do not share line of sight, then some number of your turrets will simply not fire if the current target is out of view (they won't pick a different target)

Therefore if you want the best performance:
- Group turrets by line of sight, projectile types, and possibly even by "slot size" which often correlates to rotational/aiming speed
- Give your AI pilots turrets with similar ranges to make sure they fly in a slightly more logical manner (don't give chain guns to a ship you want to be using railguns, rockets, or cannons... the stupid AI will fly into "melee range" for the chains. they might do it anyway, but at least you can help them in some way)

[rickcarson]

I'm a prolific user of auto turrets and I don't think this:

> - if the weapons do not share line of sight, then some number of your turrets will simply not fire if the current target is out of view (they won't pick a different target)

Is true at all.

I happily put all my main weapons (evenly distributed over the ship) on firegroup 1, set it to auto and then it goes full disco-ball in combat, taking on all comers.

Similarly my PD on opposite sides of the ship (but on the same group) can shoot at multiple targets at the same time even though they're all on the same weapon group.

I _could_ be wrong, stranger things have happened.

[M.Red]

used auto turrets most of the time - especially for harvesting
just care about flying while the turrets do the rest - gotta love it

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3054639481

[wildbill]

Thanks for the info, everyone. I'm going to play around with it.