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[bobucles]

But you don't need a billion weapon groups to do that. You just need one, "Fire at will". As long as independent weapons follow the rules you expect them to, they'll perform their appropriate behavior accordingly. Low efficiency guns will shut down at high flux, PD will stay active until the last, and anti shields will target anti shields etc.

Weapon groupings are best off a player convenience so that you don't need to scroll through a heap of menus to fire your own guns.

[TaLaR]

Independent weapons don't follow any complex rules. Autofire behaviour is just to shoot any available targets, without any prioritization or flux management.
Making it too smart (without extensive configuration) can backfire by making player unable to control what happens.

[SCC]

I wouldn't mind having 10 weapon groups for myself, considering that capital ship gameplay isn't about choosing which weapons to fire and where, but to choose which weapon groups are firing and when. For AI, I wouldn't mind it having every weapon in its own weapon group, with such functionality unavailable to the player, just so it can handle flux hog guns better.

Autofire behaviour is just to shoot any available targets, without any prioritization

This depends on the weapon in question. Some might shoot ships first, fighters second, some might do it the other way, some also target missiles if there's nothing else, and point defence guns go after missiles first, fighters second, ships third.

[intrinsic_parity]

I'm pretty sure auto fire also prioritizes the ship you have targeted.

[TaLaR]

Right, there is this much.
But in-depth smart prioritization would also filter missiles by type/viability/etc: Sabot is obviously more important than a Swarmer, shooting tanky Squalls only makes sense if you actually have enough combined damage output to destroy it before impact, etc.

[Sinigr]

Agree, currently i have 4 groups for paragon, and one free for autofireing other groups, i need at least 6.
1 for rotating large mounts,
2 for kinetics,
3 for large hardpoints,
4 for frontal medium energy,
5 for pd...
If player use missiles then 6 for missiles,
7th if player use different missiles then one more to separate them,
If player use rear medium mounts then for it we need 8-th group...
And one more to free all groups for autofireing ar some other option to make it so.

Perfectly there should be 10 groups and one key to turn them all free for autofireing.

[DatonKallandor]

If players need to set 10 different weapon groups to make a ship's autofire AI behave properly the problem isn't that we only have 5 weapon groups.....

[Sinigr]

If players need to set 10 different weapon groups to make a ship's autofire AI behave properly the problem isn't that we only have 5 weapon groups.....

10 groups is not for AI, i explained why 10 (game of limits, limited skills, limited ships in fleet, limited peak permormance, limited deployment, limited officer count, limited industry count, limited weapon groups, and so no  ). For me is enough 6 groups. My Ai needs just 5 groups.

[bobucles]

game of limits, limited skills, limited ships in fleet, limited peak permormance, limited deployment, limited officer count, limited industry count, limited weapon groups,

I don't even want to ask, but I will anyway. What the heck does the number of ships in your fleet have to do with weapon groups? How do ANY of these things involve weapon groups whatsoever? I don't even.

The game engine does not support the player having direct control of more than one weapon group at a time. In general a player does not use a weapon group to aim their PD, or take random pot shots with any random turret at any time. That is dumb and it is dumb to even ask for it. The player sticks their attention between 2 major classes of player weapons: Main guns and consumables(missiles).  All the rest of the weapons do whatever, and there is no need (nor should there be any need) of player intervention on them. As long as the other guns are utilized according to fairly appropriate AI rules, they'll do a good job.

Players may have certain tendencies towards conservative or aggressive firing schemes. That type of interface doesn't really have anything to do with weapon groups, it is more about allocating your ship resources. For example a conservative ship should always use PD, but not pressure its own flux with excessive weapon fire. An aggressive ship should push its flux all the way to the edge in pursuit of a kill. Steady ships should try to use their best weapons for a situation. Things like that don't really necessitate a million weapon groups, they're just taking the various flavors of captain and creating useful schemes to control the player's own ship. So if you want your ship to cool down, you set weapons to conservative and they'll only worry about defense. Stuff like that.

[Sinigr]

game of limits, limited skills, limited ships in fleet, limited peak permormance, limited deployment, limited officer count, limited industry count, limited weapon groups,

I don't even want to ask, but I will anyway. What the heck does the number of ships in your fleet have to do with weapon groups? How do ANY of these things involve weapon groups whatsoever? I don't even.

The game engine does not support the player having direct control of more than one weapon group at a time. In general a player does not use a weapon group to aim their PD, or take random pot shots with any random turret at any time. That is dumb and it is dumb to even ask for it. The player sticks their attention between 2 major classes of player weapons: Main guns and consumables(missiles).  All the rest of the weapons do whatever, and there is no need (nor should there be any need) of player intervention on them. As long as the other guns are utilized according to fairly appropriate AI rules, they'll do a good job.

Players may have certain tendencies towards conservative or aggressive firing schemes. That type of interface doesn't really have anything to do with weapon groups, it is more about allocating your ship resources. For example a conservative ship should always use PD, but not pressure its own flux with excessive weapon fire. An aggressive ship should push its flux all the way to the edge in pursuit of a kill. Steady ships should try to use their best weapons for a situation. Things like that don't really necessitate a million weapon groups, they're just taking the various flavors of captain and creating useful schemes to control the player's own ship. So if you want your ship to cool down, you set weapons to conservative and they'll only worry about defense. Stuff like that.

I need microcontrol of my weapons, i need separate 2 plasmas, 2 needlers, 2 hils, 2 pulse lasers and pd, and 6-th group i need to turn all my weapons in autofireing mode, but i do not need to turn them all at one time, sometimes i need just plasmas or hils, or pulses, now i have pulses in group with pd, and 5-th group i use to turn autofire to all my weapons. Do not understand?

[Thaago]

If players need to set 10 different weapon groups to make a ship's autofire AI behave properly the problem isn't that we only have 5 weapon groups.....

This is unfortunately rather true... while the game's AI is extremely good in general, flux management is still a weak point. I could get by with very few weapon groups, but by making sure that the low flux groups are the efficient ones I can significantly boost performance.

[Sinigr]

If players need to set 10 different weapon groups to make a ship's autofire AI behave properly the problem isn't that we only have 5 weapon groups.....

while the game's AI is extremely good in general

good AI, eah, say it to that paragon, it can smash that onslaught like a paper box, but it does not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=171I9ZnMAbI&t=0s

[Thaago]

That clip is completely meaningless to AI behavior. What are you even trying to show?

Its a player piloting with an OP boosted Onslaught specifically built to apply hard flux at max range, against the default Paragon that has no hard flux at that range. Paragons have speed 30 while the Onslaught has speed 25 - the only way its going to meaningfully catch up is if it uses a zero flux boost with shields down to get into range. That is VERY specific behavior that is almost always suicidal, and the kind of judgement call that I don't really want AI ships to make, because when they get it wrong they will be suiciding a ship shields down into the enemy.

[TrashMan]

There's still something I'm not getting here. Does a weapon NEED to have its own weapon group to have independent tracking? Because as it stands, there's little reason you'd ever need precise control over your "fire at will" turret mounts. If anything, an excessive amount of turret groupings will only clutter the interface and get in the way of more essential high level decisions.

This can be fixed by COLLAPSING the weapon groups. Basically, only show the weapon data and ammo of the currently active weapon group. This way you can fit a lot more weapon groups without any extra space, and you improve the UI clutter issue by removing the display of unnecessary data

[Plantissue]

UI-wise I don't see a major problem with an additional 5 control groups appearing on the right of where the control groups are currently, other than clutter, but it is clutter that you want.. Though it might look a bit odd to have a full 1-5 weapon group on the left and a single weapon group 6 jutting out to the right of weapon group 1 with empty space beneath it.