Weird targeting behavior
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I think it happened with recent changes to targeting system. Now, as far as i know, units will lock on whatever unit entered their weapon's range (even acu) no matter what. After that (target is destroyed or out of range) their target behavior is normal. As shown in this replay (#17336961) it is quite important for early raiding and maybe will affect ACU on ACU fights.
- Tank raiding engi near mex. Mex enters tank's range first and now thaam will focus this mex until it dies or no longer in range. Direct attack or retargeting hotkeys works to change target from mex to engie tho.
- Same story but with ACU. If ACU is exposed like this then it will be targeted until dead or exit range of unit.
Is it known behavior? Could we fix it?
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I think this was the last patch setting the "always_retarget" option to false on almost all units. So once they have a target, they will no longer change it until it's destroyed. So This could of course be fixed by reverting that change.
Maybe they'll change the always_retarget behavior back to some degree, as i have seen more people complain about this. -
@Jip any input on this? It seems like an issue if the main t1 tank gets stuck shooting mexes.
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This is a natural consequence of units sticking to their targets, unless you tell them to retarget.
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But you can not tell them to automatically retarget right?
So you would need to babysit your raiders an manually attack the engineers -
Would enabling/disabling snipe mode cause them to retarget, and/or could it be used for that functionality? So if you wanted your units to retarget you could bind the snipe key to a hotkey, press it twice, and it'd lead to your units refreshing their targets.
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@nex Look up advanced target priorities. There you can set your units to target engies first for you raiding parties, have your tanks focus on ACU alone or have your BS aim at enemy BS first among some of the settings.
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@e33144211332424 i know that one, but even setting the target priority to engi doesn't prevent your tank from targeting the mex.
And once your tank sees a mex it will shoot at it, till it dies. even if 1 sec later the engi behind it gets into range.
So basically smaller raid parties, that don't expect drawn out fights will, ignore whatever target priority you set and simply shoot whatever is in range first.
You can modify the mod, to create exclusive priorities tho, which will prevent your tank from ever targeting anything that's not an engi. But that has it's own obvious drawbacks.
tl;dr: The mod only works if at the time anything is in range, the preferred target is also in range. If not the setting is irrelevant. -
@nex said in Weird targeting behavior:
But you can not tell them to automatically retarget right?
You can not - when you switch target priorities then the weapons are reset once. But that requires manual attention.
If this is undesired in general, e.g. that land units should just retarget then I'm fine with that too. But it comes at a cost for late game where the game can slow down more during large land fights. Again - I'm fine with that tradeoff as long as we all understand the pros and cons.
Note that any 'switching' of turning the automatic checking behavior on / off is not possible. A given weapon either always checks, or only checks when it has found no targets.
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@Jip #17350210 in this replay near the end my ilshavoh shot opponent's acu despite the fact that other units were present in range. Do we really want to keep this behavior?
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Do we really want to keep this behavior?
We're all here to make FAF better, we all have a say in it. If we deem that this is not worth the performance then we (partially) revert these changes again. Which again - is fine by me.
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I believe the biggest performance impact is with huge late stage ASF battles. T1 land spam never stuck me as causing any significant performance issues (except for shitty pathfinding) and especially doesn't warrant changing unmicroed raiding outcomes so fundamentally. I think most people would be happy reverting this for land units.
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To try and comply to the feedback I hear in bits and pieces we are reverting the majority of the changes, allowing all direct fire weapons to recheck their targets as usual. That is essentially any weapon with a low arc. See also:
With that, this topic can be closed.
