Target priority

Who was in charge of the priority targeting changes, and how do you justify the imbalance targeting priority mods make on a com on com situation. Turning to blap a random engi is completely ridiculous when going for a kill.

Have you tried "snipe mode"? (put your mouse over the attack button and right-click it, there will be a red border around the attack button. you can also bind a hotkey to snipe mode)

If your ACU is on "snipe mode," and an enemy ACU is within range, your ACU should not waste shots on random engies.

Do you have a replay where you were on "snipe mode" and your ACU shot an engie anyway?

Does that work with units or com only? Will have to test. Installed a mod to do basically this with a little more clear of a UI.

"Does that work with units or com only?"

Yes and no.

Every unit can turn on "snipe mode." But snipe mode acts differently for different units.

The behavior of a unit on "snipe mode" is different because it completely changes the target priorities. They will target certain things before other things, like they will target a nuke launcher before they target an SMD before they target a pgen before they target a tank. It's like they attack the most valuable targets first, instead of trying to fight with enemy units.

CERTAIN types of units (I will list them) are allowed to have ACU target priority, meaning that when they are on snipe mode they will shoot the ACU before they shoot anything else.

OTHER types of units are NOT allowed to have ACU target priority. If you put them on snipe mode, their behavior changes, but they WON'T prioritize the ACU above shooting other stuff. They will still target nuke launchers but they won't prioritize the ACU.

Units that will prioritize the ACU while snipe mode is turned on: Experimentals, ACUs, LABs, gunships, fighter/bombers, and maybe sniper bots.

You can also select "ACU" target priority from the target priorities mod menu. If you do that, units that are ALLOWED to prioritize the ACU will. But units that are not "allowed" to prioritize the ACU will not prioritize the ACU. This is different from snipe mode because I think it only affects whether or not the unit prioritizes the ACU. It doesn't make the unit prioritize a t3 pgen before an enemy tank.

One weird thing about this is that you can select LABs and turn on snipe mode BEFORE you put them into a transport, then when the transport is in flight, the LABs will target the enemy ACU. If you're going for a ghetto gunship snipe, you should probably turn on snipe mode before loading the transport...

And this isn't information made available in the game UI why exactly?

From your later post it suonds like the options you are suggesting are part of the mod itself , and not in the base game?

I also agree with above, default priority for OC should be on the selected attack unit not on some random engi.

@arma473 there is now more units having ability to target ACU with snipe mod : https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/3072
i'm not sure if i listed every unit there

@Psions said in Target priority:

And this isn't information made available in the game UI why exactly?

From your later post it suonds like the options you are suggesting are part of the mod itself , and not in the base game?

I also agree with above, default priority for OC should be on the selected attack unit not on some random engi.

The original post didn't say whether it was a regular shot, or an OC, that went against the engineer. If you're not on snipe mode, and you have auto-OC on, I think the ACU looks for the "best" target for an OC, which could be a clump of units, rather than the one you are shooting at. If the ACU is on an attack order (told to attack a single target), I believe all shots, including all auto-OCs, go into that target until it stops being in range of the ACU.

Why isn't this described better in the UI? The target priorities updates have been going on for more than a year now, but it's still a relatively new thing. And it's pretty complicated to try to explain (even though it's obviously very important). It would be a lot more simple if every unit was allowed to target an ACU, but a lot of people complained about that (it made it too easy to kill an ACU, even if it had units protecting it)

Is snipe mode available if you don't have the target priority mod?

Yes, it is. Has been patched in for quite a while, too.

Is it just me, or is unit prioritization completely off since the last patch? Cruisers shoot at anything except things that damage them.

I consider it to be so bad that I would like to revert. Is there any way to revert the FAF client to an older version?

FAF client and FAF game/balance patches are not really connected. You can always get an older patch by making a mod that contains the older changes for yourself. Should be possible by going thru the faf lua github.

@ExituS Hello you can make a github issue about it here : https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues

what you mean is that cruiser don't target naval unit in priotiry ?

If by things that don't damage them you mean other ships, then setting 'priority: units' should do the trick. Although usually, its much more practical to have cruisers target stationary things like mexes and factories because most ships will be moved away long before missiles hit.

edit: assign a hotkey to make this more convenient.

Nope, they neglect to shoot at units and buildings all together. But they love shooting low priority stuff.

The day before yesterday I experienced an enemy ACU which my static tier 2 defences didn't shoot at at all, except when I issued the command manually. And the awesome trick with the engy target swtich of my ACU as mentioned before I also experienced.

I would like to understand this. Am I doing something wrong or missing something? I mean, these problems should be obvious to everyone, at least I would think.

Can you post some actual proof of what you are talking about? A replay or a video. Basically impossible to indentify what really happened from what you describe.