When should you let your units circle freely while shooting?

The Salem can’t shoot backwards, and not all units have the same turret turn speed. My question therefore: what rule of thumb do you need to know when microing units in small skirmishes?

For example: in a T1 tank 1v1 (say Thaam vs Striker), does one faction have to be careful not to circle too much? Any units in particular (land or sea, T1/2/3/XP) where you should be careful not to turn too tightly?

Thanks for any tips.

Mantis have very slow turret turn rates so you should zig zag micro instead of circling

Think about if you get a big enough reward for getting a better trade by microing.
If you want I can show you on discord how all units can be microed

Typical units to be microed are:
Labs, Aurora, Intis, Asf, Acu, ASF and Navy.

Some questions can be hard to answer, but some are straight up logically obvious
Is it worth to try to dodge shots?

given that if you micro to much your unit may stop shooting (depending on the unit)
So:
IF you have sufficient micro and your dodginng does not hurt your macro
AND
If you micro unit in a way that does not reduce it's DPS
AND
If you can keep focus-firing unit that you want to kill
Then yes it is ALWAYS worth it to dodge shots, maybe there are other IFs that i didn't think about

But it looks to me that for example... if your tank is shooting enemy mex while getting shot by t2 pd and you have nothing else to do you can dodge t2 pd shots with your tank without any drawback

1. you will not lose DPS
2. since we stated that you have nothing esle to do, then it will not hurt your macro
3. your tank will keep shooting enemy mex as it it is only thing that is in range and also it was the desired thign to shoot at

However in real game situation, most of the time you will not be able to focusfire and dodge at the same time
(tho there was some talk about feature that would allow to set target on certain unit, but for now there is no such feature)

So ideally you would probably want to just dodge but only with units that are getting attacked, and with rest you use focusfire to kill enemy units one by one instead of damaging multiple units

But again that might not be possible to see wtich units are getting attacked and wtich are not so most of the time you just dodge with all units or focustfire with most of units while dodging with ones that are getting attacked the most or just pulling back damaged ones

also if opponent is focus-firing one of your units it is most of the time better do focus on dodging with that unit
you can kinda set-this up by yourself. E.G. when you attack walled t1 pd with 10 tanks you put 1 tank slightly forward while the rest are at the back, and when you enter a PD range you will know witch unit will be focusfired by PD so with that one unit you don't even go close to PD, you stay at the edge of enemy PD range and try to dodge as much as you can, so you fully sacrifice DPS of that tank to avoid most of DPS of t1 pd

Edit:
so all non-obvius cases are trade-offs, you can dodge some of your opponent DPS but lose some of your DPS or lose ability to focus-fire or while dodging it is harder to keep formation probably...

@treos said in When should you let your units circle freely while shooting?:

For example: in a T1 tank 1v1 (say Thaam vs Striker), does one faction have to be careful not to circle too much? Any units in particular (land or sea, T1/2/3/XP) where you should be careful not to turn too tightly?

Those tanks will not lose DPS if you dodge a lot, so you can turn around as much as needed.
But against thaam i am pretty sure that simply running in circles might not be ideal dodge pattern but maybe good enough

in 1v1 unit vs unit it would be best to give left-right turn commands synced with fire rate of enemy unit

also because projectile speed is constant relative to map and does not depend on the speed of the unit that shot the projectiles - you projectiles will always have the same speed so if unit is running away it will actually take more time for a projectile to reach that unit so if you are one who runs away it is easyer to dodge shots

Thats one of the reasons why it is good to get your unit behind enemy lines, then enemy is forced to chase your units and you can run away and dodge

Thaam also has better alpha damage, and that also gives it a small trick that it can do. For thaam it is better to shoot, and try to go outside of the enemy unit range and then go in again, as it is more likely that thaam will be reloading while outside of enemy unit range, so against mantis in 1v1 you can go into mantis range and shoot ones when mantis maybe gonna shoot 1-3 times and you go out of mantis range and in again and you will get big dps advantage

there also can be some advanced tricks... like when your oppoent is doing circle dodge his turret turnspeed rate to one side will be different than to the other (because whole unit is rotating and turret rotation to one side will need to counteract that unit rotation) and maybe if you run round it towards the correct side it may cause unit to not shoot for some time, i usually notice that for ACUs but anyway swtiching from circle dodge to zig-zag dodge solves this problem

Thanks Zelda, Explosive and Zlo. Explosive I will take you up in that next time I see you online. And Zlo, projectile speed being relative to map not unit - that’s some impressive advanced class stuff. Perhaps one day I’ll also consider getting my PhD in FaF.