Ship Combat

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While you can assign combat settings for each ship in the Individual Unit window F6, it's much easier to control the settings for an entire fleet via the Combat Overview window F8. You have to assign fire controls to beam weapons and missile launchers, missiles to launchers, and finally targets to fire controls. It's a good idea to do this before getting into a fight, because sometimes the first thing telling you that you're in trouble is a dozen incoming missiles and you want to have your automatic defenses ready for that.

Combat Assignment screen

Assigning Weapons

1. Select a ship. 2. Select a Fire Control. 3. If you have one or more ECCM systems, you can assign each to a fire control. 2. Select the weapon(s) you want it to control.

Setup Fire Control

Here you see a list of all fire controls on the selected ship.

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Here you choose the weapons on a ship to assign to the fire control.

There is no limit to how many weapons you can link to a fire control, but for point defense usually you want to keep a bunch of different fire controls for targeting separately.

Assign ECCM

Here is where you Assign an ECCM to a fire control.

What does ECCM do? It makes it easier for the fire control to lock on and target an incoming ship with ECM of course!

Change Point Defense Mode

Here you will see the options

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Area Defense- defends an area around the fleet with weapons that are long ranged.

Final Fire- fires at incoming ships/missiles at point blank range for large accuracy bonus.

Final Fire(self)- fires at incoming ships/missiles for the single ship selected only.

Combat Controls

Here are the Combat Controls for your ships.

Open/Cease Fire

Open Fire , allows your ships to begin firing at incoming missiles and ships, Cease fire tells them they cant. You can speed up ship battles by ceasing fire till you are completely in weapons range of the enemy then opening fire, Time increments slow down when your ships are able to open fire.

Shields Raise/Lower

Raise or Lower shields. Your shields dont automatically popup you need to make sure they are on or else you may quickly find yourself dead.

Active Sensors On/Off

Turn Active Sensors On and Off. Here you can select to turn your actives on and off, and you can use this tactically to draw an enemy toward a lone ship for a trap or anything youd like.

Current Fleet Open Fire/ Cease Fire/ Auto Fire

Here is your complete fleet control. Fleet open fire does the same as the single ship open fire above, except it effects the entire fleet in system, works well when you dont wish to go through and turn on open fire for the ships with range on enemy only. Ceasefire is the same.

Auto Fire is newly added and works only against other enemy ships, dont try to use it against Missiles. It very simply sets all weapons on all your ships to the first fire control and begins tracking the enemy on its own for targets. Simplifies large close quarters battles.

Copy Assignments

Copy's Assignments of weapons and fire control to other ships , task groups or the whole empire for this type of ship.

Copy Targets

Copy's Targets of Fire Control to other ships, fleets or the empire.

Fleet Combat

Also takes place in the Combat Assignment screen.