Targeting

[ViperAssassin26]

How come whenever I target the enemy my infantry and vehicles never attack the intended target?

[MOS:96B2P]

1 hour ago, ViperAssassin26 said:

How come whenever I target the enemy my infantry and vehicles never attack the intended target?

If you give one of your fire teams or vehicles a Target order on an enemy unit, your unit will shoot at the enemy unit.  There can be some exceptions.  Some exceptions I can think of might be:

Your unit loses line of fire (LOF) to the enemy unit.

Your unit stops to re-load. 

Your unit is out of ammo.

Your unit's AI believes there is a higher priority target it needs to shoot at first. 

Your unit is suppressed / pinned.  

And this is the exception I get on occasion:  I give a vehicle a Target order.  During the turn it cycles thru arming and firing (in the status box bottom left corner of the screen) but it never shoots.  This occasionally happens with marginal LOS/LOF. The most likely cause is that the gunner has Line of Sight (LOS) to the target but the gun does not have Line of Fire (LOF). The target line shows LOS, not LOF, so it is sometimes possible to Target something the vehicle / unit cannot actually shoot at.

That's about all I can think of off hand.  If my answer doesn't seem to fit what you are seeing maybe describe the problem more in detail for us.   

Edited November 9, 2018 by MOS:96B2P

[ViperAssassin26]

yea I get what you're saying. It does however allow me to fire in the immediate vicinity and that's how I kill the enemy. like a group of infantry in a building, I use a Bradley and target the closest spot on the building and target that

[domfluff]

The battlefield is divided into 8m x 8m Action Spots. If you use the Target command, without selecting a visible enemy unit, it'll target the centre of the nearest action spot to where you click, which can be several metres away from where you expect. It'll fire on that general area for the full minute.

If you target the unit (assuming you can see it), it'll fire on the unit, until it loses sight of them.

The unit itself can override both of these if it wants or needs to - if it sees a more appropriate or threatening target.

[Kinophile]

Dunno about override. Time as Nd again I've seen AFVs targeting (set by me) a building or etc who get nailed by a very visible (ie dotted and fully id's by the  AFV). It's maddening. The hostile AFB is more dangerous than the building but I've never seen the AFV break manual targeting. 

[domfluff]

Like a lot of things, it's a behaviour with some tweaking - I've definitely seen them do it, but not always as fast as I'd like. 

 

Fundamentally though, if you order a unit to do something specific, I think it's reasonable that they should try to do that above anything else.

 

An improvement might be a "hunt-like" toggle, which could apply to several orders - i.e., "cancel any existing orders when contact is made".