Dear all,
2 tips today!
1)
Broken pieces from dead ships
Dead ships - when they break into pieces, can temporarily be a bullet sponge for others to escape enemy fire. While this is true, the broken pieces can also be deflected by indirect fire; you can't target the broken pieces but you can try to shoot through them.
This was done to counter-balance the bullet sponge effect where dead ships have the ability to absorb more damage than its original hit points.
So... how can I deflect the dead ship pieces if I can't target them? Just keep firing at the target behind!
2)
Fighter Central AI
This may appear to be very subtle to most players but every player actually has a central command system which keeps track of how many of its own fighters are actually engaging a single enemy fighter.
The system currently allows a maximum of 5 friendly fighters vs 1 enemy fighter.
This means if you have 50 fighters and there's only 2-3 enemy fighters... only 15 of your fighters will engage these 3 enemy fighters at any one time.
This system was designed for 3 reasons:
1) Performance - if fighter swarms are allowed for enemy fighters, then there'll be a huge number of fire power discharged in the game with little purpose and is totally inefficient.
2) Prevent unrealistic battle experience where you'll see a single enemy fighter being swarmed by a huge number of fighters. That's unrealistic and in reality, chances of fratricide is very very high.
3) It diverts attention away even when precious fighters can be engaging other more high value targets such as enemy bombers. It can be frustrating if ALL the fighters only engage 1 target at a time.
This being said - it doesn't apply to ships and structures. Fighters can by all means swarm an enemy ship or structure. The fighter central command doesn't apply in this scenario.
So - that's the reason why your fighters aren't doing silly things just when you might need them the most attacking other enemy bombers or fighters attacking your capital ships.
Conclusion
There're many such little gems hidden in the game - not on purpose - but they're just harder to observe. Will share more of such information next week!
Regards,
Jeremy