Targeting

Concept · Game mechanic

Armadas pick a random living ship for every weapon volley; every other ship fires at the hull class it beats in the combat triangle, lowest power first. A volley never changes target, so shots after a kill are wasted.

When a fight has several ships on a side, each attacking weapon has to pick one of them. Ships choose in one of two ways.

An armada — group, solo, outpost or formation — picks a target for every volley: each time one of its weapons fires, it chooses one of the opposing ships still in the fight at random, each equally likely. The weapon’s next volley chooses again, so consecutive volleys of one weapon land on the same ship only by chance, and a destroyed ship is never chosen.

Every other ship — players, and hostiles that are not armadas, such as the ones that retaliate against an outpost — picks by the combat triangle: an Interceptor fires at a Battleship, a Battleship at an Explorer, an Explorer at an Interceptor. Among several ships of that class it takes the one with the lowest power; with none left, the lowest-power ship of the other combat classes. Ships outside the triangle, such as survey ships, are fired on last, only once no ship of the triangle is left. The pick does not change while that ship lives, so the ship stays on it until it is destroyed and then moves to the next.

Either way, a volley keeps the target it started on. If the target is destroyed partway through a volley, the remaining shots of that volley still land on the wreck and do nothing; they never move to another ship. A combat log records their damage against the destroyed ship. With a high-damage, many-shot weapon this overkill can be most of the volley.

A ship running Taunt (The Vindicator) takes the place of the random pick: while Taunt holds, every armada volley fires at the taunting ship. It holds for the first 20 rounds of the fight; after that the armada picks at random again. Taunt is aimed at armadas; it does not change a combat-triangle pick.

How many sub-rounds a round has is set by the ship with the most weapons on either side, so bringing a ship with more weapons into the fight lengthens every round. An ability that would carry over to the next round off the last weapon of a smaller ship then lands in the same round instead — see Officer Ability Activation.

An effect lands on the ship it names, whichever ship’s crew it came from. A status such as Morale stays on the ship that gained it; Hull Breach sits on the ship it was put on, so every ship firing at that ship reads it. A cut to an opponent’s stats — its damage, its defences, its shield mitigation, Apex Shred against its barrier — is a change to that opponent, so the whole fleet fights the weakened ship. Several ships bringing the same kind of cut stack it, once per ship, research included.