[Feature Suggestion] Custom Targeting Priorities

You mean like what type of enemy ships your different types of ships will attack?

If so, I agree, but I'd also like to point out that I think it already automatically has them target the enemy ships they'd be most effective against.

Being able to script priorities (whom to target, whom to repair first, whether or not to auto-join fleets, et al) for units w/o explicit orders would be convenient, although it'd have to stay pretty light-weight to be computationally reasonable for a real-time game.

Regarding the previous reply -- individual effectiveness isn't necessarily the same as in fleets.  e.g. if there's a fleet containing multiple Hoshikos, Kodiaks, a Kol, and a pair of Dunovs, it may make sense for ships that lack disabling functions to target the Hoshikos first, even if something gets bonuses against heavier ships, because the Hoshikos die relatively fast and each dead Hoshiko means less repair.   Similar might go for critical facilities; killing repair facilities or a nano-weapons jammer might be a high priority.

Completely agree, that will be most awesome.

When clicking on a ship, a taskbar button will allows us to choose whether this ship will target mostly repair ships/long range or missile ships/skirmishers/strongest capital ship/support capital ship/buildings. That will be just great and allow us to truly leave fleet battles in the hands of the AI and deal with other tasks elsewhere.

think youre right...  tough you can still manipulate ai targeting prioritie (specialy those of militia)

i.e. jump in capital ship first,  as soon as it ARRIVES (or on long path is hafway) jump your remaining fleet / ships   this way even kodiaks or lrf's wont turn around to target light frigs etc.

Shadow:  Thats basically exploiting crappy AI.  A human wont let you do that.

I'd also like to see something like this.  Since Sins seems to be able large spammy fleets, it would be nice to prioritze things without the hassle of clicking each individual ship.

Another thing i'd like to see is ship specific stances.  Something like an aggressive stance where ships charge the enemy fleet, and a defensive stance where ships match the speed of the slowest ship and stay together.  I'd also add an escort stance to some ships, like flaks and fighters*, where they circle or stay close to their fleet.

 *Fighters in escort would stay with bombers, and try to keep fighters off of them. while fighters in defense would circle their home ship and prioritize bombers.

A simple selection like this makes sense, and could be implemented simply by putting some of the game's internal AI workings/weights into text files (I recall homeworld 2 having priority settings for each ship type). Having to script AI would be just too much work for the vast majority of players The configurability would need to be assessed, because the community's gameplay changes and some options might just become useless. Flexibility game-per-game or between different battles could be a good thing, so in-game GUI might be the way to go. For those that mostly play AI, a static textfile would be enough.

@anticommie: AI is plain stupid, yes, but humans have some features that you might use against them. The Boiling Frog for instance: jump in the cap ship, and most players will keep hammering it even if you jump in a couple of hoshikos after the cap's shields are gone. The enemy won't notice they really are screwed until the first hoshikos have depleted their AM and you jump in 8 more, together with some other reinforcements...

I'd much rather see targetting priorities, multiple chat tabs, ship and fleet specific stances, and custom map auto-download than the Entrenchment expansion which I personally am not particularly interested in.

I just knew there was a custom map autodownload connection!