I'm not opposed to it, but generally it is better to focus fire, as long as you're not wasting damage. The sooner an enemy dies, the less DPS you take. The less DPS you take, the more of your units survive, which means their remaining units die faster, and things start to snowball.

I can't see too many uses for this, especially with the devs already looking into mitigating overkill AI damage.

Why not shift right click to give the bombers a secondary target to kill after the first one? Sins II's damage ticks way faster than Sins I's did.

That said, I can see your suggestion being useful for spreading debuffs like you mention. I'm just not sure how many of those we'll actually have.

Because

Because the shift right click means you have to take time to select half of your bombers first before initiating shift right click to attack secondary target. If you can select all of your units in your fleet or fleet tree, then Shift G means the game can then evenly calculate how many bombers to split up to attack two targets. So out of a 1000 bombers, 500 attacks one target and the other 500 bombers attack the other target.

If you want to simultaneously attack 4 targets, the shift G could calculate that 250 bombers attack each target separately. And so on. It's going to save you so much time, attention span and energy when you can be doing other actions at the same time. And honestly, 250 bombers is enough to kill cruisers and low level capital ships, so you can afford to split your 1000 bombers up. Atleast that's how I see it

A few quick thoughts:

• In sins 1 you could give a general attack order by selecting your full fleet and right-clicking on the enemy fleet in the empire tree. Not necessarily efficient if damage is spread out but good if, for whatever reason, you don't want to focus-fire too much.
• The original homeworld allowed targeting specific enemies through holding control and draging a targeting box. Fire would be spread across those targets.
• Or: the simplest solution from a user perspective but probably more complicated less transparent one: a setting for fleets or groups of ships how much they should focus fire. Could be %. Could be low/none - medium - high. The devil would be in the detail what each setting means and how to communicate that to the player. And maybe how to make sure the ship AI follows that. But doable in principle.

I suppose a useful starting point for the dev team could be to lay out some scenarios when you'd want to focus fire and when you'd want to spread it out and why. There are already examples above, primarily when your fleet gets so large and its damage output so high that it can one-shit even the strongest enemies like high-level titans and starbases, which then wastes dmg. Anything else?

Also, this thread may cover some similar ideas: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire2.com/516678/page/1/#3877540

I'd prefer to have target priorities for each ship type in a fleet outside of battle via toggles. Then when you selected your ship and focus fired you could choose between the whole fleet attacking the target or just the ones with that target type as first priority. I would not want my flak frigates attacking a titan when fighters were hitting my fleet.

Here is an example of some of the orders available in WARNO by Eugen Games. Which has very similar scaled battles to sins2. Now some engagement rules below determine what a unit should do if out of range while the enemy is in range. Some determine pathfinding, some what to do if an enemy is not armed. One at the bottom basically because WARNO uses ammunition trucks to resupply tells units not to waste missiles on empty transports. My favorite is telling a unit that has smoke that if it is engaged while being outranged that it should pop smoke and then also set defensive so it reverses out of range. You will note that you can save and apply to all units of that type on the field currently or save as default for future games. You never have to micro that tank to pop smoke and reverse again. 

Now sure most of this does not apply to Sins2. But when it comes to an interface popup that lets you determine different ships behaviours in common situations and what targets they should engage first or formations to adopt before battle. I'd love something like this. One thing that cheeses me off in gravity wells when taking planets is that my ships will happily be almost dead and attacking the lowest threat like a garda frigate while the enemy missile boats kill them from behind the gardas or even unarmed siege vessels. Target priorities would fix that. 

I seem to recall, from one of the dev posts maybe or a detailed user report, that there is now a command on how much ships (fleets?) should focus fire on enemies. If so, that sounds like a good addition. When fleets get big enough, full focus fire could be overkill for even meaty targets, while early on or for smaller fleets, it seems crucial to make progress on whittling down incoming firepower. Also sounds very useful for certain abilities, e.g. buffs and debuffs from frigates and cruisers where not autocast anyway.

There are two options for fire. Focus or Spread Fire. You can read the tooltip when you are hovering over a stack in the selection window to see how to choose which one you want. (see my picture below)

So first option makes all units attack individual units spread out each having their own target?
The second option makes your units attack one of the units in a specific stack one at a time until none remain?

Quoting Blair Fraser,

reply 14

Read the bottom two lines of this tool tip. (I am hovering over a stack of skirmishers).

Thanks for your reply and showing the concrete example. Looks good to have that choice.

A few suggestions:

1. Maybe the two commands could be phrased more accurately/clearly? For instance:

Spread fire across units in this stack

Focus fire on one unit at time [in this stack]

2. Is it really right click and hold ALT? Normally, it would be Hold ALT and right click, no? That's of course assuming that the info card is for the targets rather than the player's own units.

3. Does or could this also apply to abilities? As in left click on the ability and then either RC or RC + ALT on target stack to spread or focus apply ability.

Moving slightly away from that specific command, I had another request. Left clicking multiple times on the players own stack starts selecting multiple individual units with the stack itself. That is, if i left click (or maybe shift + LC) that stack 5 times, I select 5 units within the stack. Could be useful when fleets are still smaller and one wants to quickly give different commands to parts of a stack, like splitting it off to a different fleet or just simply attack different specific targets. Maybe a bit niche but could help, if not too much trouble to implement.

There is no left click hold alt. Its alt - right click

You knew what I meant.

The tooltip says right click hold alt.

But you agree it is alt right click.

I.e. the tooltip is wrong. And right click then hold alt does nothing.

I've reworded all the lines to reflect the correct temporality. e.g. ALT and then Right Click.

I guess the other thing to ask is whether you have given the player latitude to fail with the new commands or are showing the player how to win instead. More granular contol would make the player think and be creative about target choices, hopefully setting out a plan through toggles (doctrine) before entering battle.

i need to try the new features though before judging. Downloaded the latest patch last night.