A new feature suggestion: Direct Targeting of a Starship's Hull

[Ghostsniper1701]

Hello, this is the first time I've posted on a forum like this so I'm kinda nervous.

There has been an issue I have with the game and mods in general but ICW really brought the issue back to light for me.

There is no way to destroy a star ship by directly targeting the hull instead of targeting the individual hard points, I better clear this up with examples as it might confuse some.

Here is a scenario I run into constantly. I'm using a Dreadnought (Palpatine's Eclipse or any SSD for example) and it takes forever for it to destroy anything. Why isn't there a feature for the ship to not just target individual hard-points like a shield generator or turbo-laser, but to directly hit the hull so the entire ship is taking damage? This way the SSD's or any other Dreadnought can more effectively engage much smaller ships and not waste all the shots it fired (that's another thing that bothers me, why do ships not take damage from all the shots pouring into it?  Shouldn't all those shots do SOMETHING?? Unless it's a ship that somehow walks into the line of fire of another ship apparently the only way to damage ships is to directly target hard-points.)

I originally thought of this after playing the Super Star Wars mod. There was this (I think) bug in the mod involving the Strike-class Cruisers, whatever hull damage the Cruiser received it went straight to its hull health bar and never to a hard-point even though I had directly targeted said area. So whenever I saw one of these ships I made my SSD target the ship and it melted in a few shots (the Galactic Empire in that mod was ridiculously overpowered anyway).

Now I'm not saying to take out direct targeting of hard-points, that feature can really help strategically as you don't want your bombers to target the ship's heath bar as a whole (especially on Dreadnoughts). What I'm saying is whenever a player targets a ship but has not clicked on a hard-point rather the hull of the ship, then when the currently selected unit shoots at the ship it doesn't target an area but the entire ship. So in theory the ship as a whole is taking damage removing destroying hard-points as the the only way of destroying the whole ship.

So with this fix the most powerful ships should not only kill smaller ones much faster than they currently do, but it would also make them much more intimating/dreadful to engage. Now all ships should not do this by default. Only the Dreadnoughts and Capital Ships (I'm splitting the two here because when I think of Capitals I think MC80's/90's, Nebula's, ISD-I's/II's etc; NOT Executor's, Sovereign's, Eclipse's, etc. A ship can be a Capital Ship and not a Dreadnought) should naturally do this as they have the firepower to absolutely melt ships as they should.

Those are my thoughts on the matter, what do you guys think?

[Pali]

It'd require one hell of a balance rework, for starters.  Health of hardpoints vs hull would have to be a very high ratio (meaning hardpoints are very weak compared to hull) to make targeting hardpoints at all worth it in large battles, given how much firepower is wasted when a hardpoint is destroyed and all shots in transit do nothing.  This would require a rework of every single unit in the game, with new rounds of testing being done to balance them against each other all over again.

I don't agree that bombers would want to target hardpoints, quite the opposite - their projectiles take the longest to hit, so the chances of the hardpoint dying while the torps are en route are the highest.  In other mods or vanilla, where torps bypass shields, this would make sense, but in ICW there would be little reason for targeting hardpoints over hull with bombers.  Play any fleet battle vs SSD as the NR, and you will watch as tons of your bombers' torps do nothing once the shields go down because the hardpoints die before the torps hit (not the majority, but a high enough percentage that I don't know that I'd ever have bombers go for hardpoints over hull).  Maybe in smaller battles, but in large ones where concentrated fire is king?  Not a chance.  There may be situational exceptions, like burning the weapons off one side of an SSD, but for anything smaller than a battlecruiser I don't know that I'd ever target hardpoints over hull with fighters or ships - more of your fire does its job then.

Also, I rather like the notion that ships have to be taken apart piece by piece, rather than just generically targeted.  Many ships in the game are pretty big - a Strike Cruiser is 450 meters long, or more than four and a half football fields.  While I wouldn't mind the addition of more targeting options, some of which could be instakills (main power generator, targeting the midway point to cut it in half), it makes sense that you don't just shoot any single portion of it a lot until it dies - instead you'd burn through a portion of the ship, which would lose functionality, and then likely be quickly sealed off by bulkheads with power cut off and rerouted.

[Helix345]

I would like to say that I have seen my praetors (and a few other ships) target the hull of enemy vessels directly. These vessels are usually golans. Usually they do it when I have not targeted anything, and I am not sure how to do this consistently.

[kucsidave]

I think it is more likely that there is an enemy ship under said golan and your ships are actually targetting that.
AI tends to have at least one under each one

[tlmiller]

I think it is more likely that there is an enemy ship under said golan and your ships are actually targetting that.
AI tends to have at least one under each one

Yup, this is usually what's happening.  It is nice to see all hardpoints going down simultaneously though.

That said, I don't think the effort to make it the norm for the large ships would be worth it.