Pre-Programing Ship Targeting

[t_breezie]

Hey all,

I've been messing around with the idea of programing in the equivalent of a targeting computer to the way ships engage in EaW. Before I started messing around with the game's coding I first wanted to check and make sure that 1: It's legal to do so 2: Someone hasn't already done it 3: See if anybody has a similar interest and could offer up ideas as to how to go about it.

My thoughts are as follows:
I've noticed that when engaging an enemy ship with hard points, my ships don't target in any specific or strategic order. I constantly find myself pausing the game and manually targeting the individual hard points to most efficiently take down enemy ships, but with 15+ ships in play this is tedious. Ideally, I'd like to program in multiple targeting modes that would be user enabled during a conflict to make most effective use of their fleet.

Comments, questions, suggestions?

[Pox]

I don't think you can do that with the XML AI.
However, if the Attack_Target(target) function accepts a hardpoint as target or as a second argument it should be possible to achieve something like that with LUA.
Downside to this is that you'd probably have to rewrite large parts of the AI in LUA.