Why won't they shoot?

[thedoctorking]

I've had this situation, very frustratingly, and very frequently, where I'll get a ship in position to manually fire torpedoes, and there are torps available and functional on the ship, and I go to the manual torpedo firing interface and they don't have any targets to select. I don't know if this is WAD, the DD did get hit in the preceding turn, but it seems strange that at least there wouldn't be a message "cannot fire because of X" rather than just a frustrating inability to shoot when you have given up the ship's life to put it in that position.

Game4.7z

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[thedoctorking]

In the next turn, although the DD in question was hit and reported as sinking, it was still able to launch its torps as its last action. It would seem counter-intuitive that a ship that was headed for the bottom would nevertheless be able to shoot, but also that it couldn't do it when in position a minute before and maybe sheer off and save itself. And even less so that in the interim the AI wouldn't have it fire on a target a mere few hundred yards away.

[WLRoo]

Without knowing range, target speed or torpedo speed, I can't say for sure.

I would guess that the target is too far astern at this juncture.

Just to remind you, ships are significantly out of scale and are shown much larger than the map scale. The actual position is about where the DDs health bar intersects the BB image.

[thedoctorking]

If they were too far astern, there would be the option of the unit to target, but all the mounts would show "out of arc". In this case, there is no target available to select, like the ship has no enemy in line of sight. And in the next turn's movement, both of them moved more or less straight ahead and the DD did have a shot at the BB. Also, the AI didn't fire any torps although, since the DD came up from astern, you would think that at some point during their movement they would have been in arc and the AI would have fired, except that for some reason the game doesn't think the BB is a target.

[thedoctorking]

This is the big problem here: Is the AI correctly designating enemy ships as targets for the purpose of units under their control attacking them? And is the routine for torpedo shots different from gunnery? I couldn't tell if this ship fired on the BB with its guns, other ships did, but it pretty clearly missed an opportunity to either have the AI shoot its torpedoes or do it manually.

[WLRoo]

Hmm, I wonder if the crew can be killed or sent to perform damage control procedures?

Un-crewed mounts would not be able to fire, and presumably wouldn't show up on the manual fire screen either.

[thedoctorking]

The mounts were able to fire on the immediately following turn. When the ship was sinking and you'd assume that the crew had more important things to do like getting their lifeboats in the water.

Not the first time I've had this experience, where a ship doesn't fire torpedoes on AI when it seems it should and when I go to the manual firing, it doesn't appear to have any enemy target in sight even though there is an enemy ship only a few hundred yards away.