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Space combat is a central part of the game. And the “Enemy Targets” list is, theoritically, a very good addition to the game. In theory, it would allow to see all known enemy targets, and allow to order attacks on those targets.

But as implemented, it has many problems:

• Often, maybe more often than not, It doesn’t show known targets. [EDIT: it doesn't show all known targets in a given empire, only a subset of them; often a small subset] I’ve encountered that countless times in my games (if a saved game is required to demonstrate, I have one, and screenshots).

• It forgets enemy targets that were known.

• When enemy targets do appear in the list, it’s not possible to assign a specific fleet to a target. As a player who only use manual fleets (except for defense fleets), that is a huge limitation of “Enemy Targets” usefulness.

• [EDIT: There are often discrepancies between what's shown in the list and what's visible from the map. That is especially true with troop strength on colonies for which that info is visible from a system map.]

For the third problem, the solution is simple, at least conceptually: adding, to each target in the list, a button allowing to specify which fleet to assign to the target. Hopefully, at one point, the AI will be able to insure that fleets are able to plan refueling points so that they can reach their assigned target with fuel in their tanks. That way, “fuel range” won’t be a limitation factor. And for manual fleets, their “operational range” (engagement range) shouldn’t be a consideration either.

[EDIT: Now for the first and last problems: known enemy targets not showing; and discrepancies between the list info and the map info. I suspect that these two problems are related to the background updating of the list not having a high enough priority.] Yes, there’s a lot going on in a DW2 game, and managing the game data updates must be quite a challenge. No doubt. But because war and space combat are such a central part of the game, and because “Enemy Targets” could be so useful if it worked properly, I believe that its updating priority should be increased quite a bit. Even if it means lowering other processes updating priorities.

As for the second problem (targets previously known disappear from the list), what I’d like to see is that once an enemy target is known, it should never disappear from the list, unless it’s destroyed. And each entry on the list should have a mention “Last seen on...” or “Currently Visible”, similar to “Dangerous Locations”. That would be especially important for fleets, since they’re likely to have moved to a new position since last seen. Clicking on a fleet entry that has moved elsewhere would still select it in the selection panel, allowing to see its compositions and its ships’ designs (as they were when last seen), but it wouldn’t reveal their current position (or current composition if changed since last seen).

I’ll now explain why never forgetting known targets makes sense, and then I’ll go into ways to implement that without impacting performance too much.

So why never forgetting known enemy targets?

Because forgetting known targets:

• Is inconsistent with what’s shown in other parts of the game. Often (again, I’d say more often than not), enemy mining stations are visible from the map, but not in “Enemy Targets”.

• Doesn’t make sense. What army in the history of the world has ever forgotten a known enemy target? I suspect that it didn’t happen often, if at all. Deciding to not attack a known enemy target, yes. But forgetting that it exists? In war, data gathering is extremely important. Forgetting acquired data, not so much. Imagine Hitler ordering one of his generals to attack a certain target known to them, and the general saying “What are you talking about? We don’t know of such a target.” That’s what DW2 forgetting known targets invokes in my mind.

• Greatly limits “Enemy Targets” usefulness. Imagine being able, from “Enemy Targets”, to view all possible targets for a specific enemy (all targets known to our empire, by whatever means an empire can learn the existence and location of enemy targets), and then being able to assign fleets and queue attack missions from the control center!

But what about performance?

Given how big DW2’s universe can be, wouldn’t never forgetting any known target require lots of RAM and a huge amount of constant background processing? Not necessarily if done in the following way:

• Instead of constantly keeping all the data in RAM, the data could be saved on disk periodically, possibly with a different list for each empire. The game would only keep in ram new enemy targets, not yet saved to file. Once saved, the internal list would be flushed, ready to acquire new targets.

• The enemy targets list would only be updated in CC as needed, by pressing a “Refresh Report” button after having selected the appropriate filter for the empire for which we want to see the targets. It might take a few seconds to generate the list, but for me, that would be infinitely preferable to the current “forgetting” that occurs. Even if it would take a minute or so. It’s much better than having to go all over the map to relocate targets that have already been observed.

Having seen how much loading and saving times have been improved from DW1 to DW2, I’m sure Elliot would be able to make the saving and loading from disk process quite efficient.

So that’s it. I believe making those improvements to “Enemy Targets” would be one huge step toward DW2 becoming the game it could be. What do you think?

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