Newton Behaviour

posted on June 25th, 2014, 6:52 pm

Any other Fed players get frustrated about how Newtons auto-select their repair targets? I've seen them ignore in-hull Intrepids so they can go repair a yard a screen away that's had 2% shield damage. They're definitely running a non-random algorithm to select repair targets as all three will always select the same target unless separated by a significant distance.

I know you can manually select repair targets, but when you're trying to keep four control groups moving in a tight group so they don't take too much damage from the four Serkas bombarding them from behind a line of Warbirds and trying to stop group 4 from all going to repair even though you explicitly selected just the one damaged Excelsior II before issuing the force-repair command--when you're trying to deal with all that, having to select your group of Newtons and trying to right-click on the one Nova in the middle of your fleet that's being focused on by a fresh Norexan while everything's moving ... yeah, not easy.

posted on June 25th, 2014, 7:29 pm

Yup, annoying - it's an unnecessarily high micro unit, but can't be helped in A2/FO.

Though Newtons should only repair targets within their visual range - they won't move beyond that to repair other targets unless they were within that range and the target has moved off. They will try to repair the first target that has received damage, but admittedly I have not looked at whether they consider hull damage higher priority than shield. You can use those factors to place your Newtons in a way that might increase their efficiency

posted on June 28th, 2014, 4:53 am

Yeah... some priority would be nice, I can't count the number of times my newtons have dashed off after some scout ship that passed within a lightyear of them and ended up at the BFE end of the map while I'm trying to keep some excelsiors going to free up warp-in slots.