Attack
Category	Combat
Instruction Method	Order
Skill	☆☆☆☆☆
Ship	Any
Commander	None
Mimic	No
Repeat Order	No

Overview

Oftentimes conflicts arise in the X4 universe and the player may need to intervene militarily. The attack order allows players to instruct a ship or a selection of their ships to attack an enemy target or series of targets. Enemy targets can be any ship or station and reputation losses can be expected when attacking a faction's property (though some faction reputations are locked).

Configuration

Select the ship (or group of ships) that are to attack the desired target from either the property menu or the map interface itself. use LEFT-CLICK to select and hold SHIFT or CTRL to either allow for dragging to multi-select or to individually add ships respectively.

While remaining in the map interface RIGHT-CLICK the 1st desired target and select " Attack" from the context menu that appears next to the cursor. To order an attack on multiple targets RIGHT-CLICK the next desired target and make the selection again from the menu. The ship or group of ships will then proceed to attack all targets in the order in which the targets were chosen.

To abort the attack make the selection of ships again and then select "Remove all Orders" from the context menu. Note that this will reset the ships to their default behaviour which may be a combat command that could have them engage the originally chosen target again. To mitigate this it can be useful to then give all ships a "Fly and Wait" command to physically draw them away from the engagement.

Attack Surface Elements

When ordering a ship to attack a capital ship or station there is an option in the right-click context menu to instead choose one of the following surface element options to be attacked rather than the entire ship or station:

• All surface elements, the ship will attack any and all of its target's surface elements with no preference for any type
• Turrets, the ship will only attack turrets
• Shield Generators, the ship will only attack shield generators
• Engines (provided the target is a capital ship), the ship will only attack the target's engines.

It is worth noting that this instruction isn't perfectly reliable and while the player may simply intend to disable a target it is still perfectly possible for ships to miss the surface elements and cause damage to the target or even destroy it.

Skill Effects

Crew and pilot skills have a variety of effects on how the attack order is performed, some key effects are summarised below:

Missile utilisation - Higher skill pilots will deploy their missiles at shorter intervals between salvos

Boosting - Higher skill crews allow their ship to boost while in combat (unless expressly forbidden by the player)

Applications

The attack order is a very direct command and can be used for a wide variety of combat applications like taking out remaining ships after a larger battle or ensuring that a group of ships focus all of their fire on one more important target before moving onto the next most important target as chosen by the player.

Example

As an example, this Scale Plate Pirate was cloaked in Ocean of Fantasy meaning that it wasn't being picked up by Boron patrols, manually ordering ships to attack it both removed its disguise and allowed the pirate ship to be destroyed.

Caveats

Ships will only attack their targets in the order prescribed by the player meaning that if another, greater priority target becomes available an attack order will be queued up after the earlier targets, this can be resolved by clearing the queue of all the attacking ships and then re-adding the new order of targets but it can be tedious.

Related

Order
| Attack (Order) | Attack in Range (Order) | Crew Transfer (Order) | Collect (Order) | Deploy Object (Order) | Collect Drops (Order) | 

Combat
| Defend Commander (Assignment) | Intercept/Bombard for Commander (Assignment) | Attack with Commander (Assignment) | Attack (Order) | Attack in Range (Order) | Defend Position (Assignment) |