Attack with Commander (Assignment)
Attack with Commander | |
 | |
| Category | Combat |
| Instruction Method | Assignment |
| Skill | ☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Ship | Any |
| Commander | Ship |
| Mimic | Yes (but not worthwhile) |
| Repeat Order | No |
Overview
Attack with Commander is the way to ensure that a ship or fleet of ships are directly supporting their commander by attacking the same target as them and is a means to magnify the scale of assault on individual targets.
Configuration
Select the ship (or group of ships) that are to join the commander's fleet 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 commander and hover over "Attack with Commander" from the context menu that appears next to the cursor, the group selection options will appear in a menu cascaded off of the context menu and select a valid group (one that is either empty or has all ships within it also attacking with the commander).
To remove the assignment it is matter of re-selecting the ship or group of ships and choosing "remove all orders and assignments" from the context menu.
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 with commander is the canonical method in X4 to magnify the strength of an attack against any given target reliably and repeatably.
Example
As a more advanced example it is possible to chain combat assignments to have better fleet behaviours. For instance it may be insufficient to have a wing of fighters of a carrier all set to intercept and have them all pick targets for themselves independently, instead it might be more worthwhile in certain contexts (like when the ships are intercepting medium ships) for some of the fighters to be set to attack with some of the fighters which are set to intercept. This means that on the whole the group is still attacking fighters, corvettes and gunboats but they are concentrating more firepower on fewer targets which can improve the speed and efficacy with which they attack targets.
Caveats
Ships will only attack their commander's target even if that is not a particularly beneficial target. It is then up to the player to ensure that the commanding ship is configured appropriately to select targets which suit its subordinates.