Intercept/Bombard for Commander (Assignment)
Intercept/Bombard for Commander | |
 | |
| Category | Combat |
| Instruction Method | Assignment |
| Skill | ☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Ship | Any |
| Commander | Ship |
| Mimic | Yes (but not worthwhile) |
| Repeat Order | No |
Overview
The Intercept and Bombard for Commander assignments allow for ships to independently select and engage targets that lie within their commanders radar range (by default 40km but this can be increased with equipment mods). Intercept has ships attack small and medium sized enemy craft and bombard has ships attack large and extra large sized enemy craft (this does not include stations).
| Intercept | Bombard | ||
 |  |  |  |
| S | M | L | XL |
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 "Intercept for Commander" or "Bombard for 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 intercept and bombard assignments are both incredibly useful in ensuring that ships attack a particular set of targets and are able to do so independently without having to rely on their commander for choosing a target. This is especially useful for carriers where large numbers of subordinates are delivered to the battlefield but the carrier itself generally isn't actively attacking or being attacked itself so Attack with Commander and Defend Commander become useless. Finally the assignments offer the player an assurance that their ships configured for anti-fighter duties will only be attacking smaller ships and their ships configured for anti-capital duties will only be attacking capitals and ensuring that all ships are best tasked with what their loadout demands of them (it is still up to the player to correctly equip the ships and make a judgement in how they should be assigned).
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 ships in the prescribed size range for their behaviour and will not attack other target types even if all targets in the set size class have been destroyed. Bombard ships will not attempt to attack stations.