Attack commands

[mondaymoonlight]

Something I'm really finding annoying in this game is that when my ACU faces off against another ACU, my ACU will fire at everything else but the ACU. This unusually ends in two ways, with my commander dying because their commander fires at mine the entire time or their commanders gets away. I find this amazingly frustrating. I can only think that there is some attack key or commander I don't know about. Please help.

[Adraius]

I'm often in the opposite situation, where I want to kill the arty next to the enemy ACU pursuing me, but issuing an attack command (and thus causing my ACU to stop) isn't exactly the best idea.

As far as I know, you're missing nothing. GPG never provided for a 'move-here-while-shooting-this' function. (all commands are mutually exclusive) I'm not sure if Supreme Commander makes use of a target priority system. If that could be manually configured, it could help out in this situation.

[Icy]

Every unit has an engagement priority list in its blueprint if I remember correctly. I do know that ACUs are not at the top anymore like they were in vanilla. It used to be possible to use your ACU as a tank in an MMO sense, where all units would automatically target it over anything else in the area.

[Softly]

When in a fight between similar forces of ACU + tank combos, it is better to fire at the tanks with your ACU. This lowers the enemy dps, so that you end up doing more damage to them than they do to you.

Think about it this way: ACU + 4 tanks vs same. One team just shoots at ACU, the other at units first. Ignoring problems like overkill etc, all the tanks of one guy is dead after 6 seconds. In that time you will have taken about 1000~1100 damage. (Approximately)

Now even if you are cyb and they are uef, you will still make up the 3k health difference at that stage because you are doing twice the amount of damage. If they continue to just shoot at your ACU, then you will still have about 1k health after their com bom.

The obvious exception to this is if their com is low enough that you can definitely kill it, thereby killing all nearby bots making the rest of the fight irrelevant.