Heavy Cruisers Not Shooting

- turn off the mod, see if it is responsible.
- see if the autoattack is turned on - indicated by a spinning something animation on the attack button in the control panel.
- make sure the enemy ships are not magically dying. SoaSE is set to automatically cut flashy effects to save memory for calculations; the attacks are still happening, but the pew-pew is not seen.
- make sure the enemy is not using something nasty on your ships. I can't recall anything that might turn off weapons of a whole HC group, but maybe the mod has something like it included?
- are you sure you're attacking the enemy? Maybe it's an ally, maybe you accepted a peace pact?
- maybe an Akkan used its ultimate skill?
- maybe you're attacking a Trascencia starbase that used Mass Disorient on you.

If none of the above works, make a couple of screenshots of what you're doing and post them in the Modding forum with a HELP! tag.

If the problem persists even without the mod, make a few more screenshots and post it in the Technical forum with an even bigger HELP!!! tag.

And, of course, have reinstalling the game in your mind as a last resort. Every technical support always tells you to reinstall your game first, whine later.

Mass Disorientation would cause the heavy cruisers to stop attacking and spin around and move randomly.  Still, that would only happen if he's attacking an Advent starbase.  If this is happening repeatedly in multiple scenarios, it seems more like a bug.

I'd say the mod is definitely the most likely culprit.

Sometimes I find that if there are enemy ships that are not the class that the ship are strongest, it does tend to just stop attacking, hell, sometimes even there are ships that need repair, they won't even go to the ship and repair it.

sometimes ive found that weapons effects disappear if the game is getting too large, that could be it

As far as I recall, though I haven't really seen that too often, Mass Disorient does not cause the units to stop attacking - it just roots (immobilizes) them and causes them to spin. They still shoot as long as they have the enemy in the applicable forward arc and stop when the target is beyond the acceptable angle.

Thanks for the suggestions. I checked and I am quite sure the HCs are not being jammed/stunned/armistice or anything like that. They are also clearly not shooting, as opposed to the game not showing their weapon effects, because they will open fire normally when I manually attack (some of them at least). Autoattack is on and everything else was shooting normally. No starbase.

I'll take it over to the tech forum if necessary, but this behavior has been bothering me since original Sins. Didn't one of the patches fix a HC targeting bug?

Waaaaaaaaaiiiiitaminute.

Tell me, is the battle big? I mean, big BIG? Cause there is a known issue of lagged autotargetting when the CPU has lots of stuff to do. Basically, units that pick targets almost immediately in small battles will tend to wait a dozen or more seconds before picking their next target in a huge battle, all because your CPU has "more interesting stuff to calculate instead of autotargetting".

Another reason might be that you are in an LRF-heavy fleet and you are "clicking too much". Heavy Cruisers have a far smaller range than LRFs and they need to get much closer than LRFs. If your Fleet leader is an LRF or other ship that has little reason to get point blank with the enemy and you try to "micro" the fleet as a whole too much, your HCs might be repeatedly receiving orders to fall back to position among the long-range ships. That causes them to run around in circles.

I'm out of ideas now. Good luck fixing it

I think you nailed it. The battles with the most problems are the typical endgame slugfests with many hundreds of ships on each side. I think I'll also loosen fleet cohesion to prevent them from wasting time auto-reforming. Or maybe I'll just scrap the HCs and just build more LCs.

Yay   Do I get a cookie?