Manually selecting targets increases the DPS of Machine Guns

While wasting my life testing a unit that nobody builds in a game that nobody plays, I noticed the title occurring in some of my testing.

As mentioned in my MG42 article, when a Machine Gun unit is attacking an infantry squad containing multiple sub-units, its attack recharge is triggered upon killing individual sub-units. Because of the enormous damage bonuses which Machine Guns already have against typical foot units, this means that the biggest bottleneck in DPS isn’t the damage number itself, but rather the long recharge occurring between each attack salvo.

As it turns out, if you manually tell a Machine Gun unit to attack a target, it doesn’t trigger its recharge upon killing a sub-unit, and instead switches the remaining projectiles in its attack to a new sub-unit. It doesn’t just endlessly fire and will still respect its attack recharge, but it does seem to fully use each of its attack salvos. Thus, by manually selecting a target (and then queuing up several attacks if necessary), total DPS can be increased quite significantly — it looks like DPS is a bit less than doubled by doing this with HMGs against an Infantry/Bazooka mix (with +8 armor).

This does have the somewhat interesting conundrum in that if you manually assign a target, if it goes out of range your MG will unpack itself and chase the target — something it won’t do if left to its own devices. This makes utilizing this knowledge somewhat unreliable, particularly if you try to sidestep the requirement of sustained micromanagement by queuing a few targets up.

In any case, the RoN community has thankfully assured me that the game is perfect as-is, and thus this so called “bug” obviously does not need to be fixed. Fixing it would — of course — be contrary to the original developer’s wishes, and would not align with the history or intent of the game. Such a change would be both arbitrary and asinine, and its inclusion in a patch would be trolling. Spending the time locating and implementing a fix would not only be conspiring for evil, but also make me a smug, myopic busy bee expending my time on something that is not worthwhile, as determined by a member of the RoN community who is still learning to read and who has demonstrated the judgement of a pistachio nut.

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