Jimmy Jazz wrote:The carrier protecting the sector launches its fighter squadrons.
... and the OOS combat resolution slaughters them. The Anarkis Carrier Commands do give that functionality.
In a large battle it is tedious to assign targets to each individual groups.
Much more so in vanilla than with Group HotKeys of GMS. The real power of GMS is in the ease of forming groups. Rearm, and return to formation after manual interruptions are there too. GMS does essentially simple operations, but that is way more than what vanilla offers. Simple tools to make manual controlling of a fleet more simple. That is different from fully automated fleets, which juggernaut all over the universe with no need for the player do a thing.
Smart target selection and improved AI can IMO be separate packages. X2 AEGIS had "Missile assault" command, which launched a missile at every foe. Similarly, smart targeting can make a (weighted) list of foes and available ships (group leaders), and distribute the work.
If you look for something really powerful from GMS, check the "Launch missiles" hotkeys form the GHK script. Launching 65 missiles from 65 ships at single target by one keypress is truly power under fingertip. Naturally, automated fleet manager lets you get away without making a single keypress, and just sends a bill afterwards.
But here we have the division into "fire and forget" and "I do have control" approaches. Personal tastes.
A single 5-9 ship group, with 50% of escorts on 'Protect Lead' and another 50% on 'Attack target of Lead' is amazingly effective. Setting such up with GMS is trivial. Setting it up manually is tedious. And I rather send such five-ship group at a target, than two fighters.
However, I'm not quite sure about the merits of this OP script. The GMS-GHK seems seems to do the same, and so does "Broadcast to wingmen" in some circumstances. Interestingly, it does imply that a single group can have more than one leader, a thought that has not sunken in before. That is merely a product of creating several groups with same number. That may have interesting consequences, when such groups are together and one of the leaders do die. Gosh, this idle chat has given me an idea of what to test about GMS.