this magic number doesn't make too much sense in practical use, for

- being too complicated (i know what im talking about after 4 years of game play, you can't regroup them like hell and manage them to target different ship individually but someone who is lazy-proof can try)

- micro'ing them has more effect than just the magic numbers. since, say if a dd was pulled in and the reinforcements can't even reach other ships as they are built, it beats slight benefit of regroup and retarget like hell, while being simpler to make sure you pull back too and don't let half of them get sucked in while other half make nill damage.

in a beneficial situation i do retarget to make sure i dont waste much fire power. (like, attack next bc when enemy bc is at 5% health and let ion frigs finish it off, especially for vay bc where trinity cannon can be a big waste)
you have too many to do, taking ur brain and finger on heavy regroup/retarget will prolly lose u on actions u should be doing. (maybe forget getting fct on bc or leaving a dd sitting at ms or something, which hurts much more.)

if theres room for u to go about it, it's certainly a little addition though.

when i origionally laid out the use for microtargeting i didn't realize that putting all ships in one group to aggy (f4) didn't cause them to retarget as a unit. The 12 vs 12 ion, while looked complicated, was only 6 actions if the units retargeted as a group, but if you were to have to retarget the group after every single kill 18 total actions is a bit much. where time cold be better spent doing other things.

So what action do units take? they retarget the next CLOSETS ship that is hard coded as target priority or in the same class as the previous attack?

It seems HW2 took a step in the opsite direction from the step HWC took from HW. HW was a good balence of Fleet command and tatical command, HWC was more tatical command than fleet command, hell even the Command ships them selves when used correctly were one of the most powerfull weapons in the game. This game seems to gear more twards Fleet command than tatical command. I can get used to this.

The answer to autotargetting is in lua files, but sometimes it is hard to make out what really happens. First of all, if you manually target a frig with your dd, for example, after killing that frig your dd will look for any other same category ships in the area(in this case category is Frigate) and target them first, starting with the nearest. After that category is not available, the game will pick next target according to the targetting priority table, which can be found in the spreadsheets(I also compiled it in the 'hidden facts' topic in the Game stategies section). Targetting inside the same category has some randomness to it, but I found some info where it stated that generally the game will not target a ship if it has 7 or more attackers on it already, given that there's another target of the same category available nearby.

In any case, the important manual targetting like battlecruisers battles will be always done by you and include one target at a time, strike craft targetting will almost always be performed by band-boxing, and in most other cases you will specify a target and let the game do the rest while you do more important tasks.