The "All Target This Poor B******" Key

[Zild]

Can anybody tell me what key I need to press to tell everybody to target a single unit, rather than match off against the enemy line? I often need to focus my fire (say on a general or on the only unit that isn't currently routing!) but I cannot for the life of me find the key that does this. I'm sure it used to exist...

[Quintus.JC]

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here. But I think what you want to do is set all missile units to non-fire at will mode; this way the missile units won't just fire at anybody unless you tell them to. Then you just click the enemy unit you want them to fire at. When units are set at fire-at-will mode they will automatically target any enemy unit they can hit; the button for this is on the bottom right of the screen, cramed up with all the other command buttons - the icon is a bow and arrow.

[_Tristan_]

You can also toggle it on/off by pressing "A"

[Zild]

Thanks, but that's not what I meant... I admit I was rather unclear!

If you have a number of units grouped and then select an enemy unit to attack, they do not necessarily attack the unit you selected. Rather they "line off" against the enemy, so they fire / charge at not just that single enemy unit but also at the enemy units next to it. What I want is to tell all my guys to attack a single enemy unit, rather than the enemy line. I was sure I heard about a key that you can hold whilst clicking the enemy unit that achieves this.

Is that any clearer?

[A1_Unit]

To target a single unit with your own missile units right click on the target when the cursor is a green bow. If they aren't listening, press backspace and give the order again.

[Zild]

Nope, still not it... Seriously, has nobody else noticed this?

I draw your attention to P55 of the manual (combined manual for M2TW + Kingdoms Gold):


If you order a group to attack an enemy unit, the units in the group will intelligently face off against each other. If you group the units in your line then right-click on the unit in the centre of the enemy line, all your units will intelligently match off with the enemy unit facing them.

You can see that this applies to missile weapons also; after ordering a group to fire, check their targets (shift key, I believe?) and you will see that they are not all attacking the specifed unit. Somtimes useful, sometimes not. An example of the latter being when they "intelligently match off" with enemy units in melee with your own troops.

I'm sure I heard of a modifier key to prevent that behaviour...

[IncubusDragon]

Rather than the "group units" function, I'd use "Ctrl" + "M" to select all missile troops and right-click over the enemy unit that I want to shoot the **** out of (please note - this will select horse-archers as well as infantry-archers, but will not select any artillery you have).

It depends on the composition of the army I'm fighting with as to whether or not I group any units together... I always group pikemen together in line formation (and can stop and switch "guard mode" on/off on all of them at the same time without interrupting charge of other infantry), and if I'm using a combination of horse-archer and infantry-archer, I'll sometimes group infantry-archer together so that I can pursue separate targets with my horse-archers (mainly for when I want infantry-archers to engage in melee rather than to target individual enemy units).

Basically, I don't really trust functions that are supposed to "intelligently" do anything, but I rarely want to target a single unit with missiles either, because I want my archers behind my infantry keeping sustained fire on the enemy after melee combat has commenced. I've even been known to use horse-archer as my general... that way, my infantry have the moral support of my general being right behind them, as well as my general raining arrows down on the enemy along with the archers... with that combination, even cheap troops can hold their own for much longer than one would first think.